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RESEARCH BLOG

6/28/2018 0 Comments

birds, bugs, battlestar galactica!

By Alex Youre-Moses

Purchase College Environmental Studies and Psychology double major, interested in TBA

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sampling aquatic invertebrates
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working with citizen scientists!
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a common yellowthroat
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​Now that we are almost a month in, with only one month left (sad reacts only please), I feel it is necessary to talk about the research that has been going on. If you have been keeping up with the content that we have all happily posted online, then you know the last month has consisted of bugs and, more recently, birds. The many posts online have been mostly about Dr. Jackson’s own research, but we have yet to include any information about the smaller projects that are occurring throughout the duration of our stay in Maine. I am one of the few students that are actively working on their senior projects as we all work on the broader research at hand.
 
So now you may be wondering what I am working on, but we will get to that shortly.
 
Within the last week and a half, we have been splitting our focus between bugs and birds (which is, in my opinion, difficult to do because they require two different mindsets and two different time-slots).
 
We’ve talked a bit about the daily rituals of bug collection. If you don’t know by now, a typical day in the life here goes like this: go to site, take aquatic samples, take terrestrial samples (via beat sheet and sweep net), collect qualitative aquatic and terrestrial samples (unless we have our citizen scientists to help us), check and reset the emergence traps, sort through the very muddy aquatic samples, drive home, disinfect gear, reset. On the days that we have citizen scientists help us (which happens two times a week), we do all of this in the morning and then we have more data collection between the hours of 1 pm and 5 pm. Upon returning home, or within the immediate days after, we sort and identify all of the bugs that our citizen scientists helped us collect so you, our wonderful and devoted readers, can be informed about the abundance and diversity of the insects that we have collected on that day. 
 
Bird research, on the other hand, requires very early mornings, which means we have to leave somewhere between 4:30 am and 5:30 am on the days we are collecting bird data. Luckily for us, there is enough student involvement that we can switch out who is doing what each day. Unfortunately for Dr. Jackson, there is only one of her so she has had a never-ending cycle of getting up at 4 am each morning (but, thankfully her friend Evan stayed with us for a few days and helped us out A LOT – here’s a little fun fact: Dr. Jackson and Evan called themselves the Bird Ninjas). These early mornings go like this: wake up, be a zombie, go to site, actually wake up, pick mist-netting location, set up gear, wait for bird to come to the net, successfully get bird out of net, take notes on bird condition, collect fecal samples, collect blood samples, repeat for roughly 5 hours, go home, nap for 12 hours (disclaimer: this last part may just be me).
 
Now, let’s move on to my own research project.
 
Let me give you some quick background information. At first, I was going to focus on the foraging behavior of songbirds at two of our four sites (Schoodic Beaver Pond and Gilmore Marsh). I quickly realized how DIFFICULT it would be to find and then follow foraging birds, identify what they’re eating, know exactly which bird I am looking at without the use of color bird bands, and then can compare the data. Me, only a student intern, trying to do an in-depth analysis of foraging behavior = not a chance. After looking at several scientific articles, even the professionals had a hard time. So it was back to the drawing board for Dr. Jackson and I. Then something struck. Dr. Jackson proposed territory mapping in the place of foraging behavior. At first I was like, “Why would I want to do that? How does this relate to my overarching research question: Are songbirds in Acadia National Park, Maine eating emergent aquatic insects?”
 
After some thought: it’s a pretty simple concept. Birds living closer to the water are more likely to be exposed to emergent aquatic insects. How will I study this, you ask? I will be analyzing the fecal samples collected during our early mornings! This allows me to see exactly what the birds have been eating. I will also be comparing blood mercury concentrations to the DNA results to see if higher mercury levels are associated with emergent aquatic insects.
 
Once I was out in the field, I was hooked. Just close your eyes and imagine me enthusiastically running around trying to find birds and taking their coordinates. It’s a sight for sore eyes, in my opinion.
 
So far, it’s been really hard to distinguish between individual birds, but I have had the help of Dr. Jackson, Evan, and my wonderful friend Veronica. Here’s another image to imagine: Veronica and I in the forest trying to figure out if there are multiple birds of the same species by standing back to back while I play the individuals call or song. If you didn’t picture a pose straight out of Charlie’s Angels, you’re absolutely wrong. But luckily, I am only focusing on a few bird species at each site: Common Yellowthroats and Song Sparrows at both sites, White-throated Sparrows at Schoodic Beaver Pond, and Swamp Sparrows at Gilmore. This allows me to equally distribute my energy into each bird species.
 
All in all, I have been having a great time learning how to identify both birds and insects. This is also my first time truly participating in fieldwork and I sure do have a love-hate relationship with it. But the long hours, intense heat, and the many mosquito bites are going to be worth it – or at least I hope so… I have to keep reminding myself – research isn’t linear… research isn’t linear… research is NOT a linear process!! It’s full of hard work, data that doesn’t connect right away, lots of caffeine, countless hours wondering if you’re actually doing this right… maybe even spending some days thinking that you should just walk away from the computer, the site, the microscope and run into the forest never to talk to anyone ever again. That may be an exaggeration, but you get the point. Regardless, I’m having a great time up here in Acadia.
 
P.S.
We also spend all of our time in the car listening to various episodes from a podcast called Ologies (shameless plug – go take a look). Between conducting research, attending lectures at Schoodic Institute in our free time, and listening to this podcast, I can safely say that we have all learned quite a bit this summer.
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6/28/2018 0 Comments

jumping in the deep end with amor

by Amor Luciano

Purchase College Environmental Studies undergraduate, interested in marine ecology

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Amor Luciano in Acadia National Park
PictureAmor and Matt using a beat sheet to collect terrestrial insects
The week leading up to my arrival in Maine for the Acadia Bug Project was filled with such stomach-tangling knots and nervousness that border-lined anxiety. For the first time in my academic career I will be doing actual research and field work pertaining to my possible future career. Although I was incredibly excited to finally get my hands dirty in some field work but I was nervous that I was overestimating my abilities and would be more of a setback and slow the progress down.
 
My first week here was everyone else’s third week and the rest of the crew developed a rhythm and routine for gathering data at each of the sites, sterilizing the equipment on their return back to the field house, and sorting through all of the collected data, and I was being thrown in. The same nerves and excitement made it so difficult to sleep but at 7:45 am I was up and ready to start my first day. The first morning was a bit hectic with a lot of me just standing around attempting to be helpful in gathering and loading supplies into Dr. Jackson’s car while not being helpful at the same time……. kind of a rough start. But once we were at our field site for the day it became much smoother. Collecting the terrestrial bugs was different. Using beat sheets and sweep nets we were able to gather the insects and become a human vacuum aspirating them into a collection vial. Aspirating the bugs felt like I was breaking all the “rules” my mom scolded me for as a child when it came to bugs. Not only was I sucking them up (and yes there was a time or two that I’m pretty sure I swallowed a bug) but I was touching them with my bare hands and then eating afterwards!
 
As the week progressed, it became easier to immerse myself into the routine of each field day. Some of the days were long, with us doing field work in the morning and after a quick lunch break working with citizen scientists in the afternoon and other days were a little bit shorter but much more intensive making the day appear long. However working with the citizen scientists was such a different and unique experience. The level of enthusiasm that they would bring to the site would reenergize me for the afternoon and it was also great to see regular people getting excited to be a part of scientific research. Some were a bit more enthusiastic than others completely willing to get down and dirty to catch some aquatic insects but all were fun to have. My first week was insane, exhausting, and a bit of a blur; my second week became much more routine but just as exhausting. Between the long days of field work under the hot sun, an afternoon of bug sorting, and nights filled with either reading or movies, my time here just flew by. This was definitely an experience that not only will I never forget but has solidified my decision to work as an Ecologist and work in the environment. It has also revealed how important crowd sourcing for research, aka citizen scientists, can be and how anyone who has an interest (myself included) can help in others research.

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Citizen scientists and our team at the Hunter Brook site
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6/28/2018 0 Comments

citizen science data update!

Preliminary finding: Emergent aquatic insects vary among our sitesWe are seeing big differences among the four sites that we survey. We put together this side by side comparison of all of the emergent aquatic insects at each site:
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6/24/2018 0 Comments

what the data looks like...

We are all extremely surprised that we have already completed week 3 of fieldwork here in Acadia! Time is flying by and the data is accumulating. I wanted to write a short post explaining what actual data we are trying to collect. We have had great groups of citizen scientists come to 3 of the four sites now, and we collect aquatic and terrestrial invertebrates  using a variety of methods. We try to sort them a little in the field, but mostly we bring them back to the lab (aka fieldhouse) and sort and count them. Right now, because we are trying to collect as much data while we are in Maine as possible, I don't want to spend all our time in the lab so we kind of do a rough sort into orders or families. We will look more carefully at these samples in the fall to further classify them, but for now, we are seeing lots of interesting diversity. Check out this photo of the diversity from the aquatic sampling at Marshall Brook: 
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Aquatic invertebrates laid out to show differences in size among different families.
Our goal as the summer goes on is to understand how the insects are changing at each site, so we will create graphs that show the diversity and abundance at each site... below is the data in a graph. How is this going to change at our next sampling day? We don't know! That's science! Check out our results page, which has the current graphs and trends for each site. 
 https://www.acadiabugproject.com/2018-project-results.html
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Allyson Jackson

Professor and maker of black bean burgers. 

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6/14/2018 0 Comments

Two weeks in, chock full of bugs

​Being one of the interns that are only temporarily involved, I had to catch on quickly to the project and give great effort to help out in my short stay (16 days). Arriving at the start of the project, however, was easier in that I was on the same page as everyone and did not have to play catch up to the rest of the group as the other temporary members would have to jump in when the plans are already in motion. This did mean that I would have to play a part in the “figuring out,” process at the beginning of any project. What the figuring out process involves is first testing to see if what was written down on paper that would theoretically work can be applied in practice to real field data. For all the kinks found in the first week or two, some adjustments are needed to create a successful project. While Professor Jackson is the one to make the important decisions, it was our job to work out the smaller issues that may arise and offer suggestions that may help everything run smoothly.
In the first week at Acadia, we visited all four of our research sites (three on Mount Desert Island, one on Schoodic peninsula) to get a feel for how to effectively use our equipment to obtain quality data as well as setting up the emergence traps. The equipment included dip nets, sweep nets, beat sheets, aspirators, and a dissolved oxygen meter. We did have to work around some rainy weather, which may not be ideal for insect collection but is completely unavoidable and definitely an expected occurrence in Maine. Week two of research was run more smoothly as everything was set up and we were able to get into a rhythm for the fieldwork. However, there were still certain things that needed to be worked out such as the whole citizen science aspect to the project as we were not able to hold any sessions week one. To me, this was my favorite part although I was only able to experience it once. Even after a full quantitative data collection on a considerably hot day, we held a citizen science session and it was great to have other people out in the field with us collecting data. It was great to see such enthusiasm towards our research and being able to show others what it is that we do and how to do it is fulfilling. It might have been the group that we had on the specific day, but it made it seem that the research that we conduct has more purpose than to simply prove a hypothesis. Especially with the big push for scientific communication, I feel that this is a great way to relay information to the public and get the involved in a fun way.
As my last few days on the job are wrapping up, I would like to shout out the commander in chief of the project and thank Professor Jackson for letting me help out and experience the ever beautiful Acadia National Park. I had a fantastic time learning about research first hand as I have never been a part of one before this. I have also never touched more bugs in my life than I did on even one day of quantitative data collection. It is always great to immerse yourself into something that you are not particularly used to and learn something completely new. For my last thought, I want to encourage whoever is reading this to go out and learn more about your local invertebrates! They are essential parts to the ecosystem! 
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-Daniel Kraemer
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6/5/2018 0 Comments

Settling In...

Author: Matt Garafalo
​What's up fellow nature nerds? Hopefully everyone following our project is getting as excited as we are to collect some cool bugs! So we just arrived in Maine this past Friday with our fearless leader, Dr. Allyson Jackson, at the helm. The rest of our crew (Veronica, Alex, Daniel, myself, and of course Ben the Dog) has since been settling in. Our mission is being fueled by lots of coffee and PB&J, and only the finest gourmet dog food. We've begun to explore the nearby town of Ellsworth, and the beautiful expanses of Acadia National Park. Maine is truly picturesque, and definitely a lot colder than New York. So far we've tested out some of our bug collection methods at our field sites and they've been pretty successful. We've already got a ton of creepy crawlies from both the aquatic and terrestrial realms, and we're super excited to have our citizen scientists come out and help us, and see what they find! We are in the process of deploying some of our emergence traps at our field sites so we can see what insects are entering terrestrial food webs from the ponds and streams of Acadia. We'll be sure to keep you in the loop, but for now... we've got some bugs to ID!
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