Hesperophylax occidentalis

For my animal diversity class, you may recall that I needed to get an invertebrate from the Provo River. The reason I needed to do that was for an assignment to identify an invertebrate down to the species. I got a caddis fly, a remarkable insect that in its larval stage constructs a shell for itself out of the materials at the bottom of rivers (sand, plant matter, etc)

The only thing we were allowed to assume was that the specimen was an animal (multicellular motile heterotroph). After that we needed to use scholarly dichotomous keys to identify it further. (I did it out of order though, since I assumed it was from the subclass Insecta and started there). Even though I knew it was from the caddisfly order (Trichoptera), I started there to get used to using dichotomous keys. Getting down to caddisfly, wasn't too hard, but to find the family it belonged to, we needed a microscope.

Entomologists use special microscopes that are really cool! you can zoom in on the image itself, once it's focused, which means you never have to change the lens on the microscope or refocus it. The instruments are special for looking at things about this size, and so they were perfect for examining the caddisfly.

It was actually really difficult to narrow it down to the family of caddisfly. There was lots of specific vocabulary to describe the different types, and I needed to learn a lot of terms (mesanotum, setae, etc). It took me almost 3 hours to find the family! It was from Lemniphilidae.

After that, I found the genus to be Hesperophylax. Surprisingly, finding the genus was much easier and faster than the family, and the synapomorphies were much more clearly visible. The species I had to guess on between two options since there's no way to distinguish them in their larval state, but based on population sizes in Utah, I can pretty confidently say it was most likely occidentalis. So overall the classification of the caddisfly was:
Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Arthropoda, Class Hexapoda, Subclass Insecta, Order Trichoptera, Family Lemniphilidae, Genus Hesperophylax, Species occidentalis
The assignment was difficult and time consuming but it was rewarding to eventually find the species, and to know why it was that, as well as to have the joy of discovery as I went along. I was really ready to be done with fly larvae afterwards though!