<\/a>Insects like this bee clinging to a fireweed blossom seem to be in ample supply in Alaska’s boreal forest. (Photo by Ned Rozell)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
Sikes teamed up with Julie Hagelin of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Fairbanks on the study.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Hagelin is researching the olive-sided flycatcher, a songbird that winters as far as South America and flies north to Alaska each summer to nest and raise chicks.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Olive-sided flycatchers — birds with a 78 percent drop in global population since 1970 — eat flying insects like dragonflies, yellowjackets, butterflies and mayflies. Coming and going from a prominent perch like the top of a dead tree, they zoom about to pluck everything they eat from the air.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
As part of her study, Hagelin sampled flying insects to see what flycatchers might eat. Her study sites were in Anchorage, Fairbanks and the Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge near Tok. During three recent years, she, Sikes and their colleagues retrieved more than 115,000 insect specimens from tent-like traps suspended in trees and others on the ground.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Sikes and students at the UA Museum of the North identified those insects and the timing with which they were available to birds. Overall, they found a strong midsummer pulse of insect biomass driven in part by temperature (warmer meant more insects). They also found 49 new state beetle records and 10 beetles not only new to Alaska but “new to the universe.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Those discoveries add to a long list of species Sikes has documented in Alaska. He has been everywhere from the Aleutians to the North Slope to Southeast in his 18 years as the lead entomologist at the museum. Working with Hagelin allowed him a detailed look into the boreal forest in which Fairbanks sits.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“This was my first deep dive into the insect fauna of my backyard,” he said.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t