Spring peepers are usually very easy hear, but not so easy to see -they're small and nocturnal. So imagine their surprise when Dani and Katrina stumbled across this little guy while they were monitoring purple loosestrife at Oxbow NWR in Harvard, MA!

Beetles Away!

Summer time and the field season are in full swing and things have been busy on the rivers!  We've talked a lot about our Galerucella beetle rearing project on the blog, and we are both happy and sad to say that this season's beetle rearing has come to an end.

On June 28th and 29th we gave away many of our beetle-laden plants to some great partners within the SUASCO CISMA: the Sudbury Valley Trustees, the town of Marlborough Conservation Department, Concord Land Conservation Trust, and Lincoln Land Conservation Trust. We released the remainder of our plants at the Concord Impoundments (part of Great Meadows NWR) with the help of two US Fish and Wildlife interns, Dani and Matt, and the Student Conservation Association / National Park Service Fellow, Katrina.

We are thrilled to say that the project was a huge success! It's nearly impossible to get an accurate count of how many new beetles we raised because there are so many, they're small, and many are still pupae hiding in the soil. We started out with 37 pots of purple loosestrife, a few of out pots didn't appear to turn out to be very successful, but our conservative estimate is that we raised between 17,000 and 33,000 beetles.  That's a huge number of beetles (we started out with 400-450)! The range is so big because we are estimating that each plant, seeded with 10-15 beetles, can produce between 500 and 1,000 new adults.

We'll also soon be polishing up a very detailed how-to guide, chock full of our notes, suggestions, and lessons learned. If you (or someone you know, your school, your environmental club, or conservation-related organization) are interested in rearing beetles yourself,  let us know!  It's actually relatively easy and is a great way to engage and involve people of all ages! We will be happy to share our experiences and the protocol with you, and there are tons of other beetle rearing stories out there to get you started. The Neponset Watershed Association (in Canton, MA) has been raising beetles for the past couple of years with the help of their army of volunteers. Their opperation is probably on a much larger scale than what you might be interested in, but check out their Flickr photos for some great inspiration!

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.)

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!

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.