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Aquatic insects provide a critical linkage between aquatic and terrestrial food webs. Despite spending most of their lives in aquatic habitats, most aquatic insects emerge as adults to reproduce. During this adult phase, many individuals are consumed by terrestrial predators including spiders, beetles, and birds. We're capturing emergent insects with two types of equipment: sticky traps and emergence traps.
Image from Smith et al. 2013
Sticky traps
These traps consist of a ~1.5m piece of steel conduit with velcro-mounted, tanglefoot-covered petri dishes arranged in four directions. Sticky traps are deployed along transects perpendicular to the stream to provide an idea of how emergent insects are distributed in the terrestrial landscape relative to the position of the stream. The four-directional dishes provide information as to which direction insects are coming from: the dish facing the stream should be mostly insects coming from the stream, the dish away from the stream shows insects traveling toward the stream, while the upstream/downstream facing dishes show movement along the stream in each corresponding direction.
Emergence traps
These traps are built from PVC pipe, fine mesh, and pool noodles. Placed directly on the surface of the water, emergence traps give us an idea of the amount of insects emerging from the water on a per-unit-area basis.
Image from Cadmus et al. 2016
If you find one of these traps out in the field, please leave them where you find them! If you have further questions about the traps, the study, or just streams/bugs in general, don't hesitate to reach out: christopherfrazier@unr.edu
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