A few weeks ago, Mustard and I joined an expedition with a couple of other PhD students. The mission? Hunt for wasps and bees, set some traps and check out some places we'd never been. We didn't have any luck that day, although our colleague who studies wasps that parasitise bees did find some great specimens. We'll see if he can tell us all about them in a post soon!

This weekend I headed back down to check the traps, Mustard and my self-proclaimed support crew (my adventure-keen parents) in tow. It was a three hour drive to Wirrabara State Forrest at the southern end of the Flinders Rangers in South Australia, and unfortunately there wasn't much in our trap there. 

Not to be disheartened, we continued on to Mt Remarkable National Park. This place is beautiful, and I'd highly recommend a visit if you ever find yourself driving the rather boring piece of highway between Adelaide and Port Augusta! 

We made friends with a massive goanna (and by made friends, I mean stayed well back whilst it plodded along then climbed up a gum tree) and check out our malaise trap. Unfortunately somehow the trap had been knocked over, and the bottle that normally catches the insects was unscrewed and empty.

​Malaise traps are basically a big netted tent. As insects are flying along above the ground, they don't notice the inner black netting and crash into it. An insect will then naturally climb upwards. Unfortunately for the insect, the highest part of the trap is a bottle of ethanol. However, malaise traps don't work very well when they're flat on the ground! 

There wasn't much we could do but make a sad face, stand the trap back up and hope that when we visit next month it still be standing and full of wasps! 

We didn't find any wasps for our project this field work trip, but we did eat an awesome pasty at the Port Wakefield Bakery and we had a fun walk in Mt Remarkable National Park. We'll have better luck next time, I'm sure!

You might remember a couple of weeks ago we set up some malaise traps for catching wasps. Two weeks later we went to see what we'd found! Mustard and I spent hours and hours at the microscope sorting through a lot of insects. We weren't very successful at catching many of the microgastrine wasps that we're studying, but we did find one specimen right at the end of the third bottle! 

Although we didn't find many of our wasps, we did find some pretty awesome wasps that we wanted to share with you! These guys below are in the family Chrysididae and are parasitoids or cleptoparasitoids of other wasps or bees. Head to our citizen science website to learn about parasitoids. Cleptoparasitic wasps such the Chrysididae lay their eggs inside the nests of unrelated wasps or bees, where the baby Chrysidids eat the host young and the food the host provided for them. They are iridescent due to the structural surface of their exoskeleton... and super pretty!

The true bug (Hemiptera) below is super weird and super awesome. We're not entirely sure what family it is from - do you know? Let us know in the comments!

On the weekend, Mustard and I headed out to set up malaise traps to catch some wasps. A malaise trap looks a bit like a tent - the wasps accidentally fly into the cloth, and then they tend to make their way up to the top of the 'tent' where they are caught in a bottle of ethanol. It's not very nice, having to trap and kill insects to be able to study them, but at the moment it's the only way we can collect enough samples for DNA analysis. We're definitely not affecting enough to alter their population levels or impact their place in the ecosystem.

We set up a few different malaise traps in different locations, to see if there are different species of wasp in different parts of Adelaide, and in different vegetation. We'll leave them up now for a couple of weeks - and we'll let you know what we find when we go and collect the bottles! 

One of the best parts of being a entomologist is doing field work - getting to walk around on a beautiful day in a conservation park and call it work!

Today at lab group camp, a very exciting event occurred. Mike, one of the researchers in our lab, walked out of his room… and found a spider!

Whilst this may, in fact, be the least exciting thing you can think of happening, or perhaps exciting purely because of the adrenaline that would start pumping as you run back in the room and scream for help, Mike was ecstatic.

This was a very special spider. It was a male of the Aganippe genus, which Mike is currently working on. These rather large and impressive looking spiders are pretty cool – they can live longer than your dog, and build burrows in the ground from which they hunt prey (omnomnom insects). 

A female can be found by looking for her carefully disguised trapdoor in the ground, and very skilfully digging her out... but the males are much harder to find. Unlike the females, the boys leave their burrows once they are an adult and wander around looking for females to visit, so you really need to be lucky to come across one! To find a male just sitting outside your door is amazing!

Whilst Mike was very lucky, the spider was rather unlucky… since he was nearly dead anyway, he was sacrificed for science and collected in ethanol to preserve his DNA.

Another Ph.D. student in our lab, Sophie, works on trapdoor spiders too, so this awesome find spurred a night-time spider hunt out in the bush. Armed with as many layers of clothing as we could find, beanies, head torches, and optimism, we set off down the trail in search of male trapdoor spiders.

Unfortunately luck was not with us, and not a male trapdoor was in sight. We did find some cool burrows with wolf spiders in them, and a sweet huntsman, but eventually gave up and returned to camp for sticky date pudding.

All in a normal night of science Ph.D.!

We’re going to chat to Sophie about her spider research soon, so stay tuned!