One of the things that I forget when getting ready for an expedition is how much I have learned about field research in the past and how much there is to learn if you are new to fieldwork. I'm not just speaking of learning field collection methods or processing insects in our field lab station. When you are going on your first expedition experience, you don't know what gear to bring. What will the weather be like? What shoes are best in the muggy Amazon rain forest? What socks should you bring? What will best carry it all from Kansas to Lima to the field station and back?

In June 2011, a team of eight University of Kansas students and two professors will participate in a unique interdisciplinary expedition to Peru. Unlike many Biodiversity Institute expeditions, this one brings together people from several backgrounds, among them entomology, ecology, English language history, journalism, graphic novels, and art. Join the group through this website as they learn field methods, experience the varied cultural landscape of Peru, and explore the Amazon rain forest at the Los Amigos Biological Research Station.

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We were excited to participate in these regional meetings, which conveniently took place right here in Lawrence, KS, on May 16 2011.

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Caroline Chaboo organized a workshop to train participants in developing online identification species keys using the software, LUCID (Lucid.com).

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My alarm clock sounded at 5 am. It was still dark, rainy and cold. After two days of extreme cold, we were not looking forward to the day ahead, especially to the 4-hour boat travel back to Laberinto as the start of a two-day journey back home. The station cooks kindly prepared breakfast for us, and then we formed a fire line to load gear onto the boat. Fortunately, we were leaving with less than we brought here as we stored two action-packs of field gear at the station for our next visit.

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While Diana and Malena headed out on another night walk, Dan, Choru and I set up the mercury vapor light trap again in front of my cabin. As we tied the white sheets, and turned on the light, the wind was picking up speed. We had been warned that a “friaje”, a cold polar wind coming up from Patagonia, was heading our way. Despite the wind, the number of insects coming to our sheet was low, the diversity was still good, with some unusual specimens we had not sampled before.

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Our days have developed into a pattern of servicing the traps in the mornings: picking up all the arthropods collected by the traps, returning to the lab and processing the specimens (cleaning, sorting, labeling), then each person going off in a different direction to use specialist techniques to collect their favorite group.  I spend the afternoons surveying palms, heliconias and bamboos for their particular fauna of chrysomelid beetles.

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Today is a big day: reviewing the available established plant plots in the area, relocating their markers (boundaries of edges and internal sub-quadrats), selecting a plot we will follow in the next few years, and setting up several kinds of traps to capture insects.  One of the reasons arthropods are so diverse is because they divide any habitat into 1000s of microhabitats, with many insects specializing on particular aspects – flower feeders, seed drillers, stem and leaf miners, soil arthropods, root feeders, parasites, parasitoids, predators….an insect specialist must h

post by Malena Vilchez, of the Peru research team