Wasp Field Guide
This digital field guide is the first of several planned. It is the result of a collective project at the Nature Center between the CDRI, Sul Ross State University, and the Institute of Museum & Library Services: What’s the Buzz? Pollinators of the Northern Chihuahuan Desert. The goal of the project was to raise awareness and encourage conservation of our native pollinators. This field guide is just one part of a two-year effort that also included programs, lectures, teachers' workshops, publications, community outreach, an exhibit on loan from the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, and a new Pollinator Garden at the Nature Center.
Cynthia McAlister, an entomology graduate student at Sul Ross State University, was hired to collect pollinators in our botanical garden, identify them, and create a field guide.
The number and diversity of invertebrate pollinators—including bees, wasps, flower flies, beetles, butterflies, and moths—was unexpected and overwhelming. Instead of a published field guide, we decided to create digital keys that could be updated and expanded as we gather more data and expand the geographical range of this project.
The key presented is the first in the series and was made after two years of looking closely at insects under the microscope, and working through the many identification keys already written by the true insect gurus, upon whose shoulders this entire work gratefully stands. The most common and distinctive kinds of wasps collected in the botanical gardens in 2006 and 2007 are included in this guide. This wasp key will help you identify the types of wasps observed in the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center’s Botanical Gardens. The key can also be used locally and may have limited use in other areas, as many of the wasps are common in the desert southwest, and some occur across North America.
>> Proceed to the Wasp Field Guide
Acknowledgements
Specimens collected during this project are curated in the Department of Biology’s Jim V. Richerson Invertebrate Collection at Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas.
The digital key was designed by Vast Graphics in Alpine. Specimens were collected and content for the key was produced by Cynthia McAlister; photographs were taken by Cathryn A. Hoyt.
This project was funded, in part, by a Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum & Library Services.
