My assistant Cristina and I arrived last Wednesday at our first site, Jatun Sacha. Located about an hour east of Tena, the capital of Napo province, Jatun Sacha is a reserve of approximately 2500 hectares of mixed primary and secondary lowland rainforest. The station itself is located just off the paved road, which is both good and bad. Good because access is easy. Bad because the road has brought many settlers who have cleared the surrounding land for slash and burn agriculture. In the 1990’s, several biologists, including Andrew Neild and George Beccaloni, among others, counted over 800 species of butterflies in the reserve. After a decade or more of continued deforestation, how many of those species remain?



Upon our arrival, we set out to survey the trails, searching for the best site to begin setting up traps. One of the trails seemed ideal, so we began putting traps up every 100 meters. Getting traps into the canopy is important, since many species do not descend to the ground and thus cannot be trapped there. So, we try to get them as high as possible, and this often turns into quite an ordeal. Using fishing weights, we throw the string over a branch, and ideally the weight falls right back with the string attached. Of course, it doesn't always go so smoothly, and it can be extremely frustrating to lose weights and strings to the tangle of leaves above. The effort is worth it though, as the traps produce some of the most amazing creatures imaginable from the poorly-studied rainforest canopy.

Traps, set at ground level (left), and high in the forest canopy (right).

We use rotting fish to bait the traps. While the fish smells absolutely disgusting to us, butterflies can't seem to get enough.

With the traps finally set, we began the more key task of measuring a number of ecological variables from the areas immediately surrounding the traps. These variables will hopefully give us a better insight into the factors that influence butterfly abundance and distribution, of which very little is known. A better understanding of patterns in abundance and distribution, in turn, will be important in conserving the most species possible using the limited resources available. I'll have more to say on that in future posts.