Results

Throughout both the soybean and alfalfa fields I found three different mouthparts. Cutting sponging, piercing sucking, and chewing. The most were chewing, soybeans had two insects and alfalfa had two. I only found one cutting sponging mouth (a fly) in the soybean. I found two insects with piercing sucking mouth one in the soybean and the other in the alfalfa.

Drawing of insect in the alfalfa:

Drawing of insect in the soybean field:

Discussion

The purpose of this lab was to familiarize the students with everyday insects in Kansas’s crops. I personally had a little trouble with this exercise because the mouthparts are so small and hard to actually see what I needed to draw.

I can see that a chewing mouth would be able to do more damage to a plant than another type of mouth.

Limitations of the lab would be microscope quality and insect size. Another limitation that I ran into were having many of the same insect in the bag.

Supplemental Information

Grasshopper Leg