Friday, June 26, 2015

School Malaise Trap Program - Spring 2015

We were scrambling a little in the last weeks but here they are (and all the participating schools have them already) - the results of our School program spring run:

Despite the wintry conditions in some parts of Canada the 68 traps on average collected 453 specimens for the collecting period. Our collections group sorted 61,776 specimens and selected 17,290  to  be barcoded. Our final dataset was made up of 15,199 DNA Barcodes (not all  worked and short barcodes were discarded). Using BOLDs BIN analysis we could  determine that an impressive number of 2,968 species were collected over the three week period of the program, 308 of which were brand new to BOLD. The map below shows all of these collection sites, which include elementary schools, secondary schools, and comparison sites (blue markers).


And what was collected? Here an overview pie chart:


I am particularly fond of scorpionflies and one rare find was this little critter (Boreus brumalis). Adults emerge late in the year, and are active on mild winter days when they are often seen on or near the moss in which they develop. As the common name snow scorpionflies suggests, they are often seen on the snow surface. The program started when large parts of the country still had snow which might explain our luck collecting a member of this group in one of our traps

No comments:

Post a Comment