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I have been meaning to try and make a focus stacked image after being inspired by some of Lord V’s photos and his various photo stacking guides for the freely available CombineZ programs, made by Alan Hadley.

A focus stacked image is a composite image with a better depth of field, made by combining images taken at different focal distances.

Orellana nigriplaga (depth stacked image)

This image is the result of combining the images below.

Preparatory images for depth stacking

I would recommend trying CombineZP, especially if you work with something like pinned specimens. I will be posting some more depth stacked images soon and might experiment with some landscape images.

This specimen is part of The Natural History Museum collection and was taken for a research request. © The Natural History Museum

I took my first spring insect photos today after seeing a queen bumblebee flying around the garden. There were quite a few hoppers about, one of which I photographed:

Stenocranus minutus (Hemiptera: Delphacidae)

I’m hoping to go out and catch one because I can’t quite get enough detail in a photo, but I will be getting a new (macro) lens which should help when taking photos of small insects! I had a look on the British Bugs site but didn’t see anything which had the black mark on the wing (until Joe identified it for me on Flickr!).

Tonight’s episode of QI (now in the “F” series) had a flora and fauna theme, of which one of the topics was flea circuses. I had always thought that flea circuses were mechanical and did not use fleas, but Stephen Fry has dispelled me of my ignorance! It seems that this is a common misconception and that flea circuses did use live fleas, although there were some mechanical “flea circuses” too.

For those of you planning to observe and make notes on the flora and fauna of the UK, it is probably worth looking at the recording schemes listed on the Biological Records Centre (BRC) which cover many invertebrates, vertebrates and botanical groups.

Some of my insect records from last year.

The BRC host the pages of some recording schemes including: the Harlequin Ladybird Survey, the Orthoptera Recording Scheme (see previous post for the November 2008 launch) and the Riverfly Recording Schemes.

Many of these sites have online support in some form, ranging from checklists and distribution maps to forums, and the Hoverfly Recording Scheme even has a postcode lookup (on their front page) for you to check which hoverfly species have been recorded in your area!

The long-standing entomology blog by Bug Girl has been closed, hopefully only temporarily, after her employers were notified that she was the author.

Bug Girl’s Blog was the first entomology blog that I regularly visited and I hope everything works out for her and she keeps her job. If you’re a reader of Bug Girl’s Blog go over there and give her some support!

We don’t have enough entomology bloggers.

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.

Update (22.02.2009): There have been some recent sightings of hoverflies posted on Flickr by avid insect photographer timz501.

Eristalis tenax female © Tim Ransom

This week the Spring issue of the Bulletin of the Dipterists Forum arrived in the post and contained lots of fly-based goodness. It included the newsletters for many of the (mostly) family specific study groups and recording schemes. Of these, it was the Hoverfly Newsletter which caught my interest the most because I am more familiar with the British hoverflies (Diptera: Syrphidae) than I am with any other dipteran family.

Helophilus pendulus (female) - Photographed at the London Wetland Centre

The Dipterists Forum are currently involved in the production of provisional hoverfly atlas.

The Hoverfly Recording Scheme has been in existance since 1976 but Stuart Ball, one of the organisers of the scheme, is hoping to get long-term volunteers to monitor an area over the main hoverfly season, late April to mid-July. Having a long-term monitoring program for “constant effort sites” can provide more information than single recordings made on a site.

Currently the butterflies are the only group of insects which have well organised long-term monitoring programs in the British Isles.

Part of the work I do at the Natural History Museum involves the preparation for construction of taxonomic database on Coreidae, a family of ‘true bugs’ (Hemiptera) known colloquially as squash bugs or leaf-footed bugs. One aim of the database is to include photographs of as many important museum (type) specimens as possible, allowing researchers to view the specimens without having to travel to the museum or request to have the specimens sent through the post.

The Swedish Natural History Museum, Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet, holds a number of these type specimens. As I was already going to be in Stockholm, my supervisor and I thought it would be good to visit the museum.

The entrance to the Swedish Natural History Museum, Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet.

The curators in the entomology department were very welcoming and helpful, answering many questions and allowing me to study some of their Hemiptera. Hopefully I will get to visit for longer this summer and photograph more of their specimens.

One of the photographed Coreidae, Bostrostethus annulipes © Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet

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 am the proud ownder of a new banner! Malin has done an excellent job, incorporating a pinned Cetonia aurata (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae).

This marks the start of my adventures in changing the theme of my blog and having to learn some CSS and PHP. Changing the banner was more difficult than I imagined and I’ve not yet worked out how to get the perfect border around the banner.

Expect to some minor visual changes (probably the result of major work!) over the next few weeks.

Thanks Malin!

In other news: If you didn’t already know, Buglife lost its appeal against the the development of the West Thurrock Marshes and now has a legal bill of £30,000. A good commentary about this is given on The Ranger’s Blog.

When I started this blog, one of my aims was to provide some book recommendations. Today I shall list three books which I have found very useful, especially when I first started to study insects more seriously.

‘Domino Guide to the Insects of Britain and Western Europe‘ by Michael Chinery

This book is fantastic and is my favourite general field guide because it has excellent colour illustrations accompanied with important identification features, some notes of nymphs/larvae, sexual dimorphism and concise descriptions of many families. It also covers some other arthropods “which the beginner might confuse with insects”.

‘Essential Entomology: An Order-by-Order Introduction‘ by George C. McGavin

For readers looking to learn more about the different types of insects with some basic insect biology, I would recommend this book. It is more accessible than the following recommended book by Gullan and Cranston, giving the reader an informative tour through the insect orders.

‘The Insects: An Outline of Entomology‘ by P.J. Gullan and P. Cranston

This was our recommended MSc Entomology course textbook which I bought and started reading well before the course started. As implied by the title, this book gives a summary of the important sections of entomology ranging from anatomy and reproduction to parasitism and evolution. Each chapter has a useful list of recommended further reading.

I intend to have a page soley for recommended books once I have listed some more.