"How many bugs can be found in each prairie plot and why?"

🪲 Background Information 🪲

The prairie we researched had eighteen plots, each plot having different types of plants that attracted a variety of insects. Plots 1, 7, & 13 are in the very back, while plots 10, 11, and 6 are in the front of the prairie. Our goal was to find, observe, and identify as many insects as possible. There were more insects identified in the back than in the front of the prairie, such as a true Cricket named Terrance (see pictures below).

During our trips to the prairie, we have found in our data is that the insect we frequently came upon was the grasshopper. There were Short-winged Meadow Katydids, Differential Grasshoppers, Green-striped Grasshoppers, and possibly more! According to the website Prairie Wetlands Learning Center Staff and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service., n.d., “Through their eating behaviors via the food chain, grasshoppers change the prairie landscape and contribute to the diversity of plants found here.” And it is said that in every prairie, there are about fifty different types of grasshoppers. That is because grasshoppers go through many parts of the prairie to lay eggs.

Evidence:

How Did We Find All These Insects?

The first thing our team did before going to the prairie was collecting materials. We brought a clipboard with the prairie plot map, a net, and a cup. Before going, we also made sure to have a page in the Notes app on our phones to keep track of the data. We also had the Seek app open to identify insects and plants. When we reach the prairie, we decide which plot to go to and go together. After we reach the plot, we split up and look for bugs individually and identify them on the Seek app. When a bug is found, we let each other know and add them to our notes as well as taking a picture of the plant the bug was on. We stay in each plot for about ten to fifteen minutes before moving on and repeating the process until the third day. After that, we compare notes and create one with all our data to look at and see the difference between the prairie plots.

We took the amount of insects we found in the plots we were able to research and put them in a bar graph which compares how many there were in each plot. The bar graph is shown below.

Reasoning

After about two days of going from plot to plot and searching for insects, it has come to the conclusion that more insects are found in the back side of the prairie. But why are there more bugs on the farther plots in the prairie? That is because there is a woody area nearby that insects may live in before traveling or moving to the prairie. The closest place for them to go is the closest plots to them (plots 1, 7, and 13). Another reason is the types of plants there. Some that seemed to attract many bugs including stink bugs, grasshoppers, goldenrod soldier beetles, and Leonard’s skipper butterflies are Little bluestem, Hyssopleaf Thoroughwort, Indiangrass, and Lemongrass which is actually common for those bugs to be found in according to Prairie Ecosystems Animals and Insects, n.d..

We came up with the question after going to the prairie the first time, because in each plot there were different types of plants or the same but different height. We thought about the insects as we came across multiple different bugs, and if they effected the plants in some way. Every insect has a preference as well, so they go where they think is most hospitable for them. In this experiment, we looked through each plot to see where those insects like to be and why they are there.

Discussion

Although we looked for as many insects we could find in as many plots as possible, we rarely went deeper in the plots to look for insects. The lack of time or crippling fear that a stink bug will get triggered caused us to not do as much research as we had hoped. It should also be mentioned that we used to have a different experimental question regarding the weather that was too difficult to do, so we decided to change our question to make things easier for us. Unfortunately, that has caused us to have only two days to do our research and we couldn’t cover as many plots as we hoped. During our two days, though, we have done everything we could to make our experiment and data as reliable and realistic as possible. Some other questions we have for this experiment is are there other plants that the bugs we found are attracted to? How many of those bugs are in the prairie? We were fascinated by our findings and are curious to see how many more insects and plants we can identify.