Golden Niche Documenting The Invertebrates Of New York City

This weekend, I went to Marine Park and found almost no invertebrate wildlife. I stumbled upon one butterfly, but it flew away before I was able to take a picture of it or catch it on video. I also have some video footage of myself digging through soil in search of bugs, but to no avail.

I believe this has to do with the weather getting colder. However, it’s difficult to determine the definite reason that contributes to the ease of spotting invertebrate life. Other factors besides air temperature might be humidity, precipitation, the location of the park, surrounding human activity, and pollution. One would expect that Marine Park’s proximity to the ocean correlates to higher biodiversity, but no such luck today.

This week, we went to Prospect Park. Invertebrates were more difficult to find than they were in Central Park.  Finding them took quite a bit of digging, walking and looking around. I got quite a bit of luck as I checked underneath the bark of a dead tree. As soon as I peeled it off, termites scattered, and I found some eggs, snails, and a centipede.

As I researched invertebrates, I found that the scientific definition of the term is any animal that doesn’t possess or develop a vertebral column. Surprisingly, however, “invertebrate” isn’t a category in phylogenetic trees, which are taxonomic classifications of all Earth’s organisms. The categories are:

Domain –> Kingdom –> Phylum –> Class –> Order –> Family –> Genus –> Species

To get to the invertebrate classification, you would look in the  domain, “Eukarya.” Within that domain, there exists a kingdom called, “Animalia.” This kingdom has many phylums, none of which are named “invertebrates,” but many of them containinvertebrates. Therefore, invertebrates are any organism within the animalia kingdom without a spine. These can include not only insects, but crabs, worms, jellyfish, mollusks, starfish, spiders, and countless other organisms.

Because we don’t have scuba equipment, the majority of our studies encompass land invertebrates.

As we walked through Central Park, we found it very easy to locate invertebrates, especially insects. The ground was very damp that day, and insects were abundant. Plenty of ants crawled across the ground. Ants were the easiest invertebrate to spot. Other invertebrates scurried away quickly as we exposed them and were difficult to capture. They naturally learned to have an aversion to humans.

I usually don’t remember encountering this many insects as I walk through parks. I wonder if this is because I take them for granted and don’t pay attention to them, or maybe this has something to do with the wet environment. According to the wisdom of Google, ants and termites are easy to spot because they like to come out after rain in order to dig down in soft soil to plant their eggs. Especially termites, which like to lay eggs in underground nests and wall interiors. Many air-breathing organisms, including earthworms, come up to surface during the rain when their natural habitat gets flooded.

My next trip will be to Prospect Park, and I’m curious whether it will lead to as successful of a find as this trip did.

My role for the citizen science project will be to collect videos, photos, and data from my group members and my personal endeavors to compile a documentary, with Saul as the narrator. I plan to make a visit to Central Park with my group within the next few weeks, followed by a personal visit or two to Marine Park in the following weeks. While there, we will try to find various invertebrates that we will observe, photograph, and record. Hopefully the culmination of our efforts in Central Park along with our individual efforts in our assigned parks will result in our understanding of noticeable trends in the invertebrate world. We will upload our findings to iNaturalist’s “New York is Wild!” Citizen Science project. We might learn facts about the lifestyles and niches of various invertebrates as we observe them. Or we might learn about population growth and decline of certain species as the season gets cooler. Findings from other people on iNaturalist will be a useful tool for learning as well.

In the meantime, I prepared my camera to take pictures and video of invertebrates I find in my neighborhood. I created a basic layout for the documentary, and familiarized myself with the “New York is Wild!” page on iNaturalist. I found out that it’s easier to find wasps outdoors right before the fall season, since that is the time they do their last-minute food foraging for their colonies. During the colder weather, the colonies die off, leaving only fertilized queens to survive and hibernate in sheltered locations. We might find proof of this as we explore the parks. I also noticed that the amount of posts on the page was high during the summer, but weaned off toward the end of the end of the season, with very few posts for September and October. Could this be because cold weather kills off many of the insects people typically photograph for the webpage? Or are they migrating? I realized that many of the journal entries are regarding invertebrates that are easier to find in the summer, such as fireflies, bees, cicadas, horseshoe crabs, and katydids.

Another possible reason for the diminishing frequency of posts is that perhaps cooler weather is correlated to people going outside less often. Therefore, members of the project would have less opportunities to take pictures of invertebrates. A journal entry about mud snails on the beach was made in July, for example. I doubt there would be similar posts nowadays because people don’t typically go to the beach in late October.

It’s interesting how participating in a Citizen Science project can lead to discoveries in the social sciences in addition to the biological science the project is designed for. This realization goes to show how important for science metacognitive processes are, as described in Surrounded by Science.