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Fly Finder
Researcher's in Charge
Caroline Owens, Anne Bilse, Melissa Grim, Yadi Galindo Salazar, Jagger Joyner, Michelle Lee, Thomas Lenihan, Tiger Lao, Asher Thompson, Charlie Thrift, Donica Washington, Wilma Wei
Classifications
273
Thoughts on Project
I was in a lab over thanksgiving break where we looked at malaria
parasites and very similarly, I had to count the malaria parasites in the different stages and classify them every day during my time there and calculate their growth. This project was very similar to that such that in a given sample, it needed to be sorted. I had specifically been looking for a project which was more aligned to what I did in the lab and this was the perfect one. I really enjoyed that experience and I think that this project, even though not completely similar, made me feel that I was continuing that project in a sense. I thought this project was very fun and interesting in the sense I never expected myself to enjoy sorting flies. In fact, since I joined at the start of the project, I found a fly species that wasn't listed in the options so got it established as one too to make sure that people were identifying them correctly. I think also that the more you volunteered on this project, the easier identifying the flies was and that made the process quicker in the future.
The ultimate goal was to help researchers identify and count insects to figure out how fish can change energy flow between habitat types! Cross-habitat subsidies are essential to the function of ecosystems since the energy in one transfers to the others. Sometimes, an oversupply of nutrients causes pollution and damage to aquatic systems. Subsidies (nutrients that are repackaged) are carried by insects and it travels into other ecosystems and can hurt the health of many organisms. Finding the number of aquatic insects which are caught in the card traps so we can understand if there is a difference between insect populations in cold and warm lakes, with and without fish. The aquatic insects give us a lot of information about the nutrients which are available since they all thrive on different nutrients in the water. Volunteers are tasked with identifying the number of flies and the type of flies there are and draw around them. After getting all of the flies in the sample, you can move on to the next classification.
