Friday, July 3, 2015

Third Session Begins as the Fourth of July Approaches

By: Johnica Morrow

As Independence Day approaches, the station has been a flurry of activity. This week has seen the excitement of students enduring the beginnings of third session and the influx of people coming to the area to celebrate the Fourth here at Lake McConaughy and Lake Ogallala. With the celebration right around the corner, the station is abuzz with excitement!

Students have been enjoying the nice weather as they collect specimens for their classes. For Dr. Bill Glider's LIFE 121 (Fundamentals of Biology II) course, students have been running around with insect nets hoping to back wasps and dragonflies to add to their collections. When the running gets exhausting, they have been able to pluck plants for pressing before curating them for their plant collections. Luckily, these organisms don't often escape during collecting! These students have been making good use of the station's resident herbarium and entomological collections to assist them with identifying the local flora and fauna.

Simultaneously, Dr. Devin Nickol's BIOS 452 (Field Epidemiology) course has kept students busy studying the core concepts of disease transmission. This class has taken field trips to classic collecting spots like Beckius Pond and Arapahoe Prairie to pick up things like grasshoppers, damselflies, amphipods, predacious diving beetles, and, most recently, toads. These organisms, and often their parasites, are then used as model systems to demonstrate epidemiological concepts, such as mortality rates and disease prevalence within populations.

The holiday weekend also has some of our resident interns busy with surveying people about invasive and endangered species. Our invasive species interns, Ty Trump and Ashlee Wright, hang out at docks around Lake McConaughy offering courtesy boat inspections to prevent the transmission of the dreaded zebra mussels that can devastate naive aquatic ecosystems.

Our plover interns, Peyton Burt and Jessica Tramp, are prepared to ask hundreds of people questions about the endangered birds that are nesting on the shores of Lake McConaughy during this busy weekend. With the excess of rain this year, the lake is almost at 100%, which is great except that much of the beach has disappeared. This leaves people to be more concentrated on the beach than in previous years, and makes our interns' jobs of monitoring the nesting sites of these birds all the more important.

Adult incubating eggs

People who willingly take surveys from any of these interns are rewarded for their time with free koozies to keep their water and sodas cool in the hot July sun during their days at the beach. These surveys are important for monitoring the wildlife around the lake and for preserving the natural history of the organisms that call Lake McConaughy home...even if only for part of the year.

So, if you find yourself out at Lake McConaughy celebrating this country's independence with your friends and family, please be sure to get your boat checked out for unwanted hitchhikers and to share the sand with the endangered birds that have a summer home here!

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