Outings
June 3-5, 2019
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Mike Ferro and Mike Caterino met Mike Ulyshen (US Forest Service, Athens), Joe McHugh (UGA) and Clayton Traylor (UGA grad student) in the Smokies to help Clayton hunt for some rare fungus beetles (potentially limited to old-growth forest), including the zopherid Phellopsis obcordata and the erotylids Megalodacne heros and M. fasciata. Walking about 30 miles in three days, we eventually turned up several localities for two of the three species. Phellopsis turned out to be reasonably common at higher elevations, mainly on a single hard type of shelf fungus (possibly Fomitopsis ochracea), while M. heros was abundant a bit lower, especially on Ganoderma tsugae. These data will feed into Clayton's PhD project, characterizing the preferred habitat and management for these beetles, their hosts, and associated communities.
Mike F., looking diligently for zopherids, below
Megalodacne heros, on Ganoderma tsugae, below
Phellopsis obcordata, below
Summer 2018
High Appalachia
Several trips during the summer of 2018 focused on sampling the leaf litter of the highest elevations of southern Appalachia. This included trips to Mt. Mitchell (the highest point in the eastern United States), the Great Smoky Mountains, the Grayson Highlands of southwestern Virginia, and the Roan Highlands, among others. These areas host a very distinctive biota, associated with the restricted spruce-fir forest of these high peaks, and sampling their leaf litter yielded enormous numbers of wonderful little arthropods!
July 13-29, 2015
Highlands Biological Station
To complete some intensive litter sampling for our southern Appalachia survey I (Shelley) was stationed at Highlands Biological Station for two weeks in July. Highlands was a fantastic base for getting to important field sites in North Carolina. I was even treated to my own lab space, this made for efficient running of Berlese funnels and sorting. A total of 33 litter samples were collected. This work is going towards projects comparing old growth and secondary forest beetle distributions. The old growth forests visited included: the Santeetlah Creek area of Joyce Kilmer Memorial forest, and the Hickory Branch Trail, a remote trail temporarily protected as “Large Patch Old-Growth” by Nantahala National Forest. Select trees previously cut down form this forest were found to be over 200 years old. Impressively large hickory trees are still abundant, although patches of dying hemlocks damaged the forests pristine environment. Secondary forest sites included the recently logged forest surrounding Courthouse Falls in Pisgah National Forest and Jones Knob located conveniently close to Highlands.
Highlands Biological Station provided a fantastic lab space for processing litter samples.
Coral fungi located amongst pristine litter at Joyce Kilmer Memorial forest.
An arrowhead spider (Micrathena sagittata) was saved from the sifter at Ellicott Rock Wilderness.
Lichen grasshoppers camouflaged nicely against the rocky bald at Jones Knob.
The view from Jones Knob was also impressive.
Many summer courses were taking place at Highlands during my stay. Students of the Applied Landscape Conservation of Amphibians course informed me that Looking Glass Falls was the place to find hellbender salamanders, I couldn’t resist stopping for a look as I drove past. However, all I found was people.
July -12, 2015
Back to Baruch
After an amazingly productive first trip, Anthony and Mike took a few days to return to the Hobcaw Barony to see how collecting compared during the height of summer. After a couple days and nights at Hobcaw, we visited Clemson's Pee-Dee Research and Education Center for an evening. JC Chong showed us around a surprisingly interesting place. Although it's primarily an ag field station, there are quite a few nice pieces of natural forest, including some fantastic swamp. In general, collecting during the day in July on the coastal plain is almost unbearable, but the nights were pretty exciting.
Here's a typical evening, lots of small beetles with relatively few interlopers.
Here's a poor picture of a callirhipid beetle, Zenoa picea, which was a first for either of us. It turned out to be relatively common, with a few showing up each night.
At Pee-Dee we had a chance to look at cultivated tobacco for Epitrix hirtipennis, the tobacco flea beetle (see a picture on BugGuide). Sadly for us, this tobacco was pristine, with nary a nibble.
May 12-16, 2015
Baruch Institute/Hobcaw Barony
Shelley, Anthony, and Mike spent 5 beetleful days working hard at Clemson's Baruch Institute near Georgetown. The collecting was amazing, and the habitats were fascinating (longleaf pine forest and cypress swamp, in addition to various fresh and brackish marshes.) I've written a somewhat extensive account on the Southeastern Beetles Blog, so will just link to that here. But here's a sampler of some of the catch mounted up so far.
A late update to this post, after finally getting all this trip's material sorted and mounted, we totaled up 785 beetle species for the trip! We can't tell you what they all are yet, but we're working on it.
May 4, 2015
Ellicott Rock Wilderness
We got the whole lab out for a great day of litter sifting, vegetation sweeping and bark peeling, exploring a couple different drainages in the Ellicott Rock Wilderness. Starting from the Walhalla Fish Hatchery, we bushwhacked north a little ways up Indian Camp Branch Creek, trying to get into some of the older growth forest in the area. After lunch we returned to the starting point and hiked west along the East Fork of the Chattooga, eventually making it to the confluence with the main branch of the Chattooga. A beautiful area and perfect day. A couple of the most notable finds were Ischalia and Cephaloon. The six big bags of litter no doubt hold more surprises.
April 28, 2015
Coastal expedition impending
The Caterino Lab is headed to the Baruch Institute in coastal South Carolina for 5 days of intensive inventory with an elite group of Clemson entomologists. Read more on the CUAC site.
January 16, 2015
Litter beetles beware!
At long last our litter survey work in the southern Appalachians has begun. Shelley and I (and Steve, Katie and Peter) got out this morning for some cool weather sifting. We went to one of SC-DNR's Heritage Preserves, Buzzards Roost, and found deep, rich litter-a-plenty. We didn't collect more than we could process in an afternoon, since we are all off on various other forays over the weekend. But a decent variety of beetles (and a ridiculous number of mites) were present in the samples. Looking forward to many more outings and many more beetle-rich samples!
December 7-9, 2014
Visiting the FSCA
Upon writing to Paul Skelley and being told that there were 'drawers of unsorted flea beetles' in the Florida State Arthropod Collection, Anthony decided that we probably needed to visit to sort out all the Epitrix. Not having visited Gainesville previously, I (Mike) readily agreed.
It was a good opportunity to escape the encroaching 'winter' in South Carolina, and explore some coastal plain areas in the process. On the drive down we made a stop in some pine forest in central Georgia, and found it quite similar to areas close to Clemson. So we kept on and got to some nice pine/palmetto forest in northern Florida with just enough daylight left to find beetles.
One of the very first things we found was this attractive tortoise beetle Hemisphaerota cyanea.
The next day we got to work early.
We found the collection replete with both flea beetles and histerids (loved the colorful aisle markers).
I spent a little diplomacy time visiting UF and Jiri Hulcr and Marc Branham's labs while Anthony remained diligently sorting.
No visit to UF would be complete without a Gator sighting, and sure enough, the Paynes Prairie Preserve did not disappoint.
November 28, 2014
A post-Thanksgiving hike
After stuffing ourselves on Turkey day, several lab members needed to get some fresh air and burn some calories, so we headed up to Keeowee-Toxaway State Natural Area to see what was out.
The first thing that greeted us was this beautiful buckmoth (Hemileuca maia).
Below, Shelley and Anthony look closely for any signs of beetle life. Little but larvae at this time of year.
October 27, 2014
Visting UGA
The lab took a day trip to visit the University of Georgia Arthropod Collection. In addition to having a nice time visiting with Director Joe McHugh, Collection Manager Rick Hoebeke, and graduate student Tommy McElrath, we managed to stop and collect a few Epitrix along the way (including one of Anthony's new species!)
