Luo Xinyu: What is it like to go on a field scientific expedition?

"In the field, 10 percent of it is about how we work, and the other 90 percent is largely about how we suffer."

Luo Xinyu

Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Hello everyone, my name is Luo Xinyu. I hold a PhD in Entomology from China Agricultural University, and later did postdoctoral research at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where I studied insect taxonomy.

In layman's terms, I am a person who goes to the wild to find new species. Every year, I spend 1/3 to 1/4 of my time working in the wild. This job is largely related to field expeditions, so today I will talk about what it is like to go on field expeditions.

Your imagination of scientific research vs. actual scientific research

In your impression, what should people who engage in field scientific research be like?

People who are engaged in geological research will complain about themselves, saying: From a distance, they look like refugees, from close up, they look like beggars, but when you get closer, you will find that they are geologists. Of course, this is the aspect that sounds more difficult. I believe that students also have some fantasies about scientific research in biology.

For example, you may have watched various documentaries and got your first impression of biological research from them. On the most classic and famous TV station, the British BBC, you may see Sir David Attenborough, who is also the Queen's naturalist advisor. Since I was a child, I always saw him when watching BBC documentaries. Sometimes I can't see his face but can hear his voice. I believe that he gives everyone the impression of being knowledgeable and omniscient.

This is the very famous primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall. She exudes the radiance of motherhood and is full of knowledge and wisdom.

We only see the bright side of people who do this job. So when I first decided to join this industry, I was thinking about this kind of thing.

But what happened to me next was this: This is a photo of me in Xinjiang six years ago. At that time, I still had enough hair to be messy in the wind.

What elements are in this photo? Wind and sun. And the clothes we wear when we conduct field scientific research. You can see that we are wearing quick-drying clothes. Why? Although it is not bad in Xinjiang, if we go to the south, the humid and hot weather will make it difficult for us to dry our clothes after washing. If it rains or sweats, clothes will easily become sour and smelly, so quick-drying clothes are very necessary. For pants, I like to wear more pockets, because this way I can put as many tools as possible.

There are also hiking shoes in the photo. When working in the field, the feet are the most important part to be protected. Hiking shoes are the best choice to make your feet comfortable. In addition, there are sun hats or bucket hats, which my two teammates both wear.

Because we need to take a car to get from one place to another, everyone can still see the car behind.

The photo also shows the various tools we use to collect insects. The girl on the far right is holding a net in her left hand. This is the most commonly used tool when we conduct field insect surveys. I believe many students have played with it. Of course, I won't use my net like hers. Did you notice that her net is so broken that it needs to be wrapped around a pole with tape, so I will bring my own spare net.

There is something hanging on her chest. It is not a camera or a telescope. It is called an insect sucker, which is a tool used to suck tiny insects into the tube. When catching very tiny insects, there are two consequences if you use your hands. Either you can't pinch them, or they will be crushed if you squeeze them too hard. Then you can use this tube to easily suck the insects in.

Of course, I have done stupid things with this stuff. There is an insect called a stink bug, and people in Beijing like to call it a stinky lady. I don't know what was going on in my mind that day. When I saw a bunch of tiny stink bugs, I thought, "Oh, these are too hard to catch. I'll use a sucker." After sucking five times, I almost vomited.

The weight I carry is formed by adding up all the various collection equipment. For example, I carry a 65-liter backpack on my back, which weighs about 30 kilograms. I also have a bag on my chest that contains my computer, camera, and other items, which weighs another 20 kilograms. I hold a bug net in my left hand and have a waist bag around my waist.

What is the thing in my right hand? It's a secret for now. I can only tell you that when I bought a standing ticket on the train, I squeezed in and stood there very hard. Then other passengers who had seats looked at me with eyes that showed love for a fool and said: "Young man, why don't you sit on the stool you brought with you?" So it's not a stool, right?

After everything is ready, we will set off to the designated location, usually a protected area. After settling there, we will start working.

Thought Dinner

Completed: 30%

Gather your equipment and get ready for battle

How do we work?

Single day equipment

The picture shows the equipment I need for a day's work. Ignoring the bag on my back that holds food and water, the first piece of equipment is the insect net. My insect net is different from everyone else's. It is ten meters long and can be stretched out in sections, a total of ten sections.

Why do we need such a long insect net? Because if you go to the tropical or subtropical areas in the south, you will see that some trees are very tall, and the lowest branches may not be reached with a 5- or 6-meter net, so a 10-meter net is necessary. But the 10-meter net caused me very serious psychological damage.

Everyone knows the principle of leverage. When you use a force lever, the longer the force arm at the load-bearing end, the more effort you have to put in. I am not a particularly strong person, so every swing of this ten-meter net is a torture for me.

The second piece of equipment is a fanny pack for bugs. I have used three or four of these conductor bags or fanny packs, and I like the ones with more compartments inside the bag the most.

The last piece of equipment is a ziplock bag for waist protection. What is the use of this ziplock bag? We will reveal it later.

Thought Dinner

Completed: 40%

Picky psyllids

I study a type of insect called psyllids. Many people who study insects professionally don't know much about them. You may be more familiar with aphids, or in old Beijing dialect, they are called sticky insects. They are a type of insect that eats plants and likes to live on the tender branches, buds, and leaves of plants. The psyllids I study are very closely related to aphids and have a very close lifestyle.

It has a characteristic, which is called strict host specificity in scientific terms. What is host specificity? In layman's terms, it is picky about food, for example, a psyllid that eats radishes will not eat cabbages.

Under such conditions, how can I maximize my work efficiency? The way I use is to rely on my two legs. At first, I thought I would be a wise field worker, working with the upper part of my body. Later, I found that I work with the lower part of my body.

I walk a long way every day, and I need to encounter as many different plants as possible along the way so that I will have more chances to encounter psyllids.

When I see different trees, I will use the sweeping net method to collect the insects I need. What is a sweeping net? The use of this insect-catching net is not to use the net to catch insects when you see them. This is too inefficient. The average body length of the psyllids I study is only two or three millimeters. Whenever I see a tree, I will use my net to sweep 50 or 100 nets on it, and then take it down to see if there are any psyllids. If there are, I will put it in the poison bottle, poison all the insects in the bag, and then pick out the insects I need.

This is my main method of collection, and I do this boring task all day long.

After picking out the bugs, I will put them in a small plastic tube and then put it in my waist bag. This is a temporary disposal method.

In addition, why do I use a clip to clip a ziplock bag on my waist? This is because the insects I collect have very strict host specificity, so I need to record what plants they eat. The way to record can be to take photos, but photo identification is often inaccurate. So I choose the most rigorous method, which is to collect plant specimens.

I collected psyllids from some plants, and I cut off a branch with scissors and put it in a ziplock bag I carried with me. Remember the small stool mentioned earlier? Its full name is a plant specimen folder, and there are layers of absorbent paper inside the specimen folder. Put the cut plant material between these absorbent papers, fold it up and tie it tightly, and it will dry quickly and become a plant specimen. This is what I will use for identification in the future.

Nighttime activities: light traps

At night, we have a very interesting job that makes people unable to sleep. It is called light trapping. Whenever we do this job, people think we are the film projection team that went to the countryside in the 1950s and 1960s, because we will pull a white curtain and light a large white light bulb like a high-pressure mercury lamp in front of it. It is about 500 watts or 1,000 watts, and the brightness is very high. You will be blinded if you look at it.

We use this strong light to attract all kinds of insects. The most common insects are large beetles and moths. If you light a light trap on a hot and humid rainy day or in the summer in the south, the moths may occupy the entire cloth, and the rest of the moths will fly around, sometimes even flying in your face and fanning you. So we also call this light trap a moth fan face light trap. This is also a way to collect insects.

Our work is carried out in this way, rotating day and night. Generally speaking, we can only sleep four or five hours a day, and it is like this almost every day.

Thought Dinner

Completed: 50%

Collecting insects also requires the right medicine for the right disease

Different insects have different lifestyles, and accordingly, we have different ways of collecting them. So how do others collect insects?

Other people's equipment

Look at this thing, is it for catching insects or killing people? In fact, the equipment in the photo is someone else's. What kind of insects are you using this equipment to deal with?

The answer is the following insect.

In a healthy, pristine forest you will find a lot of dead trees, which are a sign of a truly healthy forest. Some studies have shown that dead trees contain 2/3 or more of the insect diversity of the entire forest.

Many insects in dead trees eat carrion and fungi. The left picture shows a thrip living in rotten wood. It is quite special because most thrips live on plants and eat leaves and flowers. What is in the picture on the right? You may have heard of the stag beetle or stag beetle with long teeth. This is a type of beetle that insect lovers like very much. The picture on the right shows its larvae, which also live in rotten wood.

On the left is a very rare wingless bug, a favorite of entomologists. On the right is a paper-thin flat bug that feeds on fungi that grow in rotten wood.

They all live in rotten wood. When you encounter these insects, you need to pry off the bark with a knife and split the rotten wood with an axe so that you can collect them successfully.

Ground trap

There are also some insects like ground beetles, which like to run on the ground, and it is inefficient to catch them with hands. So we use the trap method, dig a hole in the ground, bury a disposable cup in the hole, and then pour a mixture of sugar, vinegar, and wine into the cup. The fragrance of these things will lure the beetles and let them fall into the trap. After a few days, the traps will be full of beetles. So people who study these things have backpacks full of disposable paper cups, and they may bury 50 or 100 cups in the pit at a time.

How to catch those insects that play dead? For example, the weevil in the picture, also known as the elephant beetle, likes to play dead. When you approach it, before you reach out to catch it, it has already played dead and rolled off the leaves and rolled into the grass, so you can't catch it. So the way people catch this kind of insects is to find a piece of cloth. The most professional cloth is supported by an X-shaped bracket. People can hold the cloth in their hands like a shield, put it under the tree when they get there, and then find a stick to knock on the tree, and these elephant beetles that play dead will fall onto the white cloth one after another, which will be conspicuous. This is also a way to collect insects.

Sometimes we may see some rather heavy-tasting ways of collecting, such as some people like to catch dung beetles. This may be his research needs, or it may be his hobby. What is a dung beetle? It is a dung beetle. So where can you catch dung beetles? Don't have the slightest illusion that you can catch them from dung, such as cow dung, camel dung, elephant dung, etc.

When you see feces in the wild, you don't need any complicated collection tools, just pick a small stick from the tree next to you and poke the feces open. Of course, feces are hard to come by. In this regard, a friend of mine who loves dung beetles deeply has a way to make feces even if there is no feces. Before going up the mountain every day, he would leave his own souvenirs at the foot of the mountain, and then look for dung beetles on the mountain when he comes back at night.

Some people also collect this insect called the broad-shouldered bug. It is very small and often floats on the water. I have a very dedicated scientist friend who catches this insect by jumping into the water himself.

At this time, what shoes to wear became a problem. Rain boots? No. Because no matter how high the rain boots are, there is a limit. If the water is too deep, it will directly flow into the rain boots. Moreover, wearing such warm shoes for a long time in the hot forest will make the feet rot, so rain boots are not suitable. My friend chose the cheapest solution, that is, green, canvas rubber shoes - Jiefang shoes. These shoes are very easy to dry, and he would carry five pairs in a backpack. When he arrived at the water's edge, he would change into a pair of dry Jiefang shoes, jump in to catch insects, and then take off this pair of shoes to dry. Five pairs of shoes a day are rotated like this.

Through this method, he achieved a much higher efficiency in catching insects than others.

Thought Dinner

Completed: 70%

Scientific research is a process of trekking through mountains and rivers and overcoming difficulties.

In the wild, 10% of the things are about how we work, and the other 90% are largely about how we endure hardships, because you have to face all kinds of hard things, such as excessive physical labor, lack of sleep, poor diet and so on.

What is the story behind this picture? This is a teammate of mine from my field trip to Kazakhstan. He now works at the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Once, after more than 20 days of very hard investigation, we came to a desert beside a river in Kazakhstan. My previous understanding of mosquitoes was that there were more mosquitoes in the south and bigger mosquitoes in the north. But when I got there, I realized that mosquitoes in one place could be both numerous and big. There were so many that if you drew a circle with a radius of five or six meters around the house we lived in, there would be mosquitoes everywhere. As soon as you go out, hundreds of mosquitoes will surround you and bite you into a pig's head.

Because there were so many mosquitoes, we had to put insect nets over our heads as mosquito shields. Even so, it was not a good idea because our hands would still be bitten. One night, my teammates went out to catch jerboas, and I followed them, but I was bitten after walking a few steps. When they came back half an hour later, I could hardly recognize them.

There were a few mosquitoes in the house at night, and they would make people unable to sleep. After three or four consecutive nights, everyone was basically exhausted. At this time, I saw my teammate lying on the floor to catch up on sleep, so I took a photo of him and named it "Red Army So-and-so on the Long March".

Mosquitoes are just the basics of bugs that can bite people. I've been bitten by all kinds of bugs, including blood-sucking bugs, venomous bugs, and some of the scary-sounding bugs you see in the news, like ticks and poisonous rove beetles.

Gnat

But I don't think these are real dangers. The first one that made me suffer was an insect called gnat.

This is a photo I took in Tibet. The red spots on my hands are mostly from mosquito bites, which is nothing. But did you notice that some of my fingers have turned into carrots? This is caused by insects like blackflies.

Gnat is a kind of mosquito-like insect that sucks blood. Normal gnats are nothing special, but Tibetan gnats are very powerful because they can not only bite your hands into carrot shapes, but also bite your mouth into sausage shapes. What is the concept of sausage? It means that half of your lips are numb and swollen, and you can't feel anything. When you drink beer at night, you will drink half of it and leak the other half.

Sometimes we may also encounter insects such as sand flies, which are really dangerous. In Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, this insect can act as a vector to spread a disease called Leishmania. When the disease is serious, if you don't get timely treatment, it will be life-threatening.

I was bitten by this insect in Beijing. I was also very worried at the time. Later, this became the source of my observation of symptoms. I found that the bites of sand flies were different from those of any other insects. They were surprisingly red and large, and the edges around them were also particularly clear. I have recorded many bites like this. These are some episodes in my investigation career.

Sleeping in the open

Sometimes we have to camp in the wild for 20 to 30 days in a row. You may have experienced camping, which is fun for a day or two, but it is easy to collapse after living for a long time, especially when we need to cook by ourselves - you know, the cooking skills of teammates are not always so good.

Sometimes we need to fight with nature. For example, in order to see an unswept tree on the other side, I need to take off my shoes and wade through the freezing cold river.

For example, sometimes the weather is not predicted well. When I see the bright sun in the morning, I may be optimistic that it will be a sunny day. But when I come back in the afternoon, it suddenly rains heavily, soaking me like a drowned chicken. When I hurriedly rushed down the mountain, the rain stopped again. You can imagine how I felt at that time.

Sometimes, the distance we walked was too long and the weather was very hot. Once, after I climbed the mountain road for seven hours in Tianmu Mountain in Zhejiang Province with about ten or twenty kilograms of things on my back, my entire upper body and even my pants were soaked with sweat. The sweat seeped into the camera hanging on my chest, causing it to short-circuit and unable to turn on.

Thought Dinner

Completed: 90%

Why do we need to conduct field research?

I've heard so many stories about hardships and sufferings. If it's so hard, why do I still like to go outdoors?

This is a photo I took during my inspection in Qilian Mountains in 2013. I would like to use it as the ending of my speech.

At that time, we had to cross the Qilian Mountains from Gansu to Qinghai. The road was so difficult to travel that it didn't even look like a national highway. Cars could only drive at an average speed of 20 kilometers per hour. Our driver was timid, not a professional, and not very familiar with the road. So he frequently asked people along the way for directions. He was about to collapse, and I kept saying "it's okay" to comfort him.

When we reached the highest point of the road, the altitude was close to 5,000 meters. It was raining heavily at that time. The driver suspected that our rear tire was flat, so I got out of the car to check. As soon as I got out of the car, I was almost blown down the mountain by the wind.

After a very hard journey, we finally crossed the mountain and arrived in Qinghai. On the way down the mountain, the wind and rain stopped, and I saw the rainbow in the picture above. It was not the biggest rainbow I have ever seen, but it was the lowest one, and I could almost touch it with my hand.

That's what's fun for me, personally.

If we look at it from a broader perspective, in addition to being smart, knowledgeable, and innovative, scientists also have another quality that is often overlooked, and that is courage.

Why do we need to be brave? Because any scientific research requires a material basis. Your research materials may not be easily obtained in the laboratory. You must go to the wild to get these rare research materials. Humans have discovered 2 million species of animals and more than 350,000 species of plants, but there are still many species and biological phenomena that we have not discovered. They are still hidden in dense forests or dark seabeds.

In addition, the increase in the world's population has resulted in the natural ecological environment being constantly divided and squeezed by us. Therefore, nature conservation researchers must go into the wild to observe and understand the survival and protection status of wild animals and plants in order to improve all these problems.

From these two perspectives, we need scientists to show their fearless courage and open minds to bring understanding, respect and protection of nature to the world. This is the value of our field work.

That’s all for my speech today, thank you everyone.

The articles and speeches only represent the author’s views and do not represent the position of the Gezhi Lundao Forum.