About a week ago, I was getting ready to start the day on an ongoing research project, and temperature and relative humidity are required to be taken and recorded at the start. It takes a few minutes …
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About a week ago, I was getting ready to start the day on an ongoing research project, and temperature and relative humidity are required to be taken and recorded at the start. It takes a few minutes for the instrument to stabilize in order to record accurate values, and after setting the instrument in the shade, I looked around and found a small milkweed patch and decided to see how many critters I could find in the short time I had to wait for the instrument to stabilize.
Right at the start, I found a garden spider, a bumblebee and what looked to be a least skipper butterfly. Intermixed with the milkweed was other plants and wildflowers, which attracted a variety of insects. As the milkweed patch was in a meadow habitat, there were also some grasshoppers and meadow katydids present. It took less than five minutes to observe a dozen insect species.
There were many milkweed-dependent species as well, including monarch caterpillars. These are the ones I included as pictures for this week’s column.
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