We went to Scotia Barrens yesterday to look for bumble bees and Odonata. While we failed to collect either of of our target taxa, we did manage to see three Anax junius (Common Green Darner) individuals, and we scooped up a ton of copepods to put in our mini-aquarium. I’m still working on an ID for these little crustaceans. They were incredibly abundant!

Maybe Diaptomus? We actually saw several kinds of non-hexapod pancrustaceans in there, but the bluish-reddish ones are the most interesting to me. We also have a few beetles I need to ID. With this long, cold winter behind us it feels good to reconnect with the arthropod world!

Here they are swimming: