Tag Archives: moths

Sunday (on Monday) Round-up 4

By Adrian | Published 30 January, 2012

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.

◊ 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)

 

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Hello 2012!

By Adrian | Published 1 January, 2012

No major resolutions here, no list of top ten photographs and blog posts. I will be re-blogging the most  popular Bug Whisperer posts and photographs throughout the winter, and with seasonal holidays still in swing, family fun will be trumping blog time. Splendor is still a-waiting, so to speak.

What I will be doing this year is perhaps counter-intuitive for someone who has just launched a website: I’ll be blogging less and reading and learning more. I will be processing (and re-processing) images to place in galleries on this site.  I  also need to come to grips with a few subjects : learning basic entomology; learning how to painlessly feed the social web monster; writing full-length articles; developing a photo-competition and, most nerve-wracking for me, doing some public speaking. I also have some ideas for new features for the website, which will take some time to organize. Most of all, when spring arrives, I have to do more of what I love: spending time in the wild, finding more bugs and taking  better photographs of them.

For now, its back to some basic Sunday link-love. With the success of Google+ (you can find me here) I am wondering how long this type of link-sharing  post will be necessary. Not only that, as Google+ becomes more sophisticated, will it eventually supplant blogs altogether?

 

Slim pickin’s this Sunday, but here are a few buggy links from the old year:

◊ Kevin Zelnio, of Deep Sea News, goes all terrestrial on us and blogs bugs. See his post at EvoEcoLab on jumping spiders (yah!) and population connectivity. Of course, he still manages to bring sinking ships, shark infested waters and islands into the picture…

◊ Reminiscent of the people of the two Korea’s, two species of millipedes in Tasmania stay on either side of a distinct line that separates the two populations. Oddly enough, this line does not necessarily follow geographic features… Visit Science Daily for an overview, and/or read the original research, free (!)  at ZooKeys.

◊ Two of our favorite entomologist-bloggers have posted on their top photos of 2011. Visit Alex Wild’s The Best of Myrmecos and Ted MacRae’s Best of BitB for some of the best bug photography from 2011.

◊ Up here in Alberta, bugs and winter are two subjects that seem to have no common ground. But head over to the Home Bug Garden to see how an enterprising acarologist fends off seasonal buglessness…

◊ And speaking of winter buggy doldrums…the man at Booger County (not those boogers, the other booger…) keeps himself  busy by keying-out saved specimens. Go walk along with him as he analyzes a damselfly. A good idea for those of us on the enthusiast side of entomology, especially if you can get hold of the keys…

◊ And last but not least, a site for moth people, and those who want to do something different with their flat-bed scanners. Visit Jim des Rivieres’ Moth Images for more.

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