The last days have, like the rest of the Swedish summer this year, not been the best for hoverflies. We did find a few yesterday but so much fewer than in Sikkim, India. Since Suhrid is here, there are a lot of memories from the Himalayas going around. A lot regarding the lovely weather we had there. Well, I thought we had lovely weather, Suhrid said yesterday that this weather here was "even worse than in Sikkim". Not even comparable I think. I remember the first day there when we used sunblock 50 and still were burnt within half an hour. That memory has also been present when we have been fighting with the Jaz, i.e. the spectrophotometer. Ours seemed to have some problems measuring in the UV-range so we gave it to OceanOptics to check it. Meanwhile we have had a machine that we have borrowed from them. However, this borrowed one has been weird since it is a little bit different and the instructions we got for it didn't add up and Malin was the one who got the instructions but she hasn't worked with it ever and blah blah problems along the way. Unfortunately we lost a little bit of data because of that. Thankfully, our own machine is now back after almost two months! And they didn't even find any problems with it. The good thing is that David, a postdoc at EBC here at Uppsala University has been working with damselflies in Colombia with interests similar to ours (when in comes to the spectrophotometer). He said that there actually is rather little UV. At least too little for most machines to measure today. They will probably improve in sensitivity over the years. At least now I can do multiple tests with our own machine, to see if the machine is wrong or if we just thought so. As soon as it has been charged =)
|