The organizers of National Moth Week have done a great job getting people to volunteer to do public moth-related events, so check to see if there’s something going on in your neck of the woods. If there aren’t, that doesn’t have to stop you from mothing; go hang out at bright lights just after dark and see what you can find!
This week should be pretty fun, and I’m going to try and get out at least one night to see if I can’t add to my abysmally poor list of moth photographs, and will try and tweet any encounters I have with moths throughout the week. I’ll also be contributing any new sightings to Project Noah and iNaturalist, so feel free to follow along with me there.
I’ve successfully ignored the Lepidoptera thus far in my entomological career, so I’m taking this opportunity to do a little learning and see if I can’t improve on my moth ID skills. I’m going to be posting photos of moths throughout the week, some from North America which I’ve been able to identify, and some from my tropical travels which I have no idea about. If you notice that I messed up an identification, please feel free to gloat and mock my error; perhaps it’ll teach me not to ignore an entire order of insects from now on…
Oh, and because I can’t completely turn my blog over to moths, I’m going to be featuring their dipteran parasites whenever possible, so expect plenty of tachinid talk this week too!
Exciting news since the last Weekly Flypaper: Piotr Naskrecki, orthopteroid taxonomist, photographer, and author (Relics and The Smaller Majority) has started a new blog — The Smaller Majority. So far Piotr has been killing this whole blogging business, with fascinating posts on tropical entomology and macrophotography tips. I’m pretty sure I bookmarked every post he made for future reference, but here are a few of my favourites:
Apparently I missed the memo about Photo Bombing blogs, as Matt Bergeron, Dave Stone and Alex Wild all showed off gorgeous photos of bombyliid bee flies.
Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis) has continued it’s inevitable march across eastern North America, this week being detected in Connecticut for the first time. What’s important about this is that Cerceris fumipennis, a solitary wasp which specializes on buprestid jewel beetles, was the first to detect it’s presence in the state. This is the sort of Bio-surveillance that Phil Careless and the rest of Team Cerceris had hoped for, and now hopefully more government agencies will invest in expanding this simple monitoring tool.
I’ve seen a bunch of people start blogs only to watch them peter out after a few weeks/months. As a blogger who has a relatively small (yet loyal) readership, I can sympathize with this post on Why Blogs Fail.
Carl Zimmer was a plenary speaker at the annual meeting of the Society for the Presevation of Natural History Collections a few weeks ago, and they just posted his talk on YouTube. It’s long (more than an hour), but it’s an interesting talk and well delivered.
While I was perusing Twitter this afternoon, Dr. Matthew Francis, a physicist/science writer who I follow, randomly started spurting out astronomical terms for fun1. One of those terms was Musca, which obviously got my attention in a hurry, and I asked what was so astronomical about a common genus of flies (you can read the full conversation at the bottom of this post)2.
Turns out Musca happens to be a constellation of stars observable in the Southern Hemisphere! It was “described” in 1597 or 1598 by Petrus Plancius, a dutch astronomer who clearly has an excellent imagination. Although it was originally called Apis (the Bee), it was changed to Musca (the Fly) in 1752 to avoid confusion with the nearby constellation Apus (literally “no feet”, in honour of birds-of-paradise, which at the time were believed to footless). But why name a constellation after an insect? Plancius named a neighbouring constellation Chamaeleon and decided it would need a source of food!
Seeing as I’m kind of a fan of flies3, I checked to see where the constellation was located so I could look for it the next time I’m on the southern half of the planet. Much to my delight, Musca is found immediately “below” the Southern Cross, the only constellation I knew about in the Southern Hemisphere, and something which I had not only seen before, but had photographed!
I quickly opened Lightroom to check my photos of the Southern Cross and see if I could make out Musca, and wouldn’t you know it, I found it! Not only that, I got good photos of it, and not just from one location, but from 2 totally different countries on 2 totally different trips! SWEET!
The Southern Cross, Musca and Chamaeleon over the Heath River
This photo was taken at the Heath River Wildlife Center on the border of Peru & Bolivia in 2007. In case you can’t see a cross, a fly or a chameleon, here they are with appropriate lines:
The Southern Cross, Musca & Chamaeleon over Peru & Bolivia
Not only did I manage to capture this celestial fly in Peru, but I also got photos of it in Ecuador while looking for real flies in 2009.
The Southern Cross & Musca over Yasuni Research Station, Ecuador
Here’s a massive crop showing the Southern Cross and Musca more closely:
The Southern Cross (top) with Musca (bottom half and faint) over Yasuni Research Station, Ecuador
When out in remote dark-sky locations deep within the Amazonian jungle, both constellations are visible to the naked eye, but picking them out from several thousand other stars and the Milky Way is a bit more of a challenge.
Musca within the Milky Way – Yasuni Research Station, Ecuador
I can’t wait to get back to South America to collect & photograph more flies, both the corporeal ones within the jungles of Earth and the shiny one above it!
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1- I don’t know either, it must be a physicist thing. They’re all about the entropy I hear…
Among the regular cadre of peer-reviewed journal articles supporting the author’s findings were two blog posts by University of Glasgow professor Roderic Page. Rod is a major proponent for digitizing and linking biodiversity literature with all aspects of a species’ pixel-trail across the internet, so I was excited to see his blog being “formally” recognized. As I finished reading the paper and reached the References section, I skimmed through to see how a blog citation might be formatted. Much to my dismay, after breezing through the L’s, M’s, and N’s I found myself within the R’s, with nary a Page in sight.
Despite having directly referenced Rod’s work on three separate occasions, the authors failed to formally acknowledge his contributions to the field. I may still be a little wet behind the ears in this whole academic publishing game, but I suspect that if someone didn’t properly cite a Nature paper, they’d be quickly reprimanded by the editor of the journal they submitted to and be told to include the citation or face rejection.
I’ve been thinking about this situation all day, and I can’t come up with a reason why the author’s didn’t include a proper citation, other than the continuing bias against blogging (and social media in general) among the scientific community. Certainly there are those in the scientific community who realize the potential of social media and blogging in science2, but in large part it seems the message is being ignored because of prejudices regarding the medium in which it’s published.
But why do scientists have such a hard time accepting blogging & social media as valid outlets? It can’t be because of the holy peer-review process, as Bora Zivkovic3elegantly points out:
“One of the usual reasons given for not citing blog posts is that they are not peer-reviewed. Which is not true. First, if the post contained errors, readers would point them out in the comments. That is the first layer of peer review. Then, the authors of the manuscript found and read a blog post, evaluated its accuracy and relevance and CHOSE to use it as a reference. That is the second layer of peer-review. Then, the people who review the manuscript will also check the references and, if there is a problem with the cited blog post, they will point this out to the editor. This is the third layer of peer-review. How much more peer-review can one ask for?”
So if the quality of content published on blogs is of interest, well supported and being recognized by our peers, why do we still see this disconnect between traditional literature and social media when it comes to proper credit? I think the social media movement4 is so new, seemingly free of traditional rules & roles and so quickly evolving that many academics have yet to take the time to explore its potential before dismissing it as a waste of time best reserved for celebrities and teenagers. Frankly, with the ever increasing pressure to publish, find funding and shoulder more responsibilities within academic circles, I can’t say I totally blame them. But just like those in academia have (mostly) accepted and embraced other technologies, I’m confident that social media, including blogging, will find its place among the scientific community and will revolutionize the ways we go about doing, discussing and disseminating scientific research. Certainly it will be an uphill battle for those who aspire to change the way this new technology is perceived and credited within the academic community, but ultimately I think it’s in all our best interest to push the boundaries!
Perhaps Rod Page summarized this entire post in a single tweet:
.@bioinfocus I suspect because blogs don’t fit into the “normal” landscape of publishing – yet
4- Which is exactly how I see it. Much like the cladistic wars of the 1980s and the Darwinian debate 100 years before that, it’s only a matter of time until social media is embraced by the scientific & academic communities.
I was going through my photos today for a project and happened across one I completely forgot I had taken:
Taken in Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, Costa Rica, this white-faced capuchin monkey (Cebus capucinus) and its troop stumbled across our group while we were hilltopping for flies. Clearly this one thought we looked like fools swinging nets around while wearing our ridiculous field clothes. On reflection, I can’t say I really blame it, we probably did look odd.
I’ve left my usual watermark off the photo because I think everybody could use a little Monkey Face Palm from time to time. Feel free to download and use this image however you see fit, whether in blog posts, on Facebook, as a Twitter rebuttal, or printed out and given to friends/colleagues/students when they do something dumb!
I just ask that if you happen to make money from it, you ask me first and share the spoils, because I’d hate to #MonkeyFacePalm myself for missing that opportunity…
Evolutionary biologists from around the world have converged on Ottawa this weekend to partake in the First Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology. Luckily for those of us who couldn’t make it, there are a ton of people tweeting about talks, the conference and evolution in general. I’ve been watching the #evol2012 hashtag all morning while writing this, and although I’m even more jealous of those that are attending the conference in person, I’m glad I can enjoy a slice of the conference through the tweets of others!
1- Not sure whether I’ve explicitly mentioned this here on the blog, but I’m starting my PhD at the University of Guelph in September! Lots of work to finish up before then, but I’m really excited to become a student again.
I’m over at ESC Blog today writing about Canada’s lack of an official insect. I provide a few potentials, but more importantly I want to hear from you about what you think would make a good national insect!
I’m not-so-secretly lobbying for a fly, but I swear I’ll be unbiased in the discussion. Well, I’ll try to be at least.
While working on my MSc in Ottawa back in 2008, my wife-to-be and I decided it would be appropriate to celebrate Canada Day on Parliament Hill with thousands of our fellow Canadians1. After spending a beautiful day taking in our country’s history with a full range of festivities including the RCMP Musical Ride, a stellar concert series that ran all afternoon, and speeches by politicians and other notable Canadians, we settled on the main lawn in front of the Peace Tower for an evening concert series and some killer fireworks.Continue reading »
