1 more day to meet goal...and pictures from Wilmer

Hello friends, family and supporters!  

Our campaign is ending soon, I only have more 1 day to get this project funded or my project will not move forward. So far $3, 913 has been pledged. I am 63% of the way there and need your help to make this successful! I will only receive pledges  if we raise all of the original pledge amount ($6300), but I remain hopeful we can make it to that goal!

We have had 1,160 page visits throughout this campaign with 34 of those visits translating to backers. While I feel it is quite a success story to raise $3,913 with 34 backers, that is only a small fraction of those who have visited the page. That has me thinking it would be worth sharing why it is so important to raise the goal amount and how  $6300  gets broken down.

First, you may wonder why is it important to support research on parasitoids?

We are losing biodiversity faster than species have been discovered and their natural-histories are understood. Why does natural-history of parasitoids matter? Natural-history of any organisms allows us to understand what it interacts with either directly or indirectly, and how it utilizes its environment for foraging, mating, development, etc. . The majority of insect taxa from spiders (Arachinda), to caterpillars (Lepidoptera), to beetles (Coleoptera)  have highly specialized parasitoids that utilize them as hosts, yet most of these species and interactions are undescribed by the scientific community, which means the stories of most organisms do not get communicated to the public. These stories will help us understand how current trajectories of global climate change and land-use practices, may cascade through the networks of interacting plants-herbivores-parasitoids. Further, this can help us understand which species and interactions maintain ecosystem stability. If we accomplish understanding how one more small, seemingly insignificant insect is important for the larger picture, it acts as one more piece of evidence for why certain areas should be protected or lan-us practices changed. Why should parasitoids be a priority to protect if the future seems so grave? Policy change and funding that aims to protect land or species depends on the level of knowledge scientists have about the role and  importance of the organism to the rest of the environment. The more scientists can fund research to understand an organism, the increased ability we have to communicate the importance of the organism to the public. Appreciation of parasitoids will only happen if we learn about all their amazing stories and can appreciate how the small things run the world. Parasitoids have incredibly concealed larval stages and ephemeral adult stages.  For example, some parasitoids  parasitize caterpillars that live and are enclosed within the stems of plants. Other parasitic hymenoptera behave as hyperparasitoids meaning they parasitize a parasitoid already infecting a host. It is incredible to think how some of these parasitoids detect parasitoid larvae inside a caterpillar body! The more funding to collect parasitoids enables us to understand insects they interact with and the habitat necessary for successful development and reproduction. The UK has many success stories with lepidotpera conservation. One neat example is with the  Large Blue Butterfly (Maculinea arion). This caterpillar species consumes ant larvae of the species Myrimica sabuleti and tricks the ants to carry the caterpillar to their nest so it  may feed on the ant brood. These ants require certain temperatures, but the overgrowth of grass due to the removal of rabbit grazer reduced ground temperatures to ranges inhabitable by the ants. This lead to the extinction of the Large Blue Butterfly  that depended on those ants for food. Conservation efforts helped restore the grasslands and reintroduction of other populations helped successfully restore the population of Large Blue Butterfly in the UK. Success stories like these required a detailed tale of natural history among the threatened species and those it interacts with. That is why we feel it is so important to have continuous collection and research understanding organisms, and this is particularly true for insects whose natural histories are so tightly coevolved with their host.

Disappearance of parasitoids is a grave concern for the agricultural industry as parasitoids act as bio-control agents. In the U.S. alone, this has been quoted to provide over $20 billion in ecosystem services.

Beto and Wilmer are locals of small agricultural towns in Costa Rica and Ecuador. Our projects have provided them a source of income and allowed them to have careers working on research projects without formal education. They have become our most valuable resources for plant and insect identification, because they work each day in the field. Their help has been integral to the management of the large scale datasets our group maintains on plant-insect-enemy interactions and they have been crucial to the set up and collection for major experiments funded by the National Science Foundation. Further,   partnerships such as these help connect scientists and Earthwatch volunteers to the communities from which research is taking place and promote the education of locals of the ecological value of their native environment.   

Our projects help support the communication of science to the public. We partner with Earthwatch Institute to take teachers, students and corporate employees to our sites to collect each year. Beto and Wilmer are integral to these expeditions as they often lead groups through trails and explain/describe natural history of caterpillars and parasitoids we collect. Through this, two individuals from small rural towns have become international collaborators and educators!

So why $6300? While the research will cost much more, and will be supplemented by other grants, the budget to fund Beto and Wilmer is a huge portion we would like to pay for this year in order to get continuous parasitoid data for a project I am currently pursuing. This amounts to $3150 each for 6-mo worth of help or $525/ mo.  By receiving help from locals we can sustain livelihoods of highly knowledgeable individuals living in impoverished areas. While one may think this opportunity could be allocated to volunteer university students, help from Beto and Wilmer is far more economical and crucial to maintain for the accuracy of our identification. We do take strong efforts to include undergraduate help through RAU grants provided by NSF. Further, for the Ecuador sites, our projects are one of the few that bring large teams to the Yanayacu Biological Research Station, which employ not only Wilmer but a team of field station staff.

I want to thank those who have supported the campaign thus far! Really, it is incredibly touching to have support from friends, family and strangers from all parts of the world! Your vote of confidence in our project is uplifting and appreciated. Please spread the word!

For now, enjoy some images Wilmer wanted to share with you from his fielding experiences and family :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wilmer, Dr. Tom Walla, Dr. Andrea Glassmire and Josh Snook and a team of Earthwatch Citizen Scientists