Insect Ecology @ Au Sable - spring 2024

On this week's integration day, we students visited several places to learn about the forests surrounding Au Sable. While no insect specimen collection took place, we gained significant insights into how our forests sustain the entire ecosystem (which are crucial to supporting insects) and how anthropogenic disturbances have impacted them. First, we learned about how our everyday activities contribute to unsustainable practices, even here at Au Sable. We use cars, electricity, and gas, emitting carbon dioxide at increased rates. A key question posed was how we reconcile the tension between being separated from nature in the city and being integrated with nature out away from the city. While it may be easy to see humanity as the focus in the Anthropocene, Rolston III said in the assigned reading for this day that we should not turn it into the "Anthropocentric era" [1].   Figure 1. Our group at Au Sable location. Our first outing was on the trail a

Introduction – When it comes to reproduction strategies of animals, there has been much research done into different life cycles – live birth, egg laying, mating practices, etc – but one area that is often overlooked is the insect world. With insects being a such wide grouping of creatures, there stands that there is much research still to be done. One area I find interest in is insect eggs. Have you ever wondered why insect eggs all look so different? In this short essay I want to briefly touch on the interesting way bugs lay their eggs, discussion on how these eggs vary in characteristics, and finally look at some recent studies showing why these eggs all look so different from each other. Methods of laying – Insects begin their reproduction cycle in a similar way to most animals – become sexually mature, find a mate, breed, and develop eggs that can then be laid. The difference that comes from this step is the method of egg laying that female insects possess. Female insects po

  For my 3 rd and final blog, I am going to talk about our field trip to the Manistee River. The Manistee River is located in the northern half of Michigan’s lower peninsula. It is about 26 miles long with recreational options available to the public (Rivers.gov). Some of those include kayaking/canoeing and fishing. In our case we did aquatic insect collecting! During this trip we were looking for caddisflies, mayflies, stoneflies and any other aquatic insect. I specifically was looking for caddisfly nymphs. Since we were looking for aquatic insects, we brought aquatic nets, and we also brought some arial nets in case we saw any flying insects. This river, like most here in Michigan was very sandy. The middle section of the river was mostly sand with some patches of silt. The banks had a lot more silt mixed in with the sand making a very thick soil type. The thick silt plus traveling upstream made it difficult to walk at times, some of us getting stuck in the process. There were mul

Disease vectors are organisms capable of transmitting pathogens, be they viruses, bacteria, or parasites, from one host to another ; for the purposes at hand, from animals to humans. 1 The most common sort of vector in the w orld are hematophagous insects, many of which are Dipterans in the   Cu lici dae family. However, there are plenty of other hematophagous Dipterans , including members of the families Simuliidae , Psychodidae , Glossinidae . This is not to speak of other insect groups who habitually take blood meals, which notably includes lice (Order Psocodea ), fleas (Order Siphonaptera), and certain individuals within the Hemipteran family Reduviidae . Of these groups, the Cu licids are generally the greatest threat, not the least due to the fact that some subspecies have developed a particular taste for human blood in particular. Every year, these vectorially-transmitted pathogens afflict hundreds of millions of humans, and wind up killing close to one million. Consequently,