'Bio Blitz' last weekend drew scientists, students to University of Michigan Biological Station

In Search of Invertebrates

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By Andrew Kimball
HARBOR LIGHT NEWSPAPER

Nestled in a tranquil wooded corner of Douglas Lake rests the near century-old University of Michigan Biological Station. With the appearance of a simple summer retreat, its rows of rustic tin-can shacks and unpainted cinder-block palaces could easily mask its function as a multifaceted academic mecca. Last week, however, the Biological Station's educational focus was obvious, ambitiously hosting northern Michigan's first "BioBlitz."

At its core, a BioBlitz-- short for Biological Blitz-- is an event that draws a diverse collection of scientists and students together to capture and catalogue as many organisms as physically possible within a set time frame. This year's event took place July 5-7.

"It's like a big sport to see how many species they can find," said Lisa Pappas, public relations coordinator at the Biological Station. "And what better place than this property that has been protected for 100 years."

Current knowledge of invertebrate species (species without backbones) in the local area, namely insects, is relatively poor. Scientists like Blitz director Brian Scholtens have a field day with the amount of invertebrate identification that occurs.

"I don't get to do intensive collecting efforts like this very often," he said, scribbling species names over a table of sundry, twitching winged insects. "This is a special opportunity for us."

Scholtens, who has done insect work in northern Michigan for 24 years, said that moths are the only group of invertebrates that we have a satisfactory (though still incomplete) species list for, and this is only because of certain passionate individuals who have been dedicated collectors in the area since the 1940s.

"We're nowhere close with beetles, flies, wasps, and bees," he said. "We really don't know what's up here."

While an updated species list is the primary product of the Blitz, the program also aims for something less tangible and more universal: education on all levels.

"There's a certain training and knowledge transfer that's going on here," said David Wagner, globally recognized caterpillar authority and University of Connecticut BioBlitz veteran. "It's professors with students. They can be post doctoral students; they can be graduate students; they can be undergraduates."

By offering free lectures, an all-day kids program and by bringing in Wagner, this BioBlitz was an earnest attempt to create an effective means of knowledge exchange for the community.

"By high school it's too late," said Wagner, commenting on how crucial the program is for children. "A scientist is made by the time they are twelve years old in terms of whether they're going to have that mindset and that connection."

And as endangered species and habitat encroachments represent an ever-present problem, educating youth seems to be all the more relevant, the professor said.

"Providing some overlap between the activities and the scientists in this younger crowd is a really productive tool," said Wagner. "Even if they turn out to be developers, an outdoor education can be really valuable in terms of how they view green space and how they plan their own development."

Though collection and classification can technically be done on a day-to-day basis in a setting like the U of M Biological Station, the time constraint component of a BioBlitz generates an excitement that attracts the public eye, according to Wagner.

"The time limit makes it interesting to the public," he said. "It adds drama. It makes you have a high probability of being on the evening news."

If this "drama" was the incentive to visit the Biological Station campus last weekend, it certainly eluded participants upon arrival. The campus was uncannily calm for the amount of work in progress. Though an occasional resident would pop out of his or her tin hut, participants were hard to come by as they were scattered about all corners of the 10,000 acre property.

This "kinder, gentler Blitz," as Wagner called it, was perhaps the product of its departure from the typical 24- hour time frame, allowing three full days of research as opposed to one.

"You just don't have enough time to do all the sorting and identification," he said of the University of Connecticut BioBlitz. "The moth people have to work all night long."

In the three days of collection, more than 1,500 species-a number rivaling other Blitzes-were identified in the area, several of them never before recorded.

"There was a lot of uncertainty and I fully expected that," said Scholtens. "Both Dave [Wagner] and I said these always are an exercise in organized chaos. And by the time you get to the end you wonder 'how did we do that?'"

This is part of the July 11, 2007 online edition of Harbor Light Newspaper.

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