CAPTURE EFFICIENCY AND PRESERVATION ATTRIBUTES OF DIFFERENT FLUIDS IN PITFALL TRAPS

By Martin Schmidt, Y. Clough, W. Schulz, A. Westphalen, T. Tscharntke. 2006

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Pitfall traps are widely used to capture arthropods. The type of fluid employed in the traps can affect size and condition of the catch. Direct comparisons of different fluids allow entomologists to avoid suboptimal solutions, and facilitate comparisons between studies using different fluids. We compared capture efficiency and preservation attributes between five fluids in a field experiment with special respect to spiders (Araneae) and ground beetles (Coleoptera, Carabidae). Catches in pure water, ethanol-water and ethanol-glycerin were less well preserved than in brine or ethylene glycol-water. Brine and ethanol-glycerin showed low capture efficiencies, presumably because their high specific density made arthropods float and thereby facilitated escape. Only the mixture of ethylene glycol and water combined good preservation attributes with high capture efficiency, and therefore represented the best solution.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Insect Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/134a53a2d6050828caac183c2bbd0915f34b84fa

How researchers see this paper

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In Ecology

1. A. Kruess
2. T. Tscharntke
3. Y. Clough
4. D. Kleijn
5. I. Steffan‐Dewenter
6. L. Fahrig

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. T. Tscharntke
2. D. Kleijn
3. Y. Clough
4. A. Kruess
5. I. Steffan‐Dewenter
6. Alexandra-Maria Klein
7. C. Kremen
8. P. Batáry

In Insect Science

1. T. Tscharntke
2. D. Kleijn
3. Y. Clough
4. A. Kruess
5. C. Kremen
6. Alexandra-Maria Klein
7. I. Steffan‐Dewenter
8. S. Potts

Citations in the corpus

• Organic versus conventional arable farming systems: Functional grouping helps understand staphylinid response (2007, methodology): “The trapping fluid was ethylene glycol (cooling fluid) diluted with water (1/3, v/v) (Schmidt et al., 2006).”
• Spider diversity in cereal fields: comparing factors at local, landscape and regional scales (2005, methodology): “…also included in this survey, but in different fields, showed that the species richness of spiders in these cereal fields was also positively correlated with the percentage of non-crop habitats around the study sites (Schmidt et al., 2005a), indicating that this pattern is robust across years.”