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The Canberra Times
  • 2 days ago
The CSIRO's Keith Bayless on how to catch a fly.
Transcript
00:00This is a bread and butter type of trap that we use a lot for catching flies for biodiversity
00:07study and other insects.
00:08It's a type of kind of set it and forget it trap.
00:10You put it up and you come back two weeks later or more and then see what's been caught
00:16in the collecting head.
00:18So the way it works is that it's kind of a thin but resilient fabric and it's tied in
00:25all the corners to trees or to pegs and any insect flying by won't really see it very
00:30well but will knock into it and to try to escape they'll either go down and we set up these
00:35yellow pan traps on the bottom where they'll go up towards the light and it's sloped so
00:40they'll all end up in the collecting head which is already a bit busy with flies and wasps
00:47and other insects and then they'll end up in the collecting medium which is just 80% ethanol.
00:52So then we'll come back, change that out, take it back to the lab, pour it out and sort
00:57out all the insects.
00:58So one of these can catch a huge diversity of critters.
01:02So this is an example of a sample once we're done with doing the malaise trap.
01:08So this is probably thousands or tens of thousands of individual insects, mainly flies and wasps.
01:15So a lot of the same things, a lot of bush flies but then there'll be a huge diversity, probably
01:20hundreds of different species and each of these essentially what we're doing is all
01:24the insects that are flying actively in a certain area will probably end up in the malaise
01:29trap.
01:30So we set it up for a certain amount of time, take it down and then it's really useful for
01:33surveying the insect diversity that's present in a given ecosystem.
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