George E. Stanton, PhD Director, Oxbow Meadows ELC Professor of Biology, Emeritus
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Transcript of George E. Stanton, PhD Director, Oxbow Meadows ELC Professor of Biology, Emeritus
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Analysis of Select Guilds of Insects from an
Anthropogenic Meadow in the Oxbow Meadows Environmental Park,
Columbus, Georgia
George E. Stanton, PhDDirector, Oxbow Meadows ELCProfessor of Biology, EmeritusCertified Senior Ecologist, ESA
7Analysis of
Insect Guilds from Grasslands & Woodlands at
Oxbow MeadowsGeorge E. Stanton, PhDDirector, Oxbow Meadows ELCProfessor of Biology, EmeritusCertified Senior Ecologist, ESA
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?
Air & Plants: the Net
Aerial & sweeping nets Make your own net How to use
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
Processing Insect Specimens
Processing the insect specimens Execution: killing jars or cryodeath Forceps (newbies call them tweezers) Pins & pinning block Spreading Board Display Box
Death by Killing Jar Plaster or paper Make your own Ethyl acetate poison Chloroform
Cryo-Death Crumpled paper in jar
What will Mom or Roomates say?
Handling Insect Specimens - Forceps
Featherweight forceps Pinning forceps Small insect forceps
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.
The Classic Collection: Pins
Special pins Many sizes
Pinning block for uniformity
Quality Control in Pinning
Spreading Boards
Pinning Lepidoptera
Record Scientific Data
Record Scientific Data
Observation Blocks
Collection Display: Amateur Collection
Collection Display: ProfessionalA tiny portion
NowLet us go to the
meadow
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)
Variables Independent
Orders Lepidoptera (butterflies & Moths) Orthoptera (grasshoppers & crickets) Other (everything else)
Taxa Dependent
Density per Unit Effort Replications
Collectors
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
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.
Collection Display:We can be unconventional
Insect body bar graph
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?
Questions - 2Did we collect significantly
different numbers of specimens fromEach order?Each taxon?
What about the distribution of collections by individual participants?
END
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?
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?
Great Teachers
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
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
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
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
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