Yesterday I was distracted by the egg-laying earwig (amongst other things) and completely forgot about the Sunday Round-up.
Delayed a day, this is the Sunday Round-up:
◊ Every entomological institute should be digitizing their collections:
Scientists at the Illinois Natural History Survey in Champaign, part of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois, are getting ready to digitize biological collections to make them more accessible to researchers and the public.
They will be sharing $2.6 million out of $10 million in grants from the National Science Foundation to begin photographing specimens and creating a digital collection.
Most of the grant funds — $2.3 million — will go to create InvertNet, a cooperative effort among 13 institutions across the upper Midwest to create a virtual museum with 56 million specimens.
◊ The Northwest Dragonflier has a post on the little mites so often seen on dragonflies and damselflies.
◊ Where have all the moths gone? Conservation Magazine in the UK looks at a recent review examining the decline of macro moths.
◊ Life magazine has a gallery featuring the author Vladimir Nabokov, whose second passion was butterflies. Visit the gallery that shows a series of photographs of Nobokov collecting butterflies, beginning in 1958.
- Read more on Nabokov’s entomological pursuits at the New York Public Library.
- And an article on recent science: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated by Carl Zimmer
◊ Quote of the Week,
In recognition of the importance of taxonomy:
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss
Poems that take a thousand years to die
But ape the immortality of this
Red label on a little butterfly.
Vladimir Nabokov, “A Discovery” (December 1941); published as “On Discovering a Butterfly” in The New Yorker (15 May 1943)
- Yet another reason why we need specimen identifiers, now! (iphylo.blogspot.com)
- The latest buzz about bugs [video] | @GrrlScientist (guardian.co.uk)
- Books: “Stalking Nabokov” review. (newyorker.com)
