Sanibonani! It's been an eventful week here at the SRC! There have been arrivals, departures, and adventures. Sifiso and Mnqobi, two graduate students from UNISWA, arrived to do their fieldwork (on birds and rodents, respectively), and Phumlile, the SRC Research Coordinator, got back from her break. Professor Magagula left to get ready for the start of the semester at UNISWA, but Daisy stayed with us until Friday, which was super helpful. She got really good at spotting and collecting coreids! She's all set to continue the project later this year after we've left, and she helped us a lot with getting specimens during her training. We also got help from Abbi, a recent high-school graduate who came to spend a week at the SRC, volunteering with Sifiso and Mnqobi. She's currently in the process of selecting and applying to universities for college, and we're working on convincing her to study Entomology. She's certainly got the eye already; in one afternoon, she found us two coreid species we didn't have yet! Collecting has been a bit hit and miss this week around the reserve. On one afternoon, we found two different species in half an hour; while we got nothing for four hours the next morning. These bugs sure know how to pose a challenge! Talk about mad hide-and-seek skills... It makes victory that much sweeter when we do find them though. We now have specimens from approximately 20-25 species! Thankfully, we got some rain in the area; which has definitely helped in terms of collecting. Some of the plants are flowering now, happy with the extra water, and that seems to be luring more bugs out. Aside from intense collecting in the reserve, Phumlile accompanied us to the Royal Swaziland Sugarcane Corporation headquarters in Simunye last Wednesday to ask for permission to collect bugs in the sugarcane fields. We were a little nervous. Asking for permission to collect on private or, in this case, the King's land can be complicated. People and governments can be very protective of their property and economic produce. At the very least, they want to understand what you're doing, why you're doing it, and whether your actions will damage their property, crops, and ultimately, their economy. In a foreign country, it's always a little extra stressful because you don't always know what cultural differences you might run into, in this regard as well as others. Thankfully, it all went smoothly thanks to Phumlile's help and existing cooperation between the RSSC and University of Florida researchers. We promptly got permission to do our fieldwork in the sugarcane fields, provided we report back at the end and let them know what we found. Today, we went collecting there for the first time and found a global pest coreid, Leptoglossus gonagra, and one other species, Prismatocerus sp., on Acacia plants. We'll be going again tomorrow, hoping for more! In other news, Michael has learned how to drive a manual! Today he successfully drove us from the Royal Swaziland Sugarcane Corporation fields back to the SRC, on the left side of the road! In fact, another concern when traveling to foreign countries can be that automatic vehicles are rather rare in many places. It's even more complicated when you have to drive on the left side of the road, with the steering wheel on the right side of the vehicle. Thankfully, we coordinated with All Out Africa and the SRC before our arrival for assistance with transportation, since automatics are not common in Swaziland (luckily for us, they are a bit more common in South Africa). It was quite an adventure riding in the back of the truck while Michael learned, driving around the reserve to our various sites. Daisy, Abbi, and I got very well acquainted with a few branches and learned the "bumpy road dance," but it was a success and worth it! Michael says "my bad, at least everyone stayed in. Mduduzi said not to worry about those in the back, focus on the front.” Mdu was somewhat right. Twice, we almost ran into a giraffe hanging-out in the middle of the road that wouldn't let us pass! And one of them wasn't even visible to Michael until he made a tight turn onto a side road; thankfully, we saw it from the top of the truck and warned him. (Sorry, the internet is extra slow today, more pictures next time!) The bug hunt continues! We've got high hopes for our last week at Mbuluzi before we make our trek to South Africa for three weeks.
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Sanibonani! (Hello all!) We made it to the Savannah Research Center (SRC) safe and sound and are having a great start of the field season here! We've been seeing lots of cool animals, big and small. On our first afternoon, we got to go check out the neighboring Mlawula Reserve for some wildlife viewing, and we've continued to see amazing creatures since. Besides lots of cool insects (including giant, colorful grasshoppers and beautiful, iridescent beetles), we've been lucky enough to spot: impalas, nyalas, kudus, zebras, waterbucks, giraffes, wildebeasts, monkeys, and warthogs! We've been going out to collect insects everyday, and although some days start off veeeery slow (one bug in three hours!), at some point we always seem to stumble upon a "bonanza patch" of habitat that is so full of bugs we can barely keep up and catch them all. We've actually run out of vials a few times and have had to come back to camp to process bugs in order to free up vials! We've also continued to use our high-tech observation chamber to record some interesting fighting and mating behaviors in different species, given these bugs are very flighty in the wild (videos coming soon). On Friday afternoon, Professor Cebisile Magagula and her student Daisy came to join us, to learn about our bugs and help us collect. Prof. Magagula stayed all weekend, and Daisy will be with us until the end of the week, honing her coreid-collecting and behavioral observation skills so that she can continue the project after we leave, as part of her undergraduate project work. We somehow also ended up recruiting an impromptu field team. Martin, a mammalian researcher from the Netherlands vacationing at the SRC, got interested in our fieldwork and decided to tag along and help us collect. Mduduzi, one of the SRC staff members, got excited about collecting bugs too and has also been joining us; he was a very quick learner and has been spotting new bugs left, right, and center! It's a great group that ended up forming, and it has been a great opportunity to network with others from different backgrounds. We've all been having so much fun and making so much progress! We all went to the Shewula Community Gardens on Sunday and Monday, and it turned out to be a jackpot. Leaf-footed bugs tend to flourish in agricultural environments (many of them are crop pests, in fact), and we found several species at these gardens. With the help of the team, we had a giant pile of vials full of insects in no time, which caused us to return to the camp within 30 minutes of starting! We now have specimens from at least 13 species, including one in the tribe Phyllomorphini, which is super cool! Not only were those guys on our high-priority list because we had no representatives of the tribe and needed some for the molecular phylogenetic work, but they also look crazy-cool and have really interesting behaviors, such as paternal care with eggs laid on the male’s back. We also collected a specimen of Petascelis remipes. It was huuuuge! Check out those crazy hind-legs! Hopefully we can find more soon and record some of their fighting behavior, but like most things here in the reserve, bugs are sparsely scattered across 1600+ hectares. Above: Daisy with the Petascelis
Hi Everybody! Finally, we are able to get enough bandwidth to edit the blog! We’ve had a pretty great first few days here in Africa! We left Gainesville last Thursday night, and after a very long trip (that included an extended layover in Toronto due to a whiteout), we arrived in Johannesburg on Sunday morning to beautiful, blue skies and hot, summer temperatures. Our driver from All Out Africa, Kwanele, picked us up at the airport and took us to a gorgeous little hotel, the Safari Club. We decided to have a “rest” day to catch-up on much-needed sleep and plan the rest of our trip, but after lunch, we went on a little walk around the hotel garden and found coreids (leaf-footed bugs, the ones we came to study)!!! Needless to say, we spent the rest of the day running around the garden chasing bugs. The owners thought we were a little crazy, but they were happy to let us collect them for our research. We captured 27 of them. They all belong to the tribe Mictini and seem to be of the same species (except perhaps one specimen that has slightly different coloration). We also found them on four different plants, of which we observed them feeding on two! We put together a little behavioral observation apparatus (very fancy, as you can see below), and we managed to get some video of slight male aggression (coming soon). Look at those chunky hind-femur weapons! We also observed them feeding on yet another species of plant that we put in there. After a very successful first day and much needed night of rest, Kwanele picked us up on Monday morning and brought us to Ezulwini, in the Kingdom of Swaziland. The drive was four hours long, but well worth it. Ezulwini is beautiful! It’s green and lush, with mountains on the horizon, and the weather is warm and humid. We’re staying at a pretty little backpacker lodge called Lidwala. We spent the rest of our first day in Swaziland getting settled-in and buying supplies. The next day, we went to the University of Swaziland (UNISWA) to meet our collaborator, Prof. Cebisile Magagula. She was very welcoming, helpful, and excited about collaborating on this new project. She normally works with beetles (order Coleoptera) and ants (order Hymenoptera), but she’s looking forward to learning and working with another order of insects. She was also very happy to show us her collection of the order Hemiptera (which includes the coreids) and get some help from Michael in identifying a few tricky specimens. There were so many cool bugs in there, and we are extra excited now to go find them in the wild! Yesterday, we went hiking and collecting on a trail by the lodge: Sheba’s Breast Hiking Trail. We didn’t find as many coreids as we had hoped for, but the trail was gorgeous and we did find a few specimens of our outgroup taxa (groups closely related to our bugs and useful for our project). We also saw some other cool critters! A baby mantis, some monkeys, a very loud cicada (that Michael couldn’t resist agitating), and an adorably grumpy-looking spider (Michael begs to differ on the point of its cuteness). Today, the adventure continues as we move on to the Savannah Research Center, at the Mbuluzi Game Reserve on the eastern side of Swaziland. |
AuthorsMichael Forthman is an insect systematist and a Postdoctoral Associate working with Dr. Christine Miller in the Entomology and Nematology Department at the University of Florida. Archives |