Insect suction trap and weather station

The suction trap is part of a network of traps through England and Scotland managed by the Rothamsted Insect Survey.
It is a 12.2 m high ‘vacuum cleaner’ that continually sucks in air at the top of the tower. Any small insects flying in that air fall to the bottom of the tower and are drowned in a solution of preservative in a small bottle at the bottom. The sample bottles rotate daily. We collect the bottles, decant the insects into tubes and send them to Rothamsted where the insects are identified and counted. The counts of pest aphids (the traps do catch other insects) are posted each week on a web site for growers’ information. Some of the traps have been running for 40+ years so they are a great resource of data on insect abundance and phenology and the data can be used to develop forecasts or look at the impact of climate change, for example.