Day 4: FLORAL ASSOCIATIONS

Wednesday 7-13-2022

The usual breakfast and orientation and then down to Site #1 to collect the 24-hour specimens from the traps in the transect and reset the traps. Then my favorite activity of this Earthwatch: Floral Visitation Rate studies or FVRs.

Blazing Star (Mentzelia laevicaulis)

We drove up the dirt road a bit to a stretch that had some beautiful blazing star flowers along the road edge. Here we got out three-legged stools, divided into groups of two or three, and recorded the pollinators that visited our flower group over half an hour at 10-minute intervals. Jeanie, Eileen, and I were in one observation group. Isaac sat with our group and helped us with identification. We recorded the numbers of bumblebees, other bees, wasps, butterflies, flies and hover flies, and other pollinators that visited our clump of blazing star. There were ants on the flowers also, but we did not record them as they are not pollinators. We performed three different half-hour FVRs on three different clumps of blazing star.

Then it was lunch, a talk about the geology of the area, a little about the at times conflicting politics among the Deer Springs Ranch Owners Association, the Bureau of Land Management, The National Park Service, Dixie National Forest, private property and roads in these areas.

The ground cup traps—blue, yellow, and white—are filled with soapy water.

On collection, this mixture is strained out through a coffee filter but the collected insects are still wet. So, after lunch and dinner, the interns helped dry and sort our collected specimens. The specimens were placed in a spring-handled tea ball infuser and were dried with a hair drier. Then we volunteers pinned them. Kira was meticulous in her arrangement of the pinned specimens in the specimen boxes.

It may have been this evening that we went on Dr. Mogs’ plant walk. My notes are sketchy at best.