collaborative abundance spreadsheetArthropod Investigation
Activities
What do you know about arthropods?
Making and setting pitfall traps
Record and Analyze Data
Working with Real Data
Online Science Notebook
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What is an Arthropod?
Now that you have done some observations and some thinking and you are going to set your traps, it's a good idea to find out a little more about the organisms that will be falling into your traps. Although we are primarily concerned with insects, we will discover many other types of arthropods as we explore the variety of microhabitats that exist within our backyards and schoolyards. What is an arthropod? Arthropoda is one of many phyla (singular: phylum) in the kingdom Animalia. The principal characteristics of an arthropod are:
Within the phylum Arthropoda are many different classes of arthropods. For example, spiders, scorpions, and ticks are in the class Arachnida, and horseshoe crabs are in the class Merostomata. Insects are classified as Hexapoda. The Hexapoda all share the following characteristics:
- Three segmented body (Head + Thorax + Abdomen)
- Six legs arising from the thorax
- One pair of antennae
- One pair of mandibles
More information on arthropods:
- The Arthropod Story (http://tolweb.org/treehouses/?treehouse_id=3923)
- Introduction to the Arthropoda (www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/arthropoda/arthropoda.html)