Discover local wildlife on your next hike
On a bright and sunny day, with a lot of enthusiasm from volunteers, the University of Guelph Arboretum held its annual bioblitz on Sat, June 18 as part of the local 2Rivers Festival.
If you are wondering what a bioblitz is, think of it as a 24-hour ticket to a watershed or park (imagine Jurassic Park). During this time, you are teamed up with experts in botany, entomology, herpetology, for example, and you are expected to try and identify as many different species of wildlife as possible.
[media-credit name=”Photo by Thanushi Eagalle” align=”aligncenter” width=”640″]
Sometimes all you need is a picture and other times you need to bring your specimens back to take a closer look under microscopes with guidebooks. Specialized hikes focusing on different organism groups such as birds, plants, and insects went out in the morning and afternoon with approximately 60 participants altogether.
Chris Earley, Interpretive Biologist and Education Coordinator at the Arboretum, approximated that the volunteers identified somewhere between 350 to 450 species over the course of the day. From that number, a brand new species of dragonfly—the Spiny baskettail—was identified, along with a Walnut shoot moth, two species of sedges, and spiders new to the Arboretum’s list of species.