September 23rd, 2015

This week across Canada, and at two of our Outdoor/Environmental Education Centres, the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario‘s School Malaise Trap Program (SMTP) got underway.

Insect collecting “malaise traps” have been set up at 60 school sites across the country, including the Blair and Camp Heidelberg OEE Centres.  After a two week period, the specimens are sent to BIO at the University of Guelph to be identified through DNA analysis, and assigned a DNA barcode.  BIO then sends each participating school a list of the species collected at their site, along with a complete photo record, and a summary of all trap sites.

Here are some highlights, from SMTP, of the program since it’s inception in 2013:

• The School Malaise Trap Program has reached nearly 300 schools, 10,000 students and has collected and sorted over 250,000 insect specimens which were caught in the schoolyards of the participating classes.
• Much more impressive still are the scientific findings associated with the School Malaise Trap Program. So far, the School Malaise Trap Program team has sequenced over 55,000 insect specimens representing over 6484 individual species – which is over 10% of all the terrestrial arthropod species found within Canada!
• Additionally, over 1000 of the individual species collected were new to the Barcode of Life Data Systems. This means that we were able to assign DNA barcodes and reference data to these species so that they can be easily identified and accessed by experts from around the world.

Al wrote about Camp Heidelberg’s amazing results in fall trapping a year ago.  CH also had the highest number of species (186) of all traps last spring!

Here is a the summary of insects caught at Blair in last spring’s program:

• 800 specimens (ranked 21st of 68 traps)
• 112 species (ranked 24th of 68 for species diversity)
• 30 species collected were found only in the Blair trap!

With this beautiful September weather, the fields at Blair are literally buzzing with life as all the insects are drawn to the last flowers of fall  – the goldenrods and asters – for nectar and pollen.  Here are two fine specimens I came across today while checking the malaise trap.