Grass Grub Beetle In Glass Cage of Sand With Saline Drip Overhead
This initial setup was extremely primitive.
The arrangement here is a small glass cage, ( though of course any small container would suffice) so that I might have a chance to see what this beetle was up to. Of course this idea didn’t work out too well as you now know, but it was Terry’s suggestion in the first place, so that observations could be made while it was buried in the wet sand.
The glass cage is open top & bottom and sits on a plastic lid off a jar which itself is mostly filled with sand. (with several holes drilled in the bottom to allow the salt water through)
This sits in a larger plastic bowl (with holes also drilled in the bottom) which is resting on a rough steel frame that lies in the larger white plastic paint bucket. When the water began to fill the outer bucket I had to disassemble everything and empty the water out and pour it back into the top reservoir.
Closeup
The wire wrapped around the thin plastic hose to hold it in place, was supported by the cage.
To control the amount of ‘dripage’ I had a sliver of wood rammed into the black nozzle in the end of the hose. Not a particularly fine system for efficiency & reliability. The holes drilled in any or all containers need to be a certain size which prevents the sand from continually washing through and causing disasters.
Later on experiments were made using pieces of cotton to lay the cage/container on top of, with minimal results as the water flow was hindered somewhat.
The final design is a double layer of paper towel laid beneath the container housing the insect in question and satisfactory results have been achieved, with barely any sand being displaced as long as the surface is flat and the outer rim of the first tray touches down securely.