Today some of us went to the Honey Island Swamp to collect caterpillars. Honey Island Swamp is a wooded section of the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area and is about a 45-minute drive from downtown New Orleans. To get to the area, we drove through the city past sections severely damaged by Katrina. It was strange to see stranded boats in the middle of abandoned malls and houses.
Grant Gentry, a senior researcher at the lab showed us how to mark off a 10-meter circular plot and look for the tiny clues ..freshly chewed leaves, caterpillar poop (frass) on the ground, rolled up dead leaves. Caterpillars are expert at camouflage.
At first it was hard to spot them. But after looking carefully at the undersides of leaves, we would begin to get better at noticing the tell-tale signs. We were able to cover four plots, and found 50 or so caterpillars ranging from big (2cm) spiny, stinging caterpillars to tiny, (4mm) twig like caterpillars.
Wendy stayed back at the lab working with Mark, the Lab Director. Check her site out for cool video clips of her in the lab and also Mark and Angela answering students' questions via video.
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