Well, as we were saying.
Every field season brings new people and new opportunities. This year, the Kaspari lab from the University of Oklahoma teams up with the Kay lab of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, to bring you another set of field notes from Panama.
One of our goals this summer is to begin to understand the chemical “recipe” of the ants of Barro Colorado Island. Turns out, that while we are all made of elements like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (the latter three representing the N, P, and K numbers found on any bag of fertilizer), subtle differences in the elemental recipe of ants may be important in determining which species grow fast (we think it’s the phosphorus), run around like whirling ant dervishes (we think it’s the carbon), or lumber around in the heavy army of chitin (the thing that gives a beetle it’s distinctive “crunch”, and we think *that’s* nitrogen).
In order to do this, we need lot’s of ants. Specifically, we need to grovel through the litter looking for whole ant colonies, but we also need to collect the winged reproductives of ant colonies–the males and females that fly from their parent colony to mate. This, we think, is a crucial time in an ant’s life that may be *especially* dependent on its chemical recipe.
Which explains why the tip of my nose is sunburned.
Bear with me on this one.
One great way of catching flying insects, at least the nocturnal ones, is to blacklight. A blacklight is basically a light bulb that gives off UV light. For reasons that are not entirely clear, many insects are drawn inexorably to the ultraviolet light given off by a blacklight.
So a couple of days after I arrived on the island (about 10 days ago) I was standing in front of a while plastic tarp, with a pair of forceps (=tweezers), while insects buzzed, fluttered, and thwapped around me, some hitting the tarp and falling to the ground, others hanging on, dazed by the light, while others skittered around. The “skittering” variety tended to be what I was after, the winged ants who rarely stick around, but carom off the tarp and head back out to the night. These ants were not going to make easy, and I felt slow and clumsy, with my right tweezer-laden hand stabbing out like a drunken heron going after minnows.
The UV light, didn’t help frankly. That was one strange, disorienting bulb. But eventually I had captured about 20 alates, and felt reasonably good about the night’s catch, as the dry season had not ended yet, and its the *wet* season that really brings out the ants. More on that later. So I plunked my ziplock full of alate into the freezer and called it a night.
So, about the nose.
Debby, my wife, a crackerjack artist, and fellow blogger, stared at me the next day, screwed up her face and said, “what did you do to your nose?” Not that I look very closely at the tip of my nose with any regularity. Its rather awkward to do so frankly. But I headed to the bathroom mirror and there, like a bright little penny, was a red spot.
Apparently pressing your face up against a UV bulb ain’t a particularly good idea.
Obviously, we are going to have to work on this blacklighting protocol.
