Welcome back to another week of field research! This week, the Conservation Biocontrol team headed out to Oko Farms in Williamsburg to collect insects. Here I managed to capture a beautiful photo of the Manhattan skyline from the farm, which paired with the incredible greenery and crop beds of Oko, emphasized to me how amazing and important urban community farms in NYC.

While in Oko, we familiarized ourselves with the crops growing at the farm. Oko has a mixture of raised bed crop growing as well as hydroponic beds. These were completely new to me and I was really excited to learn about how they benefit the plants growing in them. Due to the nature of our traps, however, we had to set them up in the raised plant beds on the ground. We chose a bed of brassicas close to the beneficial insect habitat at Oko and then a bed of cotton and peanuts. These plants were completely new to me, and I was really interested to see what types of insects we would collect from this bed on Thursday.

Once traps were set up, we went on to scout in the plant beds and around the farm. We saw a lot of hoverflies landing on the dill plants interspersed in the brassica beds. This is a good sign as hoverfly larvae are one of the beneficial predators we are hoping to see on plants! Also in the dill we found a beautiful swallowtail butterfly caterpillar. After scouting and setting traps, we went to see the hydroponics beds and found them bustling with insect life! There were countless midges, small flies, large flies, and ladybeetles in the plants and the air around it. The ladybeetle species were varied, but we were lucky enough to find a “twice-stabbed” beetle in the bed. We also found a large, green fly that we had trouble identifying at the time. Keep an eye out as these two insects will be featured in “Insects of NYC”!

We returned Thursday to find the traps full of insects, both expected and the unexpected variety! Of course, we counted plenty of aphids, tiny wasps, and flies. Maya and I were both shocked when we pulled out two enormous earwigs from the pitfall traps. Each was easily over an inch.

We also found a surprisingly large number of spiders in both trap types from the cotton/peanut bed, which was an interesting result. As we were finishing up, we also saw a cloud of small, flying insects next to the table we were working at. We didn’t think much of it and headed out due to the worsening air quality from the wildlife smoke. Later, however, as we walked home to clouds of green aphids thickening the air and terrorizing New Yorkers all evening, we realized we had seen the precursor to the so called “plague” of aphids that hit NYC that day!

That’s it for another week of insect collecting. Be sure to check out “Insects of NYC” to learn more about all the interesting arthropods we see and trap during our field days!

El