George E. Stanton, PhD Director, Oxbow Meadows ELC Professor of Biology, Emeritus

1. Analysis of Select Guilds of Insects from an Anthropogenic Meadow in the Oxbow Meadows Environmental Park, Columbus, Georgia George E. Stanton, PhD Director, Oxbow Meadows ELC Professor of Biology, Emeritus Certified Senior Ecologist, ESA

2. Analysis of Insect Guilds from Grasslands & Woodlands at Oxbow Meadows George E. Stanton, PhD Director, Oxbow Meadows ELC Professor of Biology, Emeritus Certified Senior Ecologist, ESA

3. Challenges • Do any of your students have restrictions such as allergies to bee or wasp stings? What do you do? • What about objections to killing insects? • What about people who don’t want to be hot, wet, dirty, outside?

4. Air & Plants: the Net • Aerial & sweeping nets • Make your own net • How to use

5. Work in Pairs • One jar for field collection • If you are in the sun, it’s a field • One jar for woods collection • If you are in the shade, it’s a woodland • Don’t mix them up

6. Processing Insect Specimens • Processing the insect specimens • Execution: killing jars or cryodeath • Forceps (newbies call them tweezers) • Pins & pinning block • Spreading Board • Display Box

7. Death by Killing Jar • Plaster or paper • Make your own • Ethyl acetate poison • Chloroform

8. Cryo-Death • Crumpled paper in jar What will Mom or Roomates say?

9. Handling Insect Specimens - Forceps • Featherweight forceps • Pinning forceps • Small insect forceps

10. Insect Preparation • Adds interest to the exercise if students are asked to pin, spread and label their catch • To do this, the project needs to be scheduled for at least two days. • Will skip this for the sake of time management today • We will make piles.

11. The Classic Collection: Pins • Special pins • Many sizes • Pinning block for uniformity

12. Quality Control in Pinning

13. Spreading Boards

14. Pinning Lepidoptera

15. Record Scientific Data

16. Record Scientific Data

17. Observation Blocks

18. Collection Display: Amateur Collection

19. Collection Display: ProfessionalA tiny portion

20. Now Let us go to the meadow

21. Species Stacking • You do not have to know enough biology to identify the insects beyond order. • Apply what I call “Sesame Street Taxonomy” (Which of these things are not like the others)

22. Variables • Independent • Orders • Lepidoptera (butterflies & Moths) • Orthoptera (grasshoppers & crickets) • Other (everything else) • Taxa • Dependent • Density per Unit Effort • Replications • Collectors

23. Making the Stack • Class selects a specimen and puts it into a box • Everyone else looks at their specimens and if they find similar looking specimens, add them to the box. • Call this collection “Taxon 1” and each team records how many of taxon one they collected. • Repeat for each kind of insect collected. • Complete data sheet in Excel

24. Unit Effort • Ideal design would be to collect all insects or all of certain taxa from quadrats of the same size. • That is difficult to do. • We shall work with the idea of “catch per unit effort.” • The Unit is a fixed time period of collecting by a single collector. • Collectors are replicated.

25. Collection Display:We can be unconventional • Insect body bar graph

26. Questions-1 • Describe the frequency distributions of all taxa • Describe the frequency distributions of all taxa within each order • What are the mean/median/mode of each distribution described? • What are the ranges, confidence intervals of each distribution described?

27. Questions - 2 • Did we collect significantly different numbers of specimens from • Each order? • Each taxon? • What about the distribution of collections by individual participants?

28. END

30. Questions: Before answering questions, we want to decide how to do so in a scientific manner • Is one order more abundant than the other in the sample from the meadow habitat? • Is there a difference in richness within these two orders? • What was the dominant insect taxon sampled? Was there a dominant taxon within each order? • Within which order was the distribution of taxa most equitable? • Was there a difference between the diversity indices of these two orders • What might the members of the Lepidoptera guild have been doing in this habitat? • What might the member of the Orthoptera guild been doing in this habitat? • Which team was the best at "bug catching?" Were some teams better collectors than others? • If there is a difference in collecting success, is that an important variable? • What conclusions can you draw about these two guilds of insects?

32. How many of these terms do you know? • What is an insect guild? • What is an insect community? • What is an insect population? • What is an insect taxon? • What is an insect order? • What is an anthropogenic field? • What is community (guild) richness? • What is community (guild) evenness? • What is dominance of a taxon? • What is community (guild) diversity?

33. Great Teachers

34. Great Teachers • Unique • A bit of a Rebel • Have some ham • Passionate about subject matter • Enjoys discovery and learning • Evaluate what is important; try not to depend too much on test scores

35. describing distributions by center, spread, and shape • We can do frequency distributions of some of the most abundant taxa (species).  Plot for normal distribution and look at proximities of mean, median and mode.Middle school doesn't discuss the normal distribution but they do look more informally at the shapes of the data. • understand the difference between measures of center and variation • From the above you (staff) should be able to apply whatever measures of centrality and variation that you wish.Sounds good

36. display data as dot plots, histograms, and box plots • should be all sorts of opportunities here.  Compare different taxa, different taxa from different orders,...we could go further, but that would probably take too much timeGood fit

37. using measures of center (mean/median) and variability (interquartile range/mean absolute deviation) to describe patterns and interpret in context • I am sure we would generate suitable data, but I am not familiar with those measures of variability---at least not by those namesWe can have the teachers do that based on what they've learned earlier in the week if they have quantitative data

38. doing random sampling and using data from random samples to draw inferences about a population with an unknown characteristic of interest drawing informal comparative inferences about two populations • We should have multiple populations.  this, of course, depends upon our collecting success....as all of this does.  There were lots of insects today, but we had to work to get them.  Earlier in the day, when they are not so warmed up, we might do better.That's part of what they need to know about data collection and sampling and how factors like that influence results. • investigate patterns of association in bivariate data and construct linear models in linear situations • Would this be something like correlation.  Not sure what this means.  Are bivariate data multivariate data with only two variables? That is what that is--looking at things as a scatter-plot on an x-y axis.  Middle school pretty much just looks informally at whether there is a positive correlation, negattive, or no correlation.  If there is a linear relationship they use some simple methods for finding a best-fit-line