Morgan Watkins: Week 4 Recap

We kicked off this week with a fun trip to Columbian Park for Memorial Day, grilled out, and enjoyed each other’s company. At the park, we also visited the Columbian Park Zoo and Angie showed us around since she had interned there before. We got to pet baby goats and walk through the butterfly garden. The prairie dogs were also very adorable. The last time I’d been to the zoo the prairie dogs weren’t active, so I was excited to finally see them in person.

The rest of the week entailed learning about grad school and listening to a few grad students present their research. This helped us get an idea of what our final project presentation should look like. We also continued working on our projects this week and discovered that a lot more cicadas had come out. At one site, we counted 767 live cicadas and 1,358 husks, which was incredible. Every plant and tree at that site had about 10 husks and cicadas on it. At other sites, we learned the cicadas were a lot of less abundant and live ones are decreasing in numbers. It will be interesting to see how the animals are responding to the increase and decrease of cicada numbers. From our own first impressions, it seems like there is a lot more animal activity on our cameras which is exciting!