Phew, it's been a while! Field season is gearing up, so expect more updates soon!

Meanwhile, we haven't been very active outside during the winter, but that doesn't mean that other animals haven't been out and about. These tracks were left on a frozen wetland on the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge.  Can you guess who made them?

(here's a hint: it's a rodent!)

Looks like our spider mama has her eggs now! Too bad for her, we don't want her or her spiderlings around our beetles and larvae. So off into the woods she goes.

Nursery web spiders can appear to be pretty horrifying if you don't like spiders. They're quick, agile, and can even walk on and dive under calm water. And they're big. 

Fortunately, they're of little threat to humans and will not bite unless provoked and aggravated.  They get their name from the female's behavior of carrying her egg mass in her jaw and building a web tent in which the eggs can hatch. She evens stays around until the last spiderling has hatched. How sweet!

One of the reasons we cover our purple loosestrife plants with netting is to keep our beetles in, but the other big reason for the netting is to keep predators out.

In the past, bio control agents were not as thoroughly researched as they are today. An area or country was plagued by an invasive species, and in an attempt to control it, a predator would be introduced. Sometimes, though, that predator became an invasive species itself. Australia and its cane toads are a prime example of this happening.

Fortunately, the two species of Galerucella beetles that we're using are extremely limited by purple loosestrife and need the plant to complete their life cycle.

Unfortunately, (for them and our control purposes) they are also quite tasty.



(This beetle was on one of our uncovered plants that we are using to help collect escapees. Our main beetle population is still safe and sound.)

Big News!

We have some awesome news!  Our new Junior River Ranger Activity Book and Guide v 2.0 is now live!!


We're very excited about this and will be distributing the books very soon!  In the mean time, you can download the book as a PDF and print it out at home! Click HERE to download it - the file is hosted with Google Docs, so just select "File" and then "Download" to save a copy.

The books will be available at the Visitor Centers are Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge - Sudbury, and Minuteman National Historic Park - North Bridge. Children can bring their completed booklets to any of these three locations to receive their official Junior River Ranger badge and signed certificate.

If you are unfamiliar with the program, please check out our Junior River Ranger page on the blog for more information.


We will be releasing a slightly updated v 2.1 of the booklet later this month, but we do not anticipate any significant changes. Stay tuned for the release of that version, but please don't hesitate to get started with our current booklet!


Our Junior River Ranger program is still young, as we only just launched our pilot last summer. As always, please feel free to give us suggestions on how we can improve the book or program to make it the best it can possibly be!  You can contact us via our blog email at suascoriversblog@gmail.com, or contact Katrina directly at katrina_scheiner@nps.gov.

Galerucella beetles are more active when it's sunny, and yesterday afternoon was gorgeous. We keep several purple loosestrife plants uncovered so that if any of our beetles do sneak out of their net enclosures, they have somewhere to go and food to eat. One of our beetle friends was being particularly lively yesterday and we managed to snag a few good photos.

Scroll on for an up close and personal view of beetle life! As always, click on the image to view it larger in the lightbox viewer (something we definitely recommend doing!).





    

  

 

 

 

Bio Control Phase II - Beetles!

If you've been over to Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge this week, you may have noticed a strange set up of kiddie pools, plants, and mesh-covered tomato cages. What the heck are we doing now?

You might remember that we're growing purple loosestrife plants in those kiddie pools as part of our bio control efforts to keep wild purple loosestrife in check. The addition of the cages and nets are part of Phase II of our project - raising the beetles!


Dani (back) and Matt collect beetles at the Concord impoundments

On Monday, Katrina, Dani, and Matt visited locations within the refuge complex where Galerucella sp. beetles were released in the past.  Ultimately, they collected beetles from loosestrife plants growing around the edge of the ponds at the Concord impoundments. There are a lot of beetles still living in the impoundments, which is great news because we haven't been able to release new beetles there in several years!  We want the beetles to be able to sustain their populations in the wild so that they will continue to feed on the loosestrife and so we eventually won't need to continue helping them along with our breeding programs.


Beetles congregating at the top of a purple loosestrife plant



Eventually, the beetles will eat enough of the loosestrife's leaves that the plant will die


We collect the beetles one of two ways. The first is with an insect aspirator:

Aspirators are a little strange looking, but they are essentially human-powered vacuums that are used to suck up small insects (though you should never use this type of aspirator to remove insects from the nests of mammals or birds - the mesh keeps insects from flying through the chamber and into your mouth, but not bacteria, viruses, or microscopic parasites). To use an aspirator like this one, place the open end of the straw with the yellow mesh in your mouth. Direct the tube close to your target and suck in sharply. The insect should be sucked through the tube and into the chamber. The length of the tube can make it difficult to suck up your targets as you need a reasonable amount of suction to draw them all of the way through the tube. If you can get close enough to your target, you may also remove the tubing and simply draw the insect through the other straw.  Once we had about 20 beetles in the chamber, we transferred them to a collection vessel, which brings us to our second method of collecting beetles.

Fortunately for us, collecting beetles doesn't require a lot of high-tech equipment - just a little bit of ingenuity and finesse. To make our collection vessels, all we did was cut the top off of plastic bottles, duct tape the edges so we wouldn't hurt ourselves, and then invert the tops. When we got to the collection site, we put some loosestrife stems in the bottles to help shade the beetles and give them something to munch on. The funnel created by the top makes it more difficult for them to escape as we tapped them in from the aspirator, and then we just used a rubber band to hold a piece of mesh fabric across the top of the bottle to keep the beetles in line.

While we used these bottles to transfer beetles from the aspirator collection chamber, we also collected directly into the bottles. To do this, all we had to do was gently shake the leaves that the beetles were on over the open bottle. Galerucella beetles naturally drop off of leaves as a defense against predators, so they dropped right in to our bottles.

Once we have all the beetles we need (about 10-15 per potted plant), we get back to our rearing facility right away. We don't want to keep the beetles in the bottles for too long, because otherwise they might overheat. It wasn't too warm on Monday, but if it was hot out we would have kept the bottles in a cooler with ice. Because we put all of our beetles into two collection vessels, we had to count out the necessary 10-15 beetles for each pot as we transferred them to our plants. This proved a little more difficult than we expected...

Matt and Katrina carefully attempt to transfer beetles to our plants

Not all of the beetles we collected congregated on the stems and leaves we gave them, so several flew away as soon as we cracked open the bottles. Fortunately, about half of our loosestrife plants weren't tall enough to add beetles to yet, so they didn't have nets over them. Most of the beetles that flew out of the bottles landed on the exposed loosestrife, and we were able to put them back into the nets.

After only a day in the nets, our beetles are foraging away and some have even already laid eggs! We hope that by next week the other half of our plants will be tall enough to add beetles, and we will venture out on a second collection mission. We should also see larvae next week, as the eggs will hatch after 7-10 days. Stay tuned!

Galerucella eggs

Purple Loosestrife update

Remember when we started our pots of purple loosestrife for the beetle rearing project? On March 20, they looked something like this:

Click image to enlarge

Not too exciting, are they? Some dirt, some dead sticks, and a little bit of fertilizer.

Well, with a little bit of time and some careful monitoring, the plants took off! Now, a month and a half later on May 2, our plants look like this:

Click image to enlarge

We have a number of shoots that are already about a foot tall, and as you can see they all look very healthy. Taking almost daily growth measurements of these plants really shows how fast purple loosestrife can grow! They grow more slowly when it's chilly and raining, but a couple weeks ago when it was warm, some plants grew from 3 inches tall to almost 8 inches in just  four days! Can you image if you were able to grow an inch a day?

Click images to enlarge

As soon as the shoots grow to be a foot tall, we start pinching off the apical meritstem, which is the area of cells at the very top of the shoots. The apical meristem is what causes the plants to grow taller, but we want them to be as bushy as possible to feed our beetles. By pinching off the top bud, we force the plants to grow more leaves along its stem.   The same thing happens to your shrubs or bushes at home! That's part of the reason why we prune them.  If no one pruned their rose bushes, the rose stems would grow very long, there wouldn't be as many leaves, and you wouldn't get as many flowers.

Speaking of the beetles, over-wintered adults have emerged! We found some in the wetlands on Monday, munching away on purple loosestrife leaves. Now we just have to wait until our potted loosestrife plants are tall enough, and then we can start collecting the beetles!

Snapping turtles - Cute, but feisty!

The Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord Rivers flow through some pretty developed areas, so you might be surprised to learn what sort of wildlife we have right in our backyards!

This little guy (or lady!) was hanging out by the wetlands near Puffer Pond at Assabet River NWR.  This turtle is a snapping turtle, and you can tell right away that it's a snapping turtle by its shell. Snapping turtles have ridges on and serrated (toothed) edges on their top shell, called the carapace. The ridges are often more evident on younger turtles, like this one here. Snapping turtles have a wide natural range in the United States, extending from the East coast as far west as Montana!  They can also be found even farther west in California, Oregon, and Washington but they didn't naturally occur there. The United States Geological Society calls them "native transplants" because they are naturally found in this country, just not in those states.  Check out this cool interactive map to see where they live!

 

Unlike other turtles you may be used to seeing, snapping turtles don't usually bask on sunny rocks or logs. They are very adaptable though, and frequently go on overland excursions, looking for food or a new watery habitat. They are generalized omnivores, which means that they will eat pretty much anything they can get their beaks on. You can see from the photo above that snapping turtles have beak-like mouths, which helps them grab their prey. They will eat invertebrates, plants, carrion, frogs, fish, and sometimes even small birds!

Anything that wanders too close is fair game, including your fingers! So always be careful if you come across a snapping turtle.  You should always respect wildlife when you come across it, but especially respect animals that could hurt you. You would be most likely to come across a snapping turtle when it is on land, and that is where it is most aggressive. They cannot pull their heads and legs into their shell as a defense, so they must take action to protect themselves. Snapping turtles got their name because they will extend their neck and lunge at a threat while snapping and biting at them. We typically think of turtles as being very slow-moving creatures, but snapping turtles can move quickly! They have long necks and strong beaks so they can reach farther than you might expect. 

Female snapping turtles lay their eggs during the spring and summer in the soil or in piles of vegetation, including muskrat and beaver lodges. Hatchling turtles are only the size of ping pong balls and their nests can be some distance from the water - so watch where you step! The little turtles need to make it to the water quickly so they can find food and stay safe.

 

This turtle is relatively small, only about six inches long, but they can grow to be up to 12 or 18 inches!

We have sprouts!

We wouldn't typically be excited about purple loosestrife budding, but in this case, we are! Our potted purple loosestrife are sprouting over at the Assabet River NWR visitor center!

The plants are all in different stages of growth, as you can see by the different types, sizes, and lengths of their sprouts. Purple loosestrife put up new sprouts from their roots each spring, and every year they grow more stems than they did the previous year.

The buds start out as small reddish nubbins, growing longer until they begin to turn green spread out into leaves.

Galerucella Beetle Rearing Facility - Just in time for spring!

Happy spring equinox! Over the past few days, Amber at Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge and Katrina, a Student Conservation Association fellow working with the Refuge and the National Park Service, set up our Galerucella beetle rearing facility.  The pools are housed at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge visitor center.

Creating the beetle rearing facility is a multi-step process. First, we must go find existing purple loosestrife plants in the wild that are large enough to survive being transplanted. After those plants are dug up, they are brought back to the facility location.

After we have all of the root balls back to the facility site, we have to wash them to remove all soil, debris, and roots from other plants. We do this because we want to grow the purple loosestrife and raise the beetles in as controlled an environment as possible.

We plant the loosestrife roots balls in large pots within children's wading pools. We will fill the pools part way with water to simulate the loosestrife's natural wetland environment.

Even though purple loosestrife is an invasive species, we want our samples to grow well while they are in the pots. To encourage their growth, we add fertilizer to each pot.

After all of our plants are potted, this is what they look like! It may not look like much, but over the next several weeks the plants should sprout and grow leaves. We will carefully monitor their progress and growing conditions, trying to make them feel right at home!  By May, our cultivated loosestrife plants should be large enough to feed our beetles.