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It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Weekend

Page 3

Let the Counting Begin
It’s Saturday afternoon, the carousel is playing, and hundreds of visitors have descended on Glen Echo Park to picnic and play. And then there’s Cristina Francois and the other lep team members, hunched over a cafeteria table in bioblitz headquarters, sorting through a pile of dead bugs.

They’re separating out small moths that they’ve gathered from different parks within the gorge. Michael Pogue, a research entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, peers through reading glasses as he pins each moth’s body to a small grooved block of wood. Next to him, Bob Lyon assists, sorting moths by taxonomic group into small paper cups. Lyon is an 85-year-old retired civil engineer. “Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, I had the idea that if I should go to my grave without even knowing what the hell was in my own back yard, I would be judged an ingrate,” Lyon explains. “It seemed inappropriate.” So he started listing plants, getting to 900 before he got diverted into mammals, then reptiles and amphibians, then long-horned beetles, dragonflies and damselflies, and now Lepidoptera. About 3,000 moth species make their homes in Virginia, and so far Lyon has identified 680 of them. This afternoon, he’s simply sorting, letting others with more expertise, like Pogue, identify them. “I’m in the company of august people,” Lyon says.

Sharing the Love
Lyon is still sorting on Sunday morning. By now, the rain has finally come, and it’s pouring buckets. That hasn’t stopped the die-hards on the herp team; they’re out hunting for newts and salamanders. But most of the other teams hang around headquarters, since their quarry is lying low. Throughout the cavernous room, volunteers peer into microscopes, flip through guidebooks, peer at other teams’ catches, and mingle. It’s summer camp for biologists.

Back at their home labs, many biologists specialize in a particular taxonomic class of organisms and often work alone for hours or days at a time. A bioblitz offers a valuable opportunity to rub elbows with other specialists and learn about critters outside their narrow purviews.

A man from the lep team offers Evans a plastic yogurt cup with some beetles that bungled into his group’s moth traps. Lyon leaves his moths to find someone who can identify what look like four cockroaches.

Meanwhile, Evans holds court at the beetle team’s makeshift lab in a corner of the large room. Three foam boards are on display, each with neat rows of beetles—fearsome inch-long armored black beetles, spotted beetles, striped beetles, some nondescript brown ones no bigger than a grain of sand. The team has nabbed 169 species.

Evans types the names of each beetle species into a laptop to prepare for the preliminary tally, which will be announced at closing ceremonies this afternoon. But for months afterward, he and many of the other scientists will be peering into microscopes to identify the exact species of each insect.
“After the bioblitz is done,” Evans says, “the work really begins.”

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