Chilean Arthropod Biodiversity

Expedition, January 2007
By Dr. Elizabeth T. Arias & Professor Kipling Will
Return to Santiago
After our long trip through Chile ( over a thousand miles of driving!) we have arrived back in Santiago, where we can finally get down to the business of sorting out the insects and other arthropods from our canopy-fogging samples. This can be pretty exciting (because we get to see everything we've caught) but it's also one of the less glamourous parts of the expedition. We spend 6-8 hours per day peering into microscopes or through magnifying glasses, separating the mites from the myriapods, the hemipterans from the hymenopterans, and the beetles from everything else. This kind of work can get a little tedious sometimes, but it's extremely important that we count our specimens as carefully as possible, and identify them as best we can. When you're looking for patterns in something as broad as biodiversity, detailed data matters!