Innovation Anthology #86: Assistant Professor, Dept. of Medical Microbiology & Immunology
The boreal forest is teeming with hundreds of different species of spiders, all playing an important role in the forest food web.
What impact logging has on spiders is a question Jaime Pinzon is investigating. A graduate student at the University of Alberta, he has traveled from his native Colombia to study the boreal ecosystem.
Pinzon collects his specimens by setting pitfall traps in the ground or beating trees to shake spiders out of the spruce and aspen canopy.
JAIME PINZON: Basically all these spiders that are living in the leaf litter are adapted to different conditions, different from, for example, the ones that live up there in the So in the ground you will find many species that don’t build any kind of web. They are just wandering and looking for their prey. While you start looking in the higher strata of the forest, you start finding more web building spiders that are adapted to prey on all these flying insects that are around on the ground.
Jaime Pinzon hopes his research will prove spiders can be used as a good indicator of forest health.
Thanks today to The Alberta Conservation Association
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
Troy Baldwin, PhD,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, tbaldwin@ualberta.ca
Sponsor
Program Date: 2007-11-22