Teaching

For the Masters of Wildlife Science program at the Wildlife Institute of India, I just completed teaching a 3-week intensive series of lectures and labs.  The class met every day and the students were highly motivated; very enjoyable group to work with…

I presented 8 hours of lectures and five 3 hour laboratories.  I ran my sessions as a short course on Myrmecology.  In laboratory we worked on an inventory of the ants of the Campus forest and other habitats on the grounds using pitfall traps, Winkler leaf litter samples, and baits.

The students worked very hard in the field…

And in the lab to learn to identify our catch…

From just the baits and hand collecting in our first 3 hour lab session we found more than 26 species of ants!  My favorite might be this Camponotus sp. that looks like a Christmas ornament.

The data will become part of the campus biodiversity inventory, be published as a species list, and form the baseline for an ongoing monitoring program to see what faunistic changes occur here during climate change.