Third Week of Field Work Recap - 9/18-9/25

Hello good friends and buddies. It is I, Alyson, writing to you from South Carolina. We have found a moderate number of crickets. They send their regards.The crickets of Virginia do not fear our names - in fact, almost all of the crickets of Virginia are still living happily in Virginia. If Pennsylvania crickets could be characterized as living under dumpsters and Massachusetts crickets as living under rocks, the Virginian equivalent would be crickets living in agricultural fields. Unfortunately, these fields are not easily lifted to expose the tender, cricket-filled underbelly, and so (as you might imagine) we had very little luck. Our first two crickets were caught mostly by chance, and they still took over an hour to root out of a median in a college parking lot. We also collected four crickets that were enjoying some poolside fun at our hotel, as well as eight crickets from a pile of street lamps behind a high school’s maintenance center.So, after six days, over seventy sites, and only 14 crickets, we realized that Virginia was not going well. Based on this information, we decided to pack up early and move on to South Carolina to reduce hotel costs and hopefully find greener pastures.The pastures of South Carolina turned out to be swampy piney-woods, but they are green indeed. We are staying at TJ’s mom’s condo, in which we have been able to cook food and do laundry to our hearts desire. In addition to this, we have also been able to find a satisfactory number of crickets, which has been incredibly heartening.The characteristics of South Carolinian crickets include: next to no calling, a love of baseball field trashcans (similar to PA crickets), unexplainable longs wings, and occasional bouts of flying. None of these things were expected, but given we have increased our average daily success rate by 450%, I could care less if these buggers drank human blood and danced the cha-cha.The last note of our story ends with us having a day off in Congaree National Park, a lovely end to a successful first section in SC. Today we are heading up to Anderson, SC to stay with TJ’s aunt and uncle and collect from their area. We also just sent back our NJ beach crickets, much to my sorrow. We caught them back when the Subaru first feigned death, and they have been with us through thick and thin ever since. They will be missed.In other news:

An interesting find in SC - Erica suggested tree cricket, though it looks highly similar to an orthopteran known as a trig. It is coming home with me to be sequenced.