The sun was shining, the MS revisions were nearly done, I went out to take a break after lunch.
A Stropharia something like Stropharia aeruginosa, near the Community Garden.
These are some of the most common flies around now!
There were caterpillars under the dying rhubarb leaves.
The Acanthosomatid stinkers are still hanging around.
All kinds of crazy Amanita muscaria coming up all over campus.
This Weekend Expedition was a bit rushed, as things were both busy and tiring for me, with the Spooktacular on Saturday, followed by a 5 h bout of Barn Owl tracking all night on Saturday-Sunday. As I slept in til nearly noon, and had a vehicle, I took Catherine out to Lynn Canyon, in her fabled homeland of North Vancouver. The place was absolutely crawling with people, as are most natural areas on the North Shore are on nice weekend days. A major infestation! For this reason, Catherine and I stuck to the woods high above the river.
Although it was a nice dry, sunny day, the understory was still quite wet and teeming with fungal life,
Fungi, such as this Ramaria added colour to the forest floor.
Even the crevices we examined for spiders seemed to be full of fungus.
Most of the spiders we found were small Linyphiids or Araneids, but we did encounters some larger Amaurobiids, such as this pretty one. I really love the silky look of their abdomens.
We even found a Jumping Bristletail on an old cedar trunk.
We say several large slugs, but not much else in the way of arthropods except for some stray, sunning Leptoglossus and fungus gnats.
Despite the crowds, getting out to the woods was good for us, as recently life has felt rather hectic.
This weekend members of our lab brought out our long-suffering arthropod menagerie for some more outreach, this time at our university for the annual Hallowe’en Science Spooktacular. This event combines the fun of Hallowe’en with the awesomeness of science. The displays on hand creepily demonstrated all kinds of horrifying things, such as radiation safety, microbiology, weird fluid dynamics, and of course, insects!
The event was packed!
Catherine tries to freak out a vampire with tales of spider biology. Actually, this is how she talks at any event, including during her Presiden’t’s Prize winning talk at last week’s ESC conference! Photo by Mike Hrabar.
This beautiful widow was one of three we brought out to demonstrate the awesomeness of these spiders.
Antonia Musso prepares the maggot art with some acrylic paint.
The artists get to work
Antonia displays the finest piece of the day.
Mike busts out the leaf insects.
The costumes add to the cuteness of kids meeting insects.
The undergrads were out in force to do their part in outreach. Great show everyone!
Bruce Leighton brings the steampunk chic with a horrifying Victorian curio cabinet!
Jutta Rickers- Haunerland demonstrates the radioactivity of various household items, including some of the old Pentax Super-Takumar lenses!
Uranium glass fluorescing!
Bekka Brodie tries out the Van der Graaf, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to convince her son Tavi to follow suit.
A glimpse into the wizarding world of microscopy.
A smoking-hot demonstration of glassblowing by our own Bruce Harwood.
Tavi got to take home an awesome glass dinosaur!
This Ewok was awesome!
This girl loved the black widows and the leaf insects.
This kid is filling his brains with insect knowledge.
It was great seeing all the parents bringing their kids out to these events. This kind of early exposure to science can’t be bad.
The end of a great day of science outreach! Photo by Mike Hrabar.
John Borden, a pioneer in Canadian chemical ecology research, steps up when the winner of his scholarship is announced.
Well, after a hectic 6 day trip to Guelph and back for the ESC/ESO Joint Annual Meeting, I am back in the mid-fall world of Vancouver. The conference was a big success, and was very well-organized. What I particularly liked about how it was run was having the Graduate Student Showcase and President’s Prize sections with no competing symposia, the multitude of workshops and schmoozing opportunities, and the great food.
Highlights of the conference for me were:
1)The photography workshop with Alex Wild, which brought a great group of people together to learn more about insect photography
2) The social media workshop, hosted by Crystal Ernst and Morgan Jackson, two masters of the art of Twittering and blogging, explaining exactly how social media can enrich and accelerate scientific work.
3) Laura Timms‘ Heritage Lecture, which brought a unique analysis of the ups and downs of Canadian entomology, with reference to the politics and economy of insect science
4) Steve Marshall‘s Gold Medal address, in which he sought to redefine the taxonomic impediment in more friendly and hopeful terms
5) Having a 20 min slot at the Graduate Student Showcase to bring my screaming, insect-murdering birds to the entomological world! This was a great honour and I think the talk went down really well. I made the argument that these birds are in fact true professional entomologists, being that their whole lives are devoted to finding and exploiting insects!
6) Brian Brown‘s fascinating talk on phorid fly biology and using a Los Angeles as a biodiversity research field site
7) The conference banquet, where Alex Wild gave a great talk on how digital photography has the potential to be revolutionary in the way people get out and view nature.
8) Hanging out with fellow entomologists, making contacts and being social!
John Huber and Alex Smith (who I first met in the jungle) in conversation.
Dr. Wild showing off some beautiful prints,
A meeting of the spider minds! Raphaël Royauté and Catherine Scott.
Check out the cuteness!
Crystal and Morgan brought insects to photograph, Alex brought his baby girl!
Morgan Jackson is honoured for all his great contributions to organizing the conference.
This is the moment when Thelma Finlayson gets a standing ovation in absentia!
Alex Wild photobombs an assassin shot!
No, it is not as exotic or insect-laden as Belize, but when you have a great instructor and some packages of insects, you can learn a lot about photographing the smaller creatures if Alex Wild is your instructor!
This workshop Mike and I attended yesterday was put on in association with the Entomological Society of Canada Annual Meeting in Guelph Ontario. The workshop was designed to cover the basics of insect macrophotography, and as such a lot of the material was not new to me, but watching a professional instructor was! I was surprised how casual he seemed delivering the basics, with a friendly and casual manner that made everything go down smooth among the mixed skill-level audience.
I even learned a thing or two, with the light-box technique producing amazingly easy and pleasing results with nothing more than three pieces of foamboard and some bounced flashes. To think of all the time I spend littering Adam Blake‘s desk with improvised paper diffusers, when I could have had just a ready made macro box stowed in my desk ready for when I get the urge to shoot a bug!
Unfortunately, it rained pretty hard all afternoon, so we could not go out to the field to practice, but we had some good fun continuing on with our studio techniques. Alex’s approach to teaching is very lighthearted, and it seems he wants to emphasize the fundamentals without pushing a narrow definition of the form. His tips are simple, yet will yield powerful images if they are followed.
You can see some of the shots I took below, If you are ever in the market for a fun and informative photography workshop, Alex’s course is really a great choice. Thanks go out to Morgan Jackson and Crystal Ernst for all their hard work helping facilitate the course, and of course to Dr. Wild, for helping us start the conference on a high note.
Mike shoots in the foamcore macro setup.
White backdrop on the assassin.
Dropping it off to black.
The grasshopper salutes my improving skill!
A tree cricket!
The froghopper got that orange glow from a piece of paper underneath the branch.
Grasshopper with bluejeans-clad butt as backdrop.
variations.
A brown lacewing looking elegant against black.
A pretty Goldenrod Leaf Beetle.
This widow was perched on a twig with two Lastolites hitting from either end, and the backdrop is a maple outside the window.
Dr. Evil, the Katydid.
Mike contemplates Dr. Evil.
I just came by this footage via twitter this morning, and it looks like it was put out by the Fundación Rapaces de Costa Rica, and was shot by Chris Jimenez. It shows some absolutely gorgeous footage of a caracara chick, so evidently they found a nest! Be sure I will try to track down more information about this footage and the story behind it! In the meantime, enjoy, as the chick footage is very lovely!
Tonight, Catherine and I are packing, because tomorrow we fly east to attend the Entomological Society of Canada/Entomological Society of Ontario Joint Annual Meeting in Guelph Ontario!
Highlights of this conference will be:
1) A macrophotography workshop with Alex Wild! The forecast for Saturday looks wet and cool, but I have high hopes we will find a few insects outdoors. If not, there will be some studio subjects available. I am sure I will learn a lot, especially about how Alex teaches a course. I am thinking of doing a “photograph your study” workshop at SFU soon, and this will definitely hep!
2) Grant-writing, teaching, plant recognition and job-search workshops throughout the conference. These are all important skills, and a great reason to attend this conference. Catherine and I attended a professional development workshop sponsored by CANPOLIN at SFU this summer, and it was great material! Thanks go out to Dr. Elizabeth Elle for opening it up to other students!
3) A Graduate Student Showcase, which I am honoured to have been invited to! This will give me 20 whole minutes to spread the word about the coolest wasp-eating birds on the planet! The lineup looks great, with talks on Lycaenids, Salticids, Coleophorids and Noctuids!
This should be a great meeting!
The adventures of the SFU raccoons continue! Today, they were getting into the buckets outside the building.
These Admirable Boletes (Boletus mirabilis) are especially abundant at Pete Wolf Creek. Unlike many other boletes, these like rotting trees.
This weekend was the Thanksgiving long weekend in Canada, and following tradition, I went out mushroom picking. This is something I have done since I was a teenager, and since I do not get out much anymore, every time I go it is pretty special. If the mushrooms are plentiful, it is even better!
My buddy Jeff drove, which was very non traditional!
A nice Ramaria. Apparently some are edible, but I have never harvested these.
A nice cluster of Chanterelles!
Jeff examines the second-growth forest above Pete Wolf Creek. We found that a large number of of our favourite sites had been or are being clearcut. Just a few hundred metres north of here has a new road and cutblock…
Because of the super dry summer, the king Boletes (Boletus edulis) were still good this late in the season. They must have fruited late.
Jeff with a Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) and Catherine with three Kings!
Folding boxes make great transport containers.
Jeff headed back from a downstream scouting mission.
We got up pretty high, but the pickings were better at lower altitude. The Strait of Juan de Fuca was pretty nice to see though.
Catherine in the woods.
A Grisette-like Amanaita
After a strenuous day in the woods, we chilled out with my brother’s new kitten!
who is super-cute!
Is it just me or do the undergrads look younger every year?
A few years ago, I taught the laboratory for BISC 317, Insect Biology. Much as we impress upon the students to go out and collect hard and often in the few short weeks of summer left to them, they are usually slow to do so, so to help them out, the instructors take them on a collecting trip. This is a voluntary field trip that the instructors organize solely for the students’ sake, and it allows them to get a few orders in their collections they might not yet have found, such as stoneflies, mayflies and odonates. We go out to UBC’s Malcolm Knapp research forest, and hit both a pond and a stream habitat.
This year, Bekka Brodie and Antonia Musso are teaching the course, and I went along for the fun of it. I taught the course when Antonia took it, so it was great to see her out there leading the undergrads around. Bekka is the senior entomologist, having come from a Masters where she worked on Longhorns in the US, and she brought along Tavi, our favourite budding truck enthusiast/entomologist.
Bekka wrangles supplies and students
A veritable invasion of entomologists hits the shores of the pond.
We use dollar store nets for aquatic insects. they work pretty well!
Antonia explaining the superabundance of chironomid larvae.
Antonia figures out the quirky wash bottle.
Hoping for a mayfly…
Collaborative netting.
Searching for 3 caudal filaments.
Preservation in ethanol is the next step.
Another forest invertebrate.
Ah yes! A fat juicy stonefly, freshly plucked from the stream!
A whopping corydalid larva!
Tavi had all the netting he could handle and made his escape. Viorel is not amused.
On the way back, Viorel, Tavi and I checked out some honey mushrooms on a maple at a nearby river.
With some salmon in the water…
…and some on land as bear food!