Wooly Bears Only Predict Their Ages

An all black woolly bear just means a young one, or an underfed one.....

 

...and one with more brown means an older, well fed one!

I named this blog for the idea of Do-It-Yourself Science advocated by Miami University's Casey Tucker at a recent conference on avian research at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.   I participate in many citizen science projects and like the idea of expanding the role beyond monitoring and data collecting for researchers to doing the research ourselves.  I'd like to do my own experiments and inspire middle school students and high school students to do Nature science projects that would be better and more useful than the science fair projects I did in elementary school and high school.

Another speaker at the conference announced that in six months, the Winter Breeding Bird Survey of Ohio would be published, the first such winter survey in the country.   The speaker said the survey would be repeated periodically, always in January.  He said this is the best time to get an accurate census of winter birds, better than the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count which is done between December and February each year, with the exact date up to local counting organizations. 

 I'm splitting time between Maryland and Ohio currently and wherever I live I like to write regular Nature columns to inspire interest in Nature and to force me to learn.

This blog will give me room to write about the things that I can't squeeze into those columns, like the interesting fact I read recently explaining that the width of the brown bands on woolly bear caterpillars aren't predictive of weather.   They only reflect the age of the caterpillars--they're born mostly black and then turn more and more brown with age.

But it was actually an entomologist who started the myth based on limited experiments trying to correlate the brown band width with weather.  Others say if it reflects anything about weather, it's reflecting the summer’s weather when the caterpillar was growing, and how much the caterpillar got to eat.  The bigger they get the more brown they are.

After reading that, I later walked my dog and saw several woolly bears in the same vicinity, some all black and some with different widths of brown bands and I realized that alone should put to rest the myth, unless the woolly bears have different predictions!



And if that doesn’t show you how little it takes to excite me, how about this:  I’ve become very interested in moths lately because I realized that, at least in many parts of Ohio very few people are observing and identifying them.  I started sending photos of moths, mostly circling my porch lights, to butterfliesandmoths.org and soon found that almost every moth photo I sent added a moth to their database for Knox County, Ohio.  That fired me up and I’ve brought the total of moths listed for Knox County from 13 to 29 in a short time. 

That pleases me because I haven’t been in Ohio that long and I can hardly identify a moth.  The experts identify them for me from the photos and I absorb a bit about moths from osmosis.

It’s not hard to bring the total from 13 to 29 because the average county has about 500 moth species. 

I’m wondering if there are youngsters out there that would be excited by adding to this database, if not by moths themselves, and whether their smart phones could take good enough photos for the site—giving them a worthwhile Nature science project, if not a Do-It-Yourself Scientist project.

Sources/Reading:

"Field Guide to Moths of Eastern North America" by Charles V. Covell, Jr., available from Virginia Museum of Natural History.  (It costs $30 on sale, but I don't regret buying it.  But maybe it, or the first edition, published about 20 years ago--which is the same book, except for a new introduction section--can be found on Amazon cheaper.)

Links:

Field Guide to Moths of Eastern North America

Here are links to Casey Tucker's new website (still under construction) and the blog it will eventually replace:

American Avian Conservation & Research Institute Website

American Avian Conservation & Research Institute Blog

Here's a link to a 2011 NPR radio Science Friday program on citizen science:

Who Gets to Call Themselves a Scientist? 

Popular Series of Insect Articles by USDA entomologist   (I like these articles by Jon Lundgren, a research entomologist for USDA's Agricultural Research Service.  Go to  my new website, with temporary domain name of  "doncomis.simplesite.com" for the latest story I know of, his October 14 Halloween column on larder beetles, which he calls "nature's skeleton cleanup crews." )


My new website