Research Refresh

Just a quick update about where I am at with my research. I am still based out in the field and I will probably be here for the next two weeks. I have 5 rounds of my sampling done and only one left to do next week. so I have collected and looked at 3000 leaves to date and with some leaves having 50-60 mites I can’t even begin to estimate how many mites I’ve counted. At each site I record the temperature, humidity and soil moisture to see if there is a difference in these between mono-crop and inter-crop fields. I am yet to sit down and take a proper look at my results to see if there is anything interesting happening and I am looking forward to being back in the lab in Hanoi with some time set aside for statistical analysis.

As well as collecting leaves I am also carrying out leaf dish experiments to check the predation capacity of predatory mites on red spider mites. The Adult female predator mites are starved for 24 hours and one is transferred onto a leaf with 5 red spider mites, one to a leaf with 10 red spider mites and so on increasing in 5s until a maximum of 30 mites is reached. This is repeated 5 times to get an accurate idea of what the predation capacity is. So far I have looked at the predation capacity of the adult female predator mites on spider mite eggs and I will probably repeat this experiment using a different life stage of the red spider mites to get a clearer idea of the predation capacity. In the lab I keep leaves that I have collected in water, these leaves contain my red spider mites. I also have a single leaf dish set up that contains the predatory mites as these have to be isolated to be starved in order for the predation experiment to work.

Leaves in the lab with red spider mites
Leaf dish with the isolated predatory mites.

I have also finished carrying out my soil infiltration experiments that I talked about in a previous post. The last thing left to do is to start collecting mites to bring back home to the lab in NUI Galway for DNA analysis. So it really is all go go go here trying to get everything done in the next 4 weeks or so. After a brief plateau I feel refreshed and ready to get all this work completed.

soil infiltration test on the slope