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>>Theresa Bierer: It's a favorite time of year for arthropods and they're a favorite
on campus year round. On this next Inside NAU science segment we'll feature the museum
of arthropods and NAU's Neil Cobb. >>Neil Cobb: Arthropods are the most diverse
organisms on the planet, they occur in every possible habitat that you can imagine. They
make up most of the biodiversity and in some cases most of the animal biomass in every
habitat. We have a couple of different outreach programs and they actually all emanated from
our traveling arthropod show, basically make people interested, comfortable around insects
and also to then make them appreciate saving arthropod diversities.
>>Robert Delph: What I do is travel to different schools here in flagstaff, elementary schools
and I show bugs, both live and preserved specimens to the kids, it's to encourage them to have
a career in science and that bugs are nice, they're important, that we need them and not
to just, don't pesticide on everything. So all scorpions they have a chemical on the
exoskeleton which reflects the UV, the ultra violet light. Scorpions just under the moonlight
it's enough UV to make the scorpions glow just enough that maybe we can't see it but
other insects, such as moths, will see this light and they'll actually be attracted to
it. And since all scorpions are predator and they're all nocturnal they can use fluoresce
as a way to attract food. That's a theory, it's a theory, it's a theory I happen to agree
with it makes sense. I've been stung by all the major poisonous things here in Arizona
and many other nonpoisonous, but yeah I've been bitten and stung by pretty much everything
I show in my bug shows. And so I think it's really important to get stung by a lot of
things when you're doing these bug shows because people ask "well what does that feel like?"
And so it's really great to be able to have that experience and actually share it with
people, for example getting bitten by a black widow, I can explain that to the t on how
painful it is and all the reactions that happen afterwards.
>>Cobb: A major program that we're initiating through the museum is the Colorado Plateau
All Taxa of Biodiversity Inventory. One of the places that we've initiated the focus
of this program is at Canyon De Chelly national monument, so we travel to Canyon De Chelly
every month to two months to either swap out the pit fall traps or to put up nightlights.
This program is primarily meant to identify as many taxa as we can of all taxa not just
insects, arthropods but slime molds, fungi, everything on the Colorado plateau and we're
targeting the national parks because they're a great place to initiate these kinds of studies.
In fact the ATBI program was initiated at the Great Smoky National Park and the rational
for the program and the one used at the Great Smoky was simply that they estimated it would
take them 150 years to be able to identify all of the different species that occurred
in the Smoky National Park. They also assumed that because of changing climate, changing
land use that a lot of those species may go extinct before they even identify them. Just
working at Canyon De Chelly National Monument, we started about a year ago we have 576 taxa
collected so far. And there will be several thousand minimally that we will eventually
identify. Since arthropods are such an integral part of every ecosystem it's important to
know what arthropods exist there, you can't protect what you don't know exists.