Kids and Bugs

Not long ago I reported about the start of our famous School Malaise Trap Program. The trapping period is over and this week we will be receiving all the traps and collecting bottles at our institute. Then it is time for sorting, counting, sub-sampling, imaging, data-basing, DNA-extraction, PCR, and sequencing. We will have to work through 60 schools' samples, 2 bottles each. That's a lot of bugs even this time of the year.

The program already got tremendous feedback through our blog. All participating classes had the opportunity to use the blog to report about their findings or simply post some images. And they did. We were quite pleased with the steady flow of messages and a lot of great images. I picked some of my personal favorites to present them here (want to see more, just check out the program blog):

St. Charles School, Sudbury, ON

Barcode art, Evergreen Elementary School, Drayton Valley, AB

PJ Day at St. Charles, Sudbury, ON

Pitching trap at Rothesay Park School, Rothesay, NB

John F. Ross High School, Guelph, ON

Dasmesh Punjabi School, Abbotsford, BC

Jack Chambers P.S, London, ON