TROY, Ala. (TROJANVISION) — While you normally want to keep insects away from your food, the Troy Naturalist Club combined a cookout and crawling critters for “Bugs N’ Burgers.”
After a cookout, participants trekked the Troy Arboretum trails in hopes of observing and catching a variety of insects.
“We are out here with some moth sheets,” said Fisher Parrish, president of the Troy Naturalist Club, “They basically have a light set up on one side of them, and the light confuses the moths, and they will be attracted to land on it. Then we are able to observe”
Aside from nurturing a nature loving community, the event also helped to boost the clubs numbers in the Marble Bowl.
“You go out into nature and take pictures of different species and things and then you long it on an app called iNaturalist,” said Naturalist Club secretary Sydney Bernard. “It’s a competition between a bunch of different colleges in Alabama. Whatever school gets the most entries wins.”
The etymological encounters students had also had an educational aspect. Students in Dr. Chelsea Smith’s entomology class, a course focused on the study of insects, collected different species of insects and put them into jars for later study.
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“The reason we have them collect the different insects is so they can learn how to identify the different insects,” explained Smith, “By having them capture the different insects themselves, they can look at the structure of the body, coloration, the habitat they are found in , their behavior, so they can learn about those insects.”
The Troy Naturalist Club intends to hold other public outreach events to get people to appreciate and go out into nature.
Parrish said, “We want to spread the awareness of why why all the outdoors and nature is so important and why we should protect it and sometimes with the insects why they’re not scary.”
The Troy University Arboretum, where the event was held, contains over eight miles of publicly accessible dirt trails. It is located on Pell Avenue and is open from dawn to dusk.
