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I recently purchased MapMate, a biological recording program for natural history in the UK. Whilst you can record a range of organisms using MapMate, I intend to use it primarily for recording insects.

The distributions of British records are now often given using both the traditional Watsonian vice-county divisions and a government agency (Ordnance Survey) grid reference system (both are shown below). In MapMate you specify both in the record for a particular site.

British mapping systems: Watsonian vice-counties (left) and grid reference (right). These images are adapted from the Biological Records Centre online resources.

The grid reference squares are 100km² and represented by two letters. To describe smaller areas in these squares, successive figures are given after the letters, one for each axis. Each pair of figures refers to an area that is ten times smaller than the last, so two figures would refer to a 10km² area and six figures would refer to a 100m² area.

Six-figure grid references are the smallest generally acceptable area to have in a recording but are what I’m finding the most problematic and time consuming. After getting used to other online map services, such as Google Maps/Earth and the Flickr map, using our Ordnance Survey site is an irritating experience that makes me feel that they prefer you to buy paper maps: it only displays a 1km² grid, doesn’t always display the x and y axis coordinates, and has a small map (400×400 pixel) display which is sluggish to move around.

I am still thinking about what the easiest way work out six-figure grid references is. I think I may resort to paper maps with a transparent overlay. If anyone has got an easier way, please let me know! I want a system that will be usable for areas that greater than 1km², like country parks.

My Orgyia antiqua eggs hatched over the weekend.

Orgyia antiqua caterpillars

Just before I went to sleep on Saturday night, I noticed that 16 of the eggs had hatched. By Sunday morning many more had hatched (~40), and by the evening the majority had hatched. I intend on counting the number of eggs in the batch and calculating the hatch rate later in the week.

An Orgyia antiqua caterpillar, about 2.5mm long.

As I recently had my first encounter with the eggs of the Vapourer moth, I thought I would write a little about its interesting life history.

Unlike most other moths, males of Orgyia antiqua fly during the day (often relatively highly) and are sometimes mistaken for butterflies (Waring and Townsend, 2006). The females are also unusual because they have no wings and remain on the cocoon from which they hatch. Eggs are laid on the cocoon, overwinter, and hatch from May onwards.

Orgyia antiqua life stages: eggs (left), caterpillar (middle) and copulating adults © Tristan Bantock (right). See below for Flickr links to larger images.

After reading about the moth and looking its life stages, I remembered/realised that our apple tree gets eaten by them every year! I will look for the adults this year, which should be easier now that I know what I’m looking for.

Flickr links: Eggs, caterpillar and adults © Tristan Bantock

Reference:
Waring, P. and Townsend, M. (2006) Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland. Dorset, British Wildlife Publishing

Update (18th March): Thanks to Tristan Bantock, I now know that these are the eggs of the Vapourer moth, Orgyia antiqua.

I might keep some of the eggs and see if I can rear them through to adults.

It was nice and warm the last two days, so on Monday I went insect hunting in the garden and took a few photos. When I got home from work today it was much colder and overcast, so I wasn’t expecting to see much, and didn’t plan to go looking.

As I put my bicycle away, something caught my eye:

Mystery Eggs! They are less than 1mm in diameter.

These are now in an insect pot and I am hoping that they will hatch soon. I should be able to get the name of the plant that I found the eggs on, which may help with an identification.

What do you think laid them? I think they look a bit like Heteoropteran bug eggs.

As we have cats, it’s not unusual to have an occasional mouse taken into the house, resulting in chewed books and carpet. When part of the living room carpet looked like it had been eaten, we first blamed the mice. After I took a closer look at some carpet damage I realised that it was being caused by moths rather than mice.

Carpet damage caused by moth larvae

The house is currently in disarray as we clean behind the furniture, relentlessly vacuuming and washing the carpet. The adults moths have (we hope!) all been killed but I forgot to take a photo to check the identity, although I am fairly certain that the moths are Tinea pellionella, the case-bearing clothes moth.

I did manage to get a photo of the actual cause of the damage:

The culprit: a caterpillar of Tinea pellionella; the case was around 1cm long.

The larvae are the life stage which eat fabric and they move around in a portable case which reminds me of caddisflies. We will need to keep looking for adults to prevent the laying of more eggs but hopefully we have killed or removed most of the larvae.

The insect collections of museums contain drawers of unidentified specimens which await the attention of specialists. This month a new species of butterfly, Splendeuptychia ackeryi (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae), will be published in Zootaxa after being discovered by a curator from The Natural History Museum, Blanca Huertas.

Huertas collected S. ackeryi during an expedition to Columbia, but it wasn’t until the unidentified butterfly was compared with a museum specimens that entomologist realised it was the same as a 90 year old unidentified museum specimen. One of the distinguishing features of S. ackeryi which helped with the identification were its extremely hairly mouthparts.

I first read about this in a ScienceDaily article.

You can view some photographs on the NHM news page.

The larvae and pupae of Maculinea rebeli (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae), a threatened blue butterfly, produce a scent made by red ant larvae (Myrmica sp.) allowing them to infiltrate the nest. Researchers found that the larvae and pupae also make a ticking sound which mimics the song of a red ant queen, causing the ant workers to give the developing butterfly preferential treatment and protection (Barbero et al, 2009).

The original article (abstract only) was published in Science but you can read a summary on the New Scientist website.

Reference:

Barbero F., Thomas J.A., Bonelli S., Balletto E. and Schönrogge K. (2009) Queen Ants Make Distinctive Sounds That Are Mimicked by a Butterfly Social Parasite. Science 323: 782-785

I’ve been reading some blogs and came across two interesting posts and two new blogs:

A Cybertaxonomy Discussion: Vince Smith has posted a blog response to concerns a fellow taxonomy blogger (Roderic Page) has with Scratchpads, the online taxonomy database used by Vince & the NHM, and the potential for redundant data and time wasting when trying to gather information from multiple Scrathpads. Instead, Page sugguests using Semantic MediaWikis which would be able to deal with human-language queries on bulk taxonomic/entomological information, such as “Which Hemiptera might I find in Essex during July?” or “How many beetles are there excluding weevils?”.

Whilst I don’t want to reiterate the posts, I am inclined to agree with Vince’s view from my experience with taxonomists/entomologists at museums and people who are happier working with paper rather than computers. With so much taxonomic information not readily accessible in any form I think Scratchpads & similar more traditionally organised databases will become more commonly used before the more (conceptually) advanced Semantic MediaWikis.

Scanning Moths: There are some excellent scanned images of moths over at cicindela,  which have even managed to capture individual scales at a reasonable resolution!

I’d recommend visiting cicindela as the author as plenty of other good photographs.

Cincindela and iPhylo have been added to the blogroll.

One of the species I took back from the Phasmid Study Group meeting was Mnesilochus sp., originally from Mount Apo in the Philippines. I was looking for species which at privet as I no longer have access to as many food plants as I did last and was informed that Mnesilochus will eat practically anything.

Like most phasmids you can easily see sexual dimorphism: the female is much larger than the male.

Mnesilochus sp. male (left) & female (right)

The female seems especially cryptic as she has a nobbly bit on her abdomen and usually angles her thorax when resting.

Mnesilochus abdominal extrusion

They have already started laying eggs which I shall photograph when I have better light.

Entomology News: Today BBC News had a top story titled ” Liberia worms swarm ‘emergency’ “. For a moment I was really curious, thinking they were talking about annelids before realising they meant army worms, the vernacular for particularly voracious caterpillars! The swarm of caterpillars is the worst Liberia has seen in over 30 years and they are currently undertaking aerial spraying in an attempt to control the insects.

I came across a more positive story from Monash University on some research undertaken by Dr Adrian Dyer on the responses of bees to human faces. They found that the bees could ‘average’ different views of the human face (0° and 60°) to recognise a previously unseen facial angle (30°). The research team think the study may help with the construction of AI facial recognition.

Update: You can read the full research article on bee vision at the PloS ONE website.

As my home county and the county I currently reside in, Essex and its flora and fauna are of particular interest to me. With some of the worrying developments along the Thames (notably the West Thurrock Marshes) it was good to read some positive news for the Grizzled Skipper, Pyrgus malvae (Wisbey, 2008: pg.5) and the Heath Fritillary, Melitaea athalia (Grimshaw, 2008: pg.7) in the Winter issue of Essex Wildlife.

Langdon nature reserve has managed their meadows with periodic sheep and cattle grazing, preventing growth of young trees and the more rapidly growing plants and grasses, allowing smaller plants survive. This meadow management has allowed the populations of P. malvae to increase.

Little Haven nature reserve has a growing colony of M. athalia along a managed area of coppiced trees under power lines which also has lots of Common Cow-wheat, Melampyrum pratense, one of the main foodplants for the species. As this is a UK BAP priority species with decreasing distribution and populations, this is fantastic news.

Reference:
Wisbey, J. (2008) Grizzled Skippers at Langdon, Essex Wildlife, November 2008, No. 77.
Grimshaw, S. (2008) Heath Fritillary now well established at Little Haven nature reserve, Essex Wildlife, November 2008, No. 77.