Day Ten

So I did field work today.  I have to say I like catching birds better, but I'm glad I got the experience.  To catch flies (what we were interested in) you wave a net around over grassy, bushy, poopy, sappy, leafy, areas.  Then you twist the net so the flies can't escape and try to get them all to the bottom of the net.  Now it gets really interesting, because the mouth aspirator comes into play.  The aspirator is simply a vacuum but you provide the suction.  You suck in one end, and with the other end vacuum the bugs up.  It is trickier than it sounds, because the bugs don't always want to be sucked up.  And spiders also are by catch (and I am not a huge spider fan after seeing the affects of their venom on someone close to me [my Grandpa was bitten on the leg by a spider and it was a nasty looking wound, he is fine now]).  I did take a cool picture of a spider carrying her egg sac though.

I also caught a bee fly!  I think it was from bombyliinae, specifically a bombylius, but I'm not to sure and neither was Q, X, and Jr. Doc (The Doc's grad student).  I don't think we caught any of the flies that Jr. Doc needed, but at least we tried.  Also Jr. Doc told my that chiggers only bite when they're juveniles, and their bites itch so much because they spit a chemical on the skin the changes its shape so it better accommodates their proboscis to drink our blood, and the fact that the skin changed its shape makes it itch!  How cool is that!? That's it for now, I am probably going to fold some laundry and go to bed.