Last Friday night, Mustard and I attended a BioBlitz at Morialta Conservation Park, run by the Discovery Circle. It was great fun! We set up a light trap to attract insects, and helped people collect and identify the critters that came to visit us. 

A light trap is a white sheet hung between two trees, with a bright light strung up in front of it. The light we used was a mercury vapour light, which produces lots of the UV light that insects are attracted to. Exactly why insects are attracted to bright lights, such as your porch light at home during the evening, or our light trap, is not definitively known. 

Theories include:

• The insects might use the moon to navigate by, and man-made lights confuse them
• A light source might be confused as a 'clear path', so insects are heading towards the light so to not bump into obstacles
• Perhaps insects are attracted to UV light because flowers also reflect UV light? 
  

Whatever the reason, we had lots of tiny moths and flies come land on our sheet!

There were plenty of other things happening at the BioBlitz - spider surveys, bat surveys, spotlighting possums and birds, nocturnal ant hunting... it was fantastic to see so many families heading out around the park with scientists. Data from any identified animals and plants was uploaded to The Atlas of Living Australia, which is a great place to find out what lives around you! It is also a great site to upload anything you see (and know what it is). If you find something and want help getting it identified, head to BowerBird, where there is a great community of people uploading sightings to projects and helping each other identify things from photographs.

BioBlitz brought lots of great organisations together. There were even some educational displays about how feral animals (like cats and foxes) cause so much damage to our native wildlife. Mustard was not so keen on the taxidermy cat. 

BioBlitz was a bunch of fun - thanks to the Discovery Circle for having us! There are more BioBlitzs coming up later in the year - find out more about them here, and head out to learn more about our amazing environment!

Checking out more wasps today, and came across this crazy specimen, which I had to share with you - and it made for a great opportunity to show you the automontage camera mentioned in my last post!

Spot anything unusual on the wasp above? She's pretty sandy and dirty, but if you look around the wing area on her body, you might spot some mites! Mites and ticks are in the group Acarina. They have eight legs, no antennae and no segmentation of the abdomen (their body all looks like one piece). The wasp above is a parasitoid... and these wasps are probably acting as parasites, feeding off the wasp. Parasite inception! 

The photo above shows the camera and the flashes used to take the picture of the wasp. Mustard is checking out the wasp specimen (inside the white cylinder). The cylinder helps disperse the flash, so we get even lighting and not too much reflection. 

The camera moves down from focussing at the top of the specimen to the bottom, taking pictures as it goes. Then the computer program stitches them all together, taking the parts in focus to make one big composite image. 

The finished image! 

I've been a bit quiet this week, sorry! I've been learning to identify different subfamilies of braconid wasps. When I started, they all looked the same and I thought I'd never ever be able to recognise the different types! But I'm getting there... and I thought I'd share a couple of the characters taxonomists use to tell what kind of wasp they've found. 

The pictures above is the face of a wasp that is in the group called the 'cyclostome wasps'. They all have this weird dent or hole in their faces, where the red arrow in the picture is pointing. 'Cyclostome' comes from the Greek 'round mouth' so the name makes sense! Below this concave section of their mouthparts is the mandibles. The microgastrine wasps, that I'm studying for my PhD, don't have this concave section - their face is much flatter. 

Another character I've learnt about is the wing venation. Insect wings have veins inside them, which are either tubular (tiny hollow tubes) that often have pigment in them (are coloured) or otherwise the veins are almost invisible seams in the wings. Some braconid wasps, like the picture on the left, have coloured, tubular veins that run all the way to the edge of the wing. The microgastrine wasps only have coloured tubular veins close to their body - on the outer edges the veins are almost invisible.

The pictures above were taken on the microscope automontage camera in our lab. It takes pictures at different depths of focus and then the computer program stitches all the different photos together. Mustard and I will show you how the process works next week! 

Sometimes scientists get distracted. Today I spent far too long scrolling through the #cuteoff competition on twitter. Scientists started a friendly challenge to find the cutest animals... and for some warm and cuddly feelings, you should spare a few minutes and check them out. 

Mustard and I are obviously on the side of the invertebrates (animals without a backbone). 

Like the Teddy Bear Ant...

and this guy... awwww!

IT'S SO FLUFF I'M GONNA DIE! (for the Despicable Me fans)

And whilst this penguin is not an invertebrate, you HAVE to watch this video. Cutest thing EVER.

Anyway, get on the good old twitter and spend few minutes smiling. Besides, apparently the research shows that looking at cute pictures of baby animals actually helps you concentrate!

Sand and water spraying up from the tyres, ABS brakes shuddering as we came to a sudden stop, cones flying widely as they get clipped by a misjudged turn... yesterday we did 4WD training! 

When we do field work later this year, we will probably be heading down some dirt tracks - which means driving a 4WD. As part of our training, we therefore get to do a course in 4WD defensive driving. It was run through Adventure 4WD, and was a really interesting and educational day! 

Our instructors took us through some theory in the morning. We learnt the difference between part-time and full-time 4WD cars, how and when you should use the 4WD capacity, when you should reduce the tyre pressure in the cars, and some tips on staying safe on the road. 

In the afternoon, we headed to Port Gawler Beach and put the theory into practice. We swerved around cones, tried sudden braking and saw first hand the effect that increasing speed has on braking distance. The change from going 60km/h to 80km/h made a HUGE difference in how long it took the car to come to a stop. 

Whilst this part of the day was heaps of fun, it was also a great opportunity to try different driving techniques in a supervised and controlled environment, so that when we eventually get out on the dirt roads we can be as safe as possible.