Jess and I met up with Dr. Foote on Wednesday so we could discuss a project that he wants us to work on. We're going to be sampling flies from probably seven or eight dominant plant species in the marsh that he's been doing research in. We went out to the marsh and he was showing me the way that he samples, the "messy" way. He doesn't use killing jars, he just dumps whatever he catches into a bowl of alcohol. Transferring flying flies from a net and into a bowl of alcohol isn't very easy! I guess it's faster than using a killing jar though. We're pretty much only going to focus on the flies that are specific to one plant species only, the specialists, because they're the important ones.
So we're going to work on that. I need to get some waders because for some of the plants we have to go out into the middle of the marsh. Some of the marsh is really mucky, and I know I'm going to end up getting stuck. Dr. Foote "walked out of his shoe" yesterday and that was just when we were walking around the perimeter. And it's even worse when you have waders on because they're so big and clunky.
After Dr. Foote left, Jess and I walked around the woods trying to collect crane flies for him. I'm not sure what he's doing with them, but he's been talking about getting us out to collect them for a while. I only managed to find four in about an hour, but I got three different species. Apparently Jess found a really rare crane fly the other day. Dr. Foote said he's only caught one, ever. So she's really excited about that. We're going to go out to Jennings' on Saturday to look for some more!
