by John Pirrung [jap448]
Hello Readers,
Hoo boy, this week has easily been the busiest one yet. In addition to the usual work on the fact sheets and website, I was able to participate in an all-day staff meeting here at CCE on Monday and had a very productive day of field work on Thursday. The usual project work is going well, the webpages are all fleshed out and just need some rearrangement. We have four fact sheets that are just about ready to send out to newsletters once they’ve been reviewed and approved by the rest of the team. Overall the project outputs are steadily approaching their final states, and hopefully soon I can start crossing them off of my list for good.
The staff meeting on Monday had two parts; there was a regular check-in segment where all of the different departments gave updates on their work, and a segment about DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging). It was a great seminar that gave everyone a chance to talk about topics that we rarely get to discuss as coworkers, and the environment was super open and welcoming. I’m very glad to have attended the meeting, and it was certainly a nice break from the usual Monday work experience.
The field work on Thursday was a rollercoaster, so much so that I’m going to save part of it to blog about next week. The main event though was working on our Hypena moth biocontrol project. As mentioned last week, I’m working with a team to study the efficacy and feasibility of using Hypena opulenta as biological control agents against invasive European Swallow-wort. Last week we set up our tent plot, and this week we received the live moths and larvae that we needed. We went out and released them into our tent plot, and we plan to check in on the plot regularly to see how they’re doing against the swallow-wort. While we were at the site, we also collected quite a bit of vegetation survey data. We went around to ten sample plots that had been marked in previous years (although with each year they become harder to find) and surveyed the plants in each spot. We had to count the number of flowering and non-flowering swallow-worts, as well as their seedlings and any other plants in the plot. It was tedious work, but we managed to get it done with time to spare for our other events that afternoon, which included visiting two farms in the area. This was my longest work day yet, but it was also easily the most exciting and felt very productive. Next week I’ll talk about the work we did with the farms and I’ll share some photos, for now I’ll share pictures I took of our Hypena moths and caterpillars:
