Post number four

Insects are creatures that drive our world. They may be at the bottom of the food chain but they help to fuel most small animals that feed larger animals and in turn those large animals feed the whole human race. Granted not all things we eat use insects as a food source.

One project we were assigned this semester was to create an insect collection. We were instructed to collect insects throughout the semester. Our class went into the field a few of the days we met for laboratory. Later we would be pinning these insects and presenting them to our class.

My partner and I collected seventeen insects. We thought that we had nineteen but we later found out when trying to identify our specimens that two were not insects. We used insect books to identify our specimens. The insects we collected are:

· Orange Sulfur/Alfalfa Butterfly

· Western Conifer Seed Bug

· Blowfly

· Caddis fly

· Sand Hills Hornet

· Water Boatmen

· Nine Spotted Ladybug Beetle

· Jagged Ambush Bug

· Spur Throated Grasshopper

· Giant Resin Bee

· Honey Bee

· Black Cutworm Moth

· Dusky Clubtail

· Boxelder Bug

· Small Milkweed Bug

· American Dagger Moth

· House Fly

We organized our insects into orders. The orders that pertained to our insects were Odonata, Orthoptera, Hemiptera, Coleoptera, Diptera, Trichoptera, Lepidoptera, and Hymenoptera.

The order Odonata consists of dragonflies and damselflies, Orthoptera consists of grasshoppers, crickets, and Katydids. Hemiptera consists of true bugs, cicadas, and hoppers. Coleoptera consists of beetles. Diptera consists of flies and mosquitoes. Trichoptera consists of caddisflies. Lepidoptera consists of butterflies and moths. And last, Orthoptera consists of ants, bees, hornets, and wasps.

We also found natural history information on each insect and the common and scientific name. For some of the not so popular insects it was harder to find all of the scientific classification information (i.e. kingdom, phylum, class, order, and family.) I found it really interesting to see where the insects are native too. It’s amazing to see how far some of them have expanded!

Overall I learned a lot of new information about insects. I enjoyed collecting the insects more than pinning and identifying.

Picture:http://www.copyright-free-pictures.org.uk/insects/