Onto lab work

I've finished the mark-and-recapture part of my project. I'll still go out to the field once a week or so to census. I'll post a pretty graph once I've crunched my numbers.

So it's back to the lab for me. I thought I'd post some pictures of what's going on right now. I am busy building up my lab colony, which means I open up a fly's abdomen and expose her larvae (sort of like a c-section, but the mother doesn't exactly recover to dote on her new babies...). I pick up a couple of larvae on a pin (they're really small, I'll have to post pictures of that next) and wipe them onto a cricket. I call this part of my job "doing evil". 

Anyway, I make a nice home for the cricket while the larvae consume it. Here's some cricket homes:

When the pupae emerge from the cricket, it's a little grub that can squish itself around for an hour or so before they molt and their outer layer becomes their chrysalis (just like in butterflies). Here's a newly emerged grub (the one in the center) that I caught squishing around the container, and its older sibling to our right, all molted and ready to transform:

Here's a top view of a cricket house with a dead cricket and a couple of pupae just behind it. The other brown bits to our right are cat food pieces.

Here's a closeup of a cricket house.  You can see the dead cricket (boo hoo), a hunk of egg carton (for the cricket), a piece of catfood, a glass water tube and 2 pupae. One of the pupae is in the water tube (on the cotton ball). It must have been thirsty when it emerged. I find them in the water tube a lot. 

And finally, here's a couple of pupae in my hand, so you can tell how big the are. They are very fragile- they're super easy to pop, with just a little too much pressure, so I pick them up with a crumpled up piece of tissue paper. They're that fragile.

So that's it for now. It's this colony that I'll use to pursue my next project- the effect of experience on host choice...

more to come...