Hunting for Caterpillar in Empire Update

We have been very busy planning and pulling weeds in our school garden. We decided as a class to create a butterfly waystation for California Native butterflies and migrating West Coast Monarchs. It has taken a lot of sweat and hard work to make it happen. Since our garden is organic our main method for weed removal is human power. You would think with 32 people working it would be an easy task....but it is still a lot of work when you do it all by hand. We started a new blog for the Butterfly Waystation and hope to keep it maintained with what we are planting and what we are seeing in the garden. One half of the garden is being converted to a native plant butterfly waystation and the other half is a mixture of vegetables and flowers that attract butterflies and other pollinators. Here is the blogs address: http://butterflywaystation.blogspot.com/

Hunting for Caterpillars in the Garden at Empire Elementary

On Wednesday October 8, 2008, we replicated our Louisiana study in our garden at Empire Elementary. Well....we did a fourth grade version. We weren't able to make our plots circles, our garden is very much a rectangle. We measured the width at 24' so we divided the garden in half at 12' and then made a grid. Students were assigned to hunt and do plant counts in each part of the grid. We only found one larva on Wednesday in 1a. On Friday we were working in the garden pulling sunflowers and weeds and finding surprise vegetables and we found 2 more larva. In addition, Friday morning, one of my students found a larva on the blacktop. We labeled this "general collections" and I sent her back out a morning recess to collect some leaves from a nearby tree. It was a really windy day and besides the caterpillar was really restless without food.

Can you find my bunk bed?

We spent the past week at the bunk house at the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area. This is run by the Louisiana Department of Fish and Game. This was our research center while we were in the field.







Which bunk bed do you think was mine?

This is our kitchen, office, caterpillar rearing area of the bunkhouse. We were able to enter data on the caterpillars, blog, and organize our picture we were taking.

What name would you give this caterpillar? Why?

We found this caterpillar on Sunday,he has a scientific name, but we have all given him a "pet name." What would you name him? Why?

New Mystery Sound

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A Day on the Pearl River

On Friday my teammates Ann, Mike and I spent the day on the Pearl River. We put in at the next boat launch up the road. We were prepared for a day in the sun, we each carried a gallon of water, sunscreen, bugspray, and caterpillar hunting equipment. Well, at least we thought we had our caterpillar hunting equipment...as Mike went through the mental checklist while we were well on our way on the river we discovered that we had forgotten our GPS (global positioning system) and our data logger (Palm Pilot). So we did an aboutface and paddle up the river...against the current. After about 15 minutes Ann and I decided to pull ashore and let Mike go back to the take in point. The rivers here in Louisiana are very different than those in California. They are fairly flat. The water is murky and muddy looking. One of the reasons is that there is a lot of tannin in the water from the decomposing leaves. There is also a lot of sediment in the water. In California,our rivers are fairly clear and most of them begin high in the Sierra Nevada. CHALLENGE QUESTION: What animals do you think you would find both on California rivers and rivers such as the Pearl River in Louisiana? What animals do you think are different? What kind of fish do you think we have in common? Do you think they have salmon in the rivers in Louisiana? Which are different?

Caterpillar Friends