Tussock Moth (?) – Bella Vista Cloud Forest Reserve, Ecuador
Another day in the jungle, another moth I can’t identify. I’m less confident that this is a true tussock moth (Erebidae, Lymantriinae), but it does have the posture and the somewhat fluffy legs. No matter what it is, it was a jewel to find while in the cloud forests of Ecuador.
As a bonus, I even managed to snag a little nematoceran fly in the photo!
Fall Cankerworm – Alsophila pometaria – Geometridae – Guelph, Ontario
Not all moths have showy wings, or even wings to begin with! The Fall Cankerworm (Alsophila pometaria) is a moderate pest in the landscaping industry as the larvae skeletonize leaves of several different trees and as you can see here the females are completely wingless. Females emerge from the leaf litter in the fall and climb up trees and other vertical objects to attract mates (males are winged). As the name suggests, adults are only active in the fall.
The Fall Cankerworm is host to a variety of tachinid species: Blondelia eufitchiae, Cyzenis albicans, Gonia sagax, Blepharomyia spinosa, Smidtia fumiferanae, Phryxe pecosensis, Phryxe vulgaris, Phorocera slossonae, Tachinomyia nigricans, and Winthemia rufopicta.
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Parasite information from A Host-Parasite Catalog of North American Tachinidae Diptera (Arnaud, 1978).
Sphinx Moth – Ecuador
The cryptic colouration of this sphinx moth likely protects it from bird predation during the day while it’s resting among the jungle foliage. Much as camo clothing won’t keep a person hidden in the middle of a parking lot, this cryptic colouration did diddly squat when an undergraduate student decided to release the moth off a second storey balcony in mid-afternoon while surrounded by Amazonian jungle! The ill-fated moth didn’t make it 20 feet before it was picked out of the air by a lucky fly catcher and dismantled in a poof of scales.
At least the students learned a little lesson on how not to release insects…
Virginia Ctenucha – Ctenucha virginica
I may be nearly useless with moth identification, but this is one I know by heart. Of course, this isn’t really brag worthy since there aren’t many moths with an iridescent blue thorax and yellow head, but I’m working on baby steps here.
Just because I can identify it doesn’t mean I can place it in the correct family however! When I was an undergrad (back in the day when I had to walk 10 miles uphill both ways, etc) I was taught the tiger moths were a family unto themselves. Since then however, they’ve been sunk into the family Erebidae, causing me much confusion.
The Virginia Ctenucha feeds on a variety of grasses and sedges as a caterpillar, and adults are active from late spring to mid summer.
What feeds on Virginia Ctenucha though? Compsilura concinnata, a tachinid fly that was introduced to North America to combat Gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar) in the late 19th and early 20th century. As is wont to happen with poorly understood ecology and introductions, Compsilura concinnata turned out to be a broad generalist, and is right at home within a wide diversity of caterpillar hosts. There’s concern that this “new” parasitoid is a contributing factor to declining saturniid moth populations in eastern North America, but the fly appears to be under heavy pressure from a hyper-parasitoid species of trigonalid wasp, which appears to be keeping fly populations low enough to prevent eradication of native moths.
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Kellogg, S.K., Fink, L.S. & Brower, L.P. (2003). Parasitism of Native Luna Moths, (L.) (Lepidoptera: Saturniidae) by the Introduced (Meigen) (Diptera: Tachinidae) in Central Virginia, and Their Hyperparasitism by Trigonalid Wasps (Hymenoptera: Trigonalidae), Environmental Entomology, 32 (5) 1027. DOI: 10.1603/0046-225X-32.5.1019
It’s been quite awhile since the last Tuesday Tunes, but I think it’s time I resurrect it for a bit, and I have the perfect song for (Inter)National Moth Week — Moth by Audioslave.
And as a special bonus, here’s a little taxonomic refresher that A Moth Is Not A Butterfly from Hawksley Workman.
In fact, if we’re following a strictly cladistic view, then butterflies and skippers are actually moths. I suspect this song wouldn’t be quite as poetic, so I’ll just stick to taxonomy and leave the songsmithing to the professionals.
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These songs are available on iTunes:
Moth – Revelations – Audio Slave
A Moth Is Not a Butterfly – Treeful of Starling (Limited Edition) – Hawksley Workman
Green Tussock Moth – Bolivia (Photo from 2007)
This is the first of my tropical mystery moths. I’m assuming it’s a tussock moth (Erebidae, Lymantriinae) based on the posture and fluffy front legs. I have no idea how this moth manages to fly with the crazy hairs along the leading edges of the wings, or what those hairs may do, but it certainly makes for a dramatic look!
Waved Sphinx Moth – Ceratomia undulosa (Hodges #7787)
I can’t help but get a little excited about sphinx moths; they’re so big and cool looking that I just can’t resist taking a photo (foreshadowing: expect to see more sphinx moth photos by the end of the week). This individual came in while I was blacklighting at the Rouge Valley BioBlitz, right in the heart of Toronto.
The Waved Sphinx Moth feeds on a variety of plants as a caterpillar, including ash (Fraxinus), privet (Ligustrum), oak (Quercus), hawthorn (Crataegus), and fringe (Chionanthus). and can be found across much of eastern North America throughout the summer.
As for parasites, being big and widespread has it’s drawbacks, as this species has at least 10 species of Tachinidae known to develop in it (Belvosia borealis, Compsilura concinnata, Drino incompta, Chetogena claripennis, Chetogena floridensis, Hyphantrophaga hyphantriae, Hyphantrophaga virilis, Lespesia aletiae, Lespesia frenchii and Winthemia datanae).
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Moth identification and biology from the Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America (Beadle & Leckie, 2012).
Parasite information from A Host-Parasite Catalog of North American Tachinidae Diptera (Arnaud, 1978).
Happy (Inter)National Moth Week!
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!
Happy Mothing! 🙂
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:
Now onto the rest of the best from the last 2 weeks!
General Entomology
If you ever need a gift idea for the Dragonfly Woman, she’s got a nice wishlist of field guides that any nature nut would appreciate.
Speaking of gifts, we’re right in the midst of wedding season, and if you need nuptial gift ideas, why not take a page out of the insect world.
Erica McAlister, the Diptera curator at the Natural History Museum, London, takes you on a backstage tour of the NHM insect collection and shows off some spectacular specimens, including a grasshopper hugging a mouse. Seriously.
What’s the biggest bug? The North Carolina State University Insect Collection has a couple of options to answer that.
Entomology is a hobby all unto its own for some people, but it also happens to be a sub-hobby for some fly fisherman!
My wife and I had a date night this week and went to see The Amazing Spider-Man. I really enjoyed it, but was a little disappointed that Peter Parker didn’t snack on a fly or two at some point in the movie. Even if you’re not an arachnid-infused superhero, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t consider eating bugs as Doug Yanega explains to the University of California Food Blog. The Weird Bug Lady even has a tasty sounding recipe for entomological power bars to get you started!
Flies – Diptera
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.
Brian Brown is having a pretty good month for publications, with his latest discussing phorid flies which are parasites of endangered ants.
Researchers have bred “super” smart fruit flies which can count. I for one, welcome our new Dipteran overlords.
Black flies take the majority of bad press for Northern pests, but don’t forget to watch out for moose flies while in Alaska.
Robber flies are popular with a lot of people, including devoted beetler Ted MacRae. And with their own special facial hair, the mystax, it’s no wonder.
The Geek demonstrates that sometimes when you’re photographing flies, you’re only able to snipe one photo before they take off.
Beetles – Coleoptera
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.
Cerceris fumipennis is also a useful tool for collecting other jewel beetles besides EAB as Ted MacRae recently found out.
Of course you don’t need to always rely on other species to find your jewel beetles for you, as the Geek reminds us to always look.
Some people can be picky eaters, but the same holds true for dung beetles, with species preferring different types of brown sauce, and Bug Girl is on it.
Why might it matter what type of dung a beetle prefers? Because places like Australia and New Zealand don’t have any native dung beetles, making agricultural waste a significant problem. Becky Crew has a nice feature on the work being done to bring dung beetles to New Zealand.
Not all scarab beetles like to feed on dung though, like these Green June Beetles that Derek Hennen found in his yard.
With summer comes the opportunity to watch fireflies flashing in the night. Check out this nice flash guide to see if you can recognize any of the species in your backyard, and contribute to a citizen science program.
Ants, Bees & Wasps – Hymenoptera
This photo of a flying bumblebee by Adrian Thysse might be the best of it’s kind that I’ve ever seen.
The Gratton Lab at the University of Wisconsin – Madison is working on an automated bee identification project.
Urban beekeepers in Edmonton are pushing for changes to bylaws that keep their hives in hiding.
Meanwhile in Edmonton, Matthias Buck has discovered 2 new species of paper wasps right under our noses.
The School of Ants is holding a student essay contest with a nice cash prize.
Eric Eaton shows that solitary wasps can be used for monitoring other insects, like stink bugs (potentially including the mega-pest Brown Marmorated Stink Bug) or membracids.
Moths & Butterflies – Lepidoptera
National Moth Week is coming up this week, so expect most of the bug-blogosphere to get a little scaley!
The Dragonfly Woman started a little earlier by announcing an event she’s helping with at her new job.
Other Insect Orders
Troy Bartlett thinks ants mite do a better job of taking care of their herds of membracids.
Ever wondered why your car attracts some insects like dragonflies and horse flies? The Dragonfly Woman has a great explanation.
It looks like the Cleveland Museum of Natural History is becoming ground zero for mantid research in North America.
The Neuroptera are an amazing group of insects with incredible diversity. Jonathan Wojcik provides a nice overview of that diversity, and introduced me to an amazing group called the Spoonwings (family Nemopteridae). Brian Cutting showed off a member of another one of my favourite groups, the Mantis flies, while Derek Hennen found a spectacular antlion adult.
Spiders – Arachnida
“Oh look at that lovely lady beetle! It looks so cute and cuddly and OH MY GOD!!!”
Next time I go to Chicago, I’m definitely rewarding the Chicago Hilton with my business for being so awesome with their natural history and outreach!
I hate when I get a spider web across my face while out walking in the woods, but I think I might have to learn more about spiders and their webbing from a book Bug Girl recently reviewed, Spider Silk by Leslie Brunetta and Catherine L. Craig.
Now if all spiders lived among the canopy of trees like this Hentzia mitrata that Chris Buddle and colleagues are studying, then I wouldn’t have to worry about silk wrapping my face…
Speaking of Chris, he went, he saw, he videoed; Beringian pseudoscorpions in the Yukon that is!
Taxonomy & Systematics
A parasitic isopod was recently described and named after Bob Marley. Too bad the authors messed up and published the name a few months earlier in an ecological paper before formally describing it. Everybody repeat after me — in taxonomy, the order in which you publish or publicize MATTERS.
Of course, because this species was named after somebody famous, the media took off with it and the BBC published a top 10 list of what I’m now going to start calling “Celebronyms”. Have I mentioned how much I hate these top 10 species lists lately? Because I do. With a passion. Ugh.
Where should money be invested to solve the taxonomic impediment? Quentin Wheeler of Arizona State University thinks technology leads the way (i.e. the University of Arizona’s new funding to revitalize and digitize their collection), while Bob Mesibov of the Queen Victoria Museum (Tasmania) argues that more taxonomists need to be hired first. Me? I think technology will be useless if there’s no one around to develop, maintain and actually use it. I’ll also need a job in 3-5 years, so I might be a bit biased here.
The Willi Hennig Society Meeting was held at the end of June, and Itsy Bitsy attended. So did Salva at Computer Cladistics, who has a fantastic detailed review of the conference.
Kevin Peterson is literally uprooting the mammal phylogeny with a new technique he’s developed. My question is what makes this new technique more accurate to the true evolutionary history of the mammals? Micro-RNA is also being used to study Diptera evolution, but I can’t understand why it’s considered more “accurate”. It’s a wonder I get any sleep at all with these types of questions rolling around in my head…
Does the way that we traditionally draw and think of phylogenies (i.e. a “tree” of life) block us from considering new ideas on relationships?
Academia
My post on Citations, Social Media & Science gathered some attention last week, including that of the researcher who’s improperly cited blog started the whole discussion. The author of the paper also stopped by and explained they tried to include the citation, but the publisher wouldn’t allow a blog to be cited like a journal. I’m not really sure why a publisher has so much control over the content of a journal rather than the editorial staff of said journal, but I find it troubling.
This is pretty handy for people just starting out in academia/grad school – Field Guide to Scientific Conferences: An Ecological Review.
Also handy, this complete walkthrough by Steve Hamblin on laying out and developing a poster for a conference. Many, many good tips here for balancing form and function. It’s also a pretty interesting view inside the head of a Post-Doc…
It’s good to remember that it matters how you write in academia, not just what you write.
Science Communication & Social Media
Bora Zivkovic (aka the Blogfather) drops a massive backgrounder on the history and rise of science blogging.
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.
Here’s 10 Apps That Put Science In Your Pocket.
Dr. Olin Sander compares Twitter popularity during the recent Evolution meeting in Ottawa to a sage grouse lek. Awesome.
Photography
Ted MacRae demonstrates why the placement of your lighting sources and choice of background can have a dramatic effect on a photo’s feel.
Alex Wild has a nice flowchart of his digital darkroom workflow.
Adrian Thysse has a lovely interview with renowned nature photographer Heather Angel.
Other Fun Stuff
David Winter does a great job of explaining why red heads are here to stay. Looks like my wife won’t be getting rid of me that easily!
This fish grows ant-shaped appendages to get laid. I feel like there’s an inappropriate joke in here somewhere…
Who needs cable TV when you can get all kinds of drama & comedy from social media?
Aquaman makes a terrible marine mammal. He also makes a terrible superhero.
What would happen if a pitcher threw a baseball at 90% of the speed of light? I suspect he’d be investigated for Perfomance Enhancing Drug use and never make it into the Hall of Fame.
Video of the Week
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.
Further Reading
Bora Zivkovic – The Science Blogging Weekly, July 13th 2012 – (I made the Top 10 posts list! W00T!)
Ed Yong – Missing Links, July 14, 2012
Ed Yong – Missing Links, July 21, 2012
I’m filing this story under “Cosmic Awesomeness”.
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!
Besides being a really cool constellation, Musca also contains a binary object of a star being consumed by a black hole, as well as a couple of beautiful galaxies.
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…
2- Another excellent example of the scientific benefits of Twitter.
3- This may come as a surprise to many of you, I know.
http://storify.com/BioInFocus/social-media-among-the-stars