Do you have Museum Malaise?

You better not! However, just in case you do I have a line of curative agents perfect for any and all afflicted with such exhibit ennui. The elixirs I speak of are our new L.A. nature exhibits, Nature Lab and Nature Gardens, and they're about to open on June 9!

I've written loads of posts about both exhibits, so I thought it might be interesting to have a guest writer this week (I swear it's not because I'm too busy)! Dean Pentcheff from our Research and Collections staff is going to answer the question that everyone will be asking when the Nature Gardens open, who's camping in that tent out there?

"Peek between the bushes in the Nature Garden and you’ll see what looks like someone’s overnight camping spot. We do host overnight sleepovers at NHM but we don’t do it in the garden (at least not yet). What’s going on here?

Photo by Phyllis Sun

 

The “tent,” as it turns out, is actually an insect trap. It is no coincidence that it looks like a tent. Its inventor, René Malaise, was inspired by watching insects in his own tent while he was on tropical collecting trips. Insects bumping into an obstruction, like a tent wall (or the vertical mesh of the Malaise trap), tend to fly up to escape. The conical top deflects them up further to the topmost part of the cone. There, our arthropod guests find a hole to a plastic jar full of ethanol — their last drink, and a preservative that lets us keep them for the Museum’s collection in good physical condition and with their DNA available for genetic research.

Why such an elaborate insect trap in the Nature Gardens? This trap is one of about thirty that we’re setting up between downtown L.A. and the Griffith Park area as part of our BioSCAN project (BioSCAN stands for Biodiversity Science: City and Nature). Our goals are to develop a good inventory of L.A. insect diversity and to see how insect diversity differs between inner urban areas and outer less-urbanized areas. That’s the reason for the mini-weather station next to every trap. Measuring physical parameters like temperature, humidity, soil temperature, and moistness will help us develop explanations for the diversity differences we will see.

Dean explaining BioSCAN

 

The beauty of the Malaise trap, as René Malaise put it in his original publication, is that they can “… catch all the time, by night as well as by day, and never be forced to quit catching when it was best because dinner-time was at hand.” That also means that we’ll have thousands of samples to sort. You can come watch us do it (and volunteer to help, if you want) in the Nature Lab when that opens in June."

Thanks Dean

So if you're interested in finding out what a robber fly really looks like, and how many of them we've caught in our Malaise trap, stop by the Museum on or after June 9 and ask us...you never know Dean might actually be the scientist you get to talk too.

p.s. he's awesome!