Posted by Arianne:
This field season was a wild ride – through rainstorms, sharing Mongolian yurts, seeing the sun come up while finishing experiments, and breaking through language barriers – Team Grasshopper 2009 will remain good friends for years to come.
Team Grasshopper 2009: Fan Zhantou, Colleen, Kong Yuan, Shuguang, Arianne, and Jin Feng
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Posted by Arianne:
Jim with gigapan near BEF plots
Jim and the other PI’s from the NSF China grasslands BES-ES project arrived at the height of the grass production and at the very end of my stay at IMGERS. We toured the field sites, Jim took some cool photos using the gigapan, several meetings took place at the station, good food was had, and basketball matches were played. With Jingle and me against Chris and Jim, it turned into a mentor-mentee match-up — which, I’m proud to say, Jingle and I won by a slim margin each time (Jingle’s got quite the shot). Until next time at IMGERS…
With help from Jim and Team Grasshopper, I packed up 3-months worth of field equipment, hoppers, and grass in roughly 4 hours. It was just in time for me to join Jim and others for a conference on grassland ecology in Beijing in honor of IMGERS’ 30th anniversary.
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Posted by Arianne:
It was clear that focusing too heavily on just one element of the food chain was unacceptable and we took the opportunity to collect as many spiders as possible (okay, there was a tinge of revenge in there) and the grass from the cages (we will investigate the effects of N-fertilization and grasshopper density on plant species composition and stoichiometry). IMGERS is under the Institute of Botany and there was a wealth of information and expertise which made this expansion of the experiment possible.
I then focused my energy on building up all of the side projects that had been squeezed in along the way. Colleen helped me jump two more sets of hoppers (early- and mid-adult) = 300 grasshoppers and ~60,000 jumps. I then set out to demonstrate the pattern of high O. asiaticus numbers in heavily grazed pastures and to test a few hypotheses for why this may be the case.
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We returned from our 4-day journey to Beijing to find, not beautiful cages filled with happy hoppers, but cages with small holes (the wind had finally taken its toll) and very happy, fat spiders (spiders love to munch on hoppers). A rescue mission was immediately sent out and we were able to salvage ~15 adults for each of the six treatment groups. We brought them into lab cages, determined to finish the experiment. The next morning, I went to check on my hoppers and discovered that two of the six cages had been constructed with materials toxic to insects and the two most important treatment groups had withered to piles of writhing helpless hoppers.
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Posted by Arianne:
Basing my dissertation work in China has had many perks, but one I did not necessarily expect was the opportunity to meet so many interesting people from around the world.
In late July, grasshopper ecologist Tony Joern and grasshopper/insect ecophysiologist Spencer Behmer made their first visit to China. Dr. Kang was a postdoc in Tony’s lab in Nebraska — I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the degrees of separation are down to 2 in academia. Colleen and I had the opportunity to join them in Beijing for a few days while members from Dr. Kang’s group showed us the wonders of the Forbidden City and The Great Wall. The sites were fantastic to see again, but being the grasshopper geek that I’m becoming, I’ll admit that the most exciting part was hearing about their research and getting to ask questions first-hand.
Wu Rei (a Kang PhD student and fantastic guide), Tony, Spence, Colleen, and Arianne on the infamous wall near Badaling
(a little help for the students) From the Taoist White Cloud Temple: “…They are protectors of scholars and students, and are able to bestow intelligence on people, and provide assistance to pass examinations and tests…”
Kuixing: rub the belly for good luck on exams!
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In early July, Jon Harrison — an insect physiologist and my other co-advisor — visited China and IMGERS for the first time. We had a great day and a half introducing him to the field site, hashing out ideas, and coming up with solutions to make all four flight mills work simultaneously! Unfortunately, his son got sick and didn’t have so pleasant an experience resulting in an early return to the U.S. Luckily, he’s doing well now. We hope to see Jon at IMGERS again next year!
Shuguang and Jon in front of the N-fertilized plots
Mike Harrison and Arianne waiting in the Xilinhot hospital
Before we could get Mike anti-nausea meds, all Americans had to get their temperature taken. Luckily, we were all a balmy ~37C and below the quarantine cutoff of 37.8C. I’m pointing to the thermometer – a contrast to the temperature guns they were using on planes.
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Posted by Arianne:
Since I had limited internet and no blog access this summer, I’ve decided to post a “China recap” series illustrating some of the highlights from our summer at the field station in NE China. Photos to come soon!
At the end of May, I met Shuguang and the two undergrads who would be working with us for the summer (Kong Yuan and Fan Zhantou) in Beijing. We piled our gear into Shuguang’s jeep and drove about 9 hrs northwest to IMGERS (Inner Mongolia Grasslands Ecological Research Station). Jin Feng (the best grasshopper wrangler I’ve met) was there waiting. She lives in the nearby Village 12 and works with Team Grasshopper during the summers. During the next two weeks, Team Grasshopper put up field cages for my main experiment (investigating the effects of density and N-fertilization on migratory polyphenism in Oedaleus asiaticus), collected O. asiaticus to rear in cages on the BEF-ES plots (investigating the effects of plant functional group richness on grasshopper growth performance), and prepared the lab for upcoming experiments.
In mid-June, Colleen, an undergraduate supported in part by the ASU Parents’ Association, arrived to complete “Team Grasshopper.” We worked out the logistics for her project (investigating feeding preferences of O. a.) This was followed by a four-day frenzy where we sought to answer the question of whether green and black morphs of O.a. had similar preferences for the six most common plants and whether N-fertilization altered those preferences. It’s looking like N-fertilization had a strong effect, but we’re still sorting through the data.
On the BEF-ES plots, we surveyed the ambient grasshopper populations (via sweep nets) and collected grasshoppers from the cages for further analyses in Beijing and Arizona.
On the N-fertilized plots, the grasshoppers were growing along smoothly. Through cage surveys, we determine that density is influencing color — meaning that color is a plastic trait!
We did a few mark/recapture experiments using fluorescent powder and tracking the hoppers down at dark with a UV light. It looks like the black may disperse further than the green. This draws a crowd.
We looked at jump performance in 5th instar black and green O. a. We are finding that black grasshoppers are consistently heavier than green grasshoppers. Data I collected last summer suggests that this can be explained largely by an increased hind leg mass. These differing morphologies could translate into different locomotary capacities. This draws the largest stream of visitors asking what I’m doing chasing a hopper barefoot around the entryway to the office building (one of the few places big enough to put the jumping grid), all the while spouting bingo combinations (“A14”, etc) into a tape recorder.
Stoichiometry, Fairly Unbalanced 