Over the past few weeks, I have been almost exclusively working on a grasshopper survey in the Panoche Hills region of Northern California. I have developed a protocol that will hopefully be published by the end of the summer (along with a literature review of other recent grasshopper studies).
I spent a significant amount of time since my last blog post in the field at three different test sites. One is located in Little Panoche Valley, one is located on the Panoche Plateau, and one is in Silver Creek. Each test site represents a zone where leopard lizards have been found. I completed several zone sweeps and transects in order to collect grasshoppers, and identify them down to species.
The next phase of the protocol calls for a genetic comparison and analysis to assess where and why each different species is overlapping with the observed leopard lizard populations. This will answer questions about the genetic composition of the community, overall gene flow, and dietary preferences of the endangered lizard.
I visited UC Davis this past Friday to work on IDing the grasshoppers with the head curator of the insect collection there. It is quite an impressive collection. Over six MILLION specimens! If anyone reading is at all interested in bugs, it is worth a visit! I now possess a great key that will help me identify down to species for each grasshopper that I have collected (more than 200 so far). It’s somewhat difficult to do because grasshoppers vary greatly in coloration and markings within a species. For example, taking each specimen through a key requires that I look at wing venation, pronotum structure, reproductive structure, and many other morphological traits. I will get through them all eventually!
Over the next few weeks, I hope to begin the genetic component of the protocol as well as the literature review. I’m really enjoying this project, and can’t wait to see the end results.
Jen Michalski
Hollister Field Office
GPS coordinates of where I spotted a leopard lizard in the field one day!
Panoche Plateau test site