News That Stays News

Frustrations and apologies July 21, 2015

July 21, 2015

If anyone is still reading despite my erratic postings or lack thereof, my thanks and apologies. My excuse isn’t that I’m totally lacking in self-discipline, but that the vast majority of it is currently keeping me plodding along on a very frustrating project. One part of my research—the part where I’m trying to measure the effects of many different caterpillar shelters on caterpillar survival—is going as well as can be expected given the lack of rain. The problem is another project—to switch caterpillars from two different species into each other’s shelters and see how much differences in survival are just caused by the shelter itself.

Unfortunately, both the plants the caterpillars eat and the butterfly adults are particularly vulnerable to dry conditions. When the host plants first sprouted in early June, I watered patches of them daily so they’d look appealing to the females laying their eggs. Then some big herbivores (maybe deer, maybe iguanas) started eating the plants in one bite. A couple weeks ago, the adults finally appeared and started laying eggs on the plants. But when the caterpillars hatched, they built shelters that were very different from the ones I expected them to build. I spent a few days trying to figure out whether I could still do the experiment if they were building several different types of shelters instead of the one type I’d expected. I decided to give it a shot and switched a few pairs of caterpillars.

That was when the herbivores came back and ate a bunch of my plants, caterpillars and all.

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Normal posts will continue soon. I promise to put at least two more up by the end of this week.