We may not be professionals, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun!
One of my biggest thrills about parenting, especially now that my children are getting away from the baby years, is watching them get excited about learning. I am a learning addict, and hence my kids have become my little etudantes. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to start collecting insects, but it all started with a house spider that I captured a few weeks ago. Now, I have a couple of spiders, a random insect that Jackson caught, and my grasshopper that I found, last night, dead but intact.
I haven’t taken an entomology class so I have no formal training in the art of pinning. What DO I have? A father who studied limnology prior to medicine, and the experience of viewing specimens in my general biology courses.
Ya gotta start somewhere! My grasshopper may not be perfectly pinned and I can’t figure out what direction the darn label is supposed to lay, but I don’t care because this is for US here at home… to have our own amateur naturalist’s collection. (It’s my Urbana, IL childhood roots showing.) AND to stimulate my children’s interest and conscientiousness of the world around them.
Josie was following me around this evening begging to see the “buzz-buzz,” so cute.
Hey Faye,
. Gets the kids outside, gets them to like bugs (as opposed to freaked out by them. My BF could really have used a dose o’ this), and gets them used to bizarre body piercings. Haha.
That is SUCH an awesome kids activity, in a nerdy Urbana, IL sorta way
Anyways, I am impressed that you are doing the pins and labels and the whole shebang. I remember in HS it was so hard to pin them without legs or heads falling off. May your little critters fare better!
xo
Samantha
Oh, Urbana. Since I started studying bio/pre-med, my Urbana-naturalist roots have been emerging in full-force.
It’s funny, you know stereotypically parents want the “same thing” for their children, or sometimes they want the opposite, but for my children I want to provide them with learning experiences similar to what we had in Urbana. (maybe it was the enthusiasm and community-wide involvement more than the resources. Considering 98% of our neighborhood children’s parents were PhDs, the enthusiasm for learning was relatively high. As a result, picking up cicadas was NORMAL. LOL)
I find that living along the coast gives us an abundance of opportunity to go out and seek wildlife, etc. There are plenty of wildlife refuges, marsh, beach, etc. Jackson loves learning about sea turtles, and what better place to live!?! A little hot-spot for loggerhead nesting! It’s probably time to do this; but I’ve been wanting to take the kids out to the beach in the middle of the night to see if we can spot some babies hatching.
Yeah, the bugs… I have general bio to thank for that. I would never have touched an arthropod, minus the tasty crustaceans, prior to covering arthropods in bio/lab. I can even sympathize, (just a little), with palmetto bugs.
Do you forget that I raised and pinned insects all through high school for a job at the university? I can tell you exactly how it’s done!
ha ha… yes I did forget. I have easily figured out where anatomically you are supposed to pin… and I’ve read that for grasshoppers you can spread the left wing… I just don’t own a spreader, although I saw someone on the internet just used styrofoam, and wedeged out a space for the body.
my confusion is with the labeling… a lot of website contradict each other, I’ve pulled up university websites with biology class syllabi online and the lab exercises have specifications, but still they contradict each other.
At least for the sake of getting started, my label has the common name, the genus, date, time of day, location, weather condition, and substrate.
but which direction the labels are supposed to face has me confused.
did you do spiders? I read a suggestion of suspending them in glycerol, as they will shrivel up when dried. I currently have three spiders in alcohol… one, I believe, may be an immature female orb-weaver…. she has a huge bulbous abdomen with striped markings on the dorsal side… the other two I’m not certain about…. maybe male house spiders…..
oh, and I have 5(?) lice in alcohol, too.