Completing Caterpillar Collections

All caterpillars are now obtained, photographed and safely stored away in controlled temperature rooms in individual containers. They are photographed, as below to enable me to establish at which stage of development (instar) the caterpillars were at when collected. As caterpillars grow and shed their skin, their heads grow and by measuring the widths of their heads, I can tell whether they are first (0.3mm), second (0.6mm), third (0.9mm), 4th (1.25mm) or fifth instar (1.5mm).



The forest remnant that I was working on yesterday was undulating and rather unstable underfoot. We managed to do well getting the samples down from a steep slope, over a river bed, through brambles but as we scrambled up the last slippy valley side I lost my footing and thumped to the ground landing on a number of the Petri-dishes containing the caterpillars. Not ideal. Luckily no caterpillars were harmed although they did proceeded to loop out from their labelled containers, march out of my collecting belt and get completely mixed up whilst crawling round my top. We managed to catch some of them yet unfortunately I could not tell which caterpillars came from which plants. Still, I should be able to analyse parasitism rates for the site still. Not all bad news.

Anyway, to celebrate finishing the second stage of my fieldwork we decided to go and see some of the other wildlife in the area, the enigmatic Hectors dolphins. Apparently they are the world’s smallest, rarest marine dolphins and in going swimming with them I got to fulfil a childhood dream and contribute funds towards ensuring their survival.