This is suction trap basically it’s a giant upside down vacuum cleaner, its 12.2 metres
tall. Any insect which is unfortunate to fly over the top gets sucked down the tube, so
let’s so and have a look and see what’s in the box.
Turn the fan off so you can hear me. So this is one of 15 traps like this around the UK
that have been operated now for 50 years. They are designed primarily to study aphids
which are one of the country’s most important agricultural pests.
And the trap was emptied earlier this morning a couple of hours ago, but even so I can see
there are quite a few insects in there including several aphids, and these samples from this
trap and from the other 14 in the country are all identified in our laboratory which
we will go and have a look at in just a moment. I’m looking at a sample from one of our
traps and I’m been picking out aphids from our sample and I’m also noting whether our
samples have ladybirds, lacewings, hoverflies and things like that. So I am just looking
through and just checking the catch and then afterwards once I have pulled all the aphids
out I will then identify them individually. So the traps pick up the winged forms of these
aphids and of all other insects and what we are really all about is providing information
to the agriculture industry on what pest species of aphids there are about, where they are,
whether or not they are resistant to insecticides. In other words which insecticides will work
and which ones won’t and whether they are carrying viruses, but as well as these more
immediately applied aspects of the work the data is used for a very wide range of studies
spanning the full fundamental to applied spectrum. We identify every aphid species we get in
our sample and then we put it into a database and that gets stored, and we keep all the
aphids and the insects afterwards as well. The Rothamsted Insect Survey is then a BBSRC
National Capability. It comprises two networks of traps: we have the big suction traps here,
12 metres tall which are primarily for studying aphids but cover a range of other agricultural
pests as well; and we also have another network of light traps that are specifically for monitoring
and understanding changes in moth populations. This is a Rothamsted Insect Survey light trap
designed by C B Williams back in the 1930s. So if I just open the trap up and show you
what… so this is a pretty standard catch there are plenty of moths in there and there
are a few dark arches I can see and some footman moths. So moths are likely to be quite good
pollinators, however, there has not been the work done on them to know quite how important
they are in our environment as pollinating species partly because of the difficulty in
surveying nocturnal animals in general. So that is a pretty standard sample in any
one year we have near to 80 to 100 traps running. The vast majority of them are run by volunteers
and most of them are identified by volunteers, not necessarily the same people, so there
is round about 70-80 volunteer workers that provide all the data for us.
With 50 years’ worth of data it is possible to get a really deep understanding of what
makes aphids populations go up and down. I think the biggest impact of the work is in
the forecasting of the timing and size of insect populations, aphid populations in particular,
which really does help grow us to determine the need for control, and it saves them spraying
insecticides if they don’t need to do so. Do you have to love insects to do this job?
I think it helps! It does help; looking down the microscope some of them are fascinating
and beautiful colours and markings. Yeah, you just can’t not admire some of them they
are very beautiful.