Collecting Carabidae (ground beetles)

J. B. S. Haldane, on being asked by theologians if there were anything that could be concluded about the Creator from the study of creation, is reputed to have said “The Creator, if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

This remark came to me from Jack Longino, one of Evergreen’s faculty in biology, who has agreed to help us begin our studies of nature much as Darwin did, by collecting beetles.

Those in “Discovering Darwin” will trap and collect ground beetles, carabidae, on the Evergreen campus. This will involve setting pitfall traps in various locations, tending the traps several times a week to retrieve or release what is caught, then freezing the collectables for identification and mounting. Jack is willing to spend time with us initially, but we’ll be largely on our own once we get under way.

Some years ago, Jack’s students put together a web site that we will use for identification:

Please have a look at this site for orientation.  We will be using it extensively to identify what we collect (or to build a case that one of you has found a new species).

On Thursday of Week 1, April 3,  we will have an orientation session in the morning (10 am), during which Jack will show us how to set traps and what kinds of records we should keep.  On Thursday morning of week 2, we will meet in one of the labs to begin our work on identification.  After that, we will have three or four further ID sessions before the end of the quarter.
 
If we do good work, we might add useful specimens to Evergreen's collections, and we should come up with a profile of what Evergreen's caribidae are up to this spring.