While the Portal Project focuses primarily on rodents and plants, there is more to our ecosystem than just those taxa. This week’s Portal Project post focuses on some insect work at the site.
If four legs are great, six legs are better. Right? For forty years now, the Portal Project has primarily focused on two-legged creatures trapping, studying, and sometimes cuddling small, furry four-legged creatures. But we haven’t ignored the six-legged inhabitants of our long-term research site, and I am going to tell you more about them now.
Which one of these is least like the other?
I am the Ernest lab entomologist, who doesn’t consider herself an entomologist. I am interested in biodiversity, community, and macroecological patterns like those studied by generations of Portal rodent researchers. I just happen to study them using bees. There are over twenty thousand species of bees in the world, and about four thousand in North America. My research so far has focused on the community ecology of native bees in a global hotspot of bee diversity in California. But as fate or luck would have it…
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Jabberwocky Ecology 