Questions

You students have lots of good questions about caterpillars! Unfortunately, I don't know most of the answers, so I will ask some of the professors here tomorrow. We haven't actually worked with caterpillars yet. I think that starts tomorrow. Tomorrow we teachers divide up--one of us dissects caterpillars; two of us are helping to set up greenhouse experiments; and two of us do something called curation.
Today I learned that they are now estimating that there are between 3 million and 30 million different species of these critters all over the world, and they really haven't even begun to catalog them yet. They are studying the interactions of caterpillars, the plants, and the parasitoids that feed on them. I learned that a parasitoid is something that lays eggs in the caterpillars and devours them until it emerges from the caterpillar (which usually kills the caterpillar. The parasitoid is one of two types: a wasp or a fly, basically. I also learned that caterpillars are very picky as to what plants they feed on. Up north, they may feed on a few types of plants. As you go south to the rainforests, they get very, very picky about their food. They might only prefer one type of plant. If they don't have that plant, they just don't eat, and die.
What they do here is go out and find caterpillars, put them in bags, and wait to see if they get a moth (butterflies are moths) or if they get a parasitoid (fly or wasp). They study what type of caterpillar feeds on what type of plant. They are studying what kinds of damage was done by the hurricanes, and how that affects which caterpillars and parasitoids. As global warming continues, they expect more extreme weather events, which will in turn affect all the insects, which affects the plants, which eventually affects all of us.
They bring the caterpillars back and put them in the "mud room", feed them their plants, and wait to see what happens. They call the mud room the "zoo". It actually is a zoo since caterpillars are animals, and they are in cages being watched! They have to clean out their cages, and make sure their "animals" are healthy. When they die, they are studied, mounted on pins, and sent out to labs for classification, be given official names, and cataloged in the databases.
Hopefully, I will get to start learning how to work with their databases tomorrow.
I hope you were all listening to Rebecca (the head grad student) who said how much she needs computer skills in her work, and how she wished she had had a class like yours when she was in high school. She has to learn it now, which takes a lot of time she could be using otherwise to do various things.
A few weeks ago they had a computer analyst from New York who spent her vacation time helping them catalog things in the database. They were very happy that she came and helped them.
Tomorrow I would like to try and Skype with all of you via the webcam in Room 242 and the web cam that I have with me. I'm also going to post a couple of websites for you to go look at.

I miss all of you! Be good for the sub.

Love,
Ms. O.

P.S. To whoever asked on the blog--A days have 3rd lunch, B days have 1st lunch!