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Part of my work is to photograph pinned insect specimens and I had previously been manually shooting then transferring photos from the SD card to my PC. At work our imaging lab is entirely Canon-based, so I was aware of EOS Utility, Canon’s own remote camera operation software. It wasn’t until I recently went to visit the Paris museum (MNHN) that I worked with Nikon’s Camera Control Pro 2 and realised how much time it would save when organising files if I was using remote photography software.

I started looking at the prices for Nikon remote photography software and Camera Control Pro 2 is fairly expensive, costing around £130 if you buy it from Amazon. Other commercial software was also fairly pricey (NKRemote @ $130), so I looked around for something free.

After a little Googling I found DIYPhotobits.Com Camera Control. It’s completely free and does the job (while using a paltry 373KB of hard drive space)! The interface was so simple that I have already taken photos of two specimens and depth-stacked them (in CombineZP). This means I can now remotely control my camera and produce depth-stacked images using free software :)

Here is an example of Zopherosis georgei (Coleoptera: Zopheridae) that I took today:

After two visits to the Rainham Marshes this year, I wanted to explore other local sites in Essex. The Chafford Gorges (owned by the Essex Wildlife Trust) are local to me and seemed interesting because of their flora and history. They are located in the the Chafford Hundred area which is mostly a modern housing development, and is adjacent to one of our huge regional shopping centres, Lakeside. The three gorges are all that remain of a much larger wild area that I remember from my childhood.

A shot of one of the nearby chalk pits (mostly filled with Birch)

When I visited with Tristan I went to Grays Gorge and Lion Gorge. At Grays Gorge I saw my first wild British orchid, the common spotted orchid, Dactylorhiza fuchsii.

Common Spotted-orchid, Dactylorhiza fuchsii

We were fortunate to meet the site warden whilst we explored, and hopefully I will be able to acquire some old records for insects in the area.

Somewhat anecdotally, I recall seeing glow worms, Lampyris noctiluca, on the nearby cliffs when I was younger but do not recall seeing them after a road was built nearby, which would have coincided with increased light in the area from both new houses and street lights. Perhaps this can be seen from the local records…

Some photos from the gorge area:

A lucky shot

The rather attractive Cercopis vulnerata

I recently ordered some Royal Entomological Society insect handbooks and they all arrived today. They were discounted due to damp damage which seems superficial; one of the covers had some marks which I removed with a damp cloth and some of the staple-bound books have rusty staples that I plan to replace. The books also have a slight damp smell that I hope will disappear after some airing.

Most of the discounted books are for Diptera but they also had some on aphids and sawflies. The handbook list can be found on the RES publications page.

The Local reports that a new species of longhorn beetle (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) has been confirmed in Sweden. The new species, Leiopus linnei, is very similar to L. nebulosus but DNA barcoding combined with the examination of male genetalia and female spermathecae support its establishment as a separate species. The original article was published in Zootaxa.

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.

The beetle family Scarabaeidae contains some well known British insects like the chafers and scarabs, of which the most notable species is probably Melolontha melolontha (cock chafer/may-bug).  Of the 20,000+ species in the family, none were known to be primarily carnivorous, with most members eating plant matter or dung.

Melolontha melolontha, a British member of the Scarabaeidae family

In the Scarabaeidae subfamily Scarabaeinae the principal food stuff is dung, although some species eat carrion, rotting fruit or fungus. In a recently published paper one Peruvian species in the Scarabaeinae subfamily, Deltochilum valgum, has been found to be a predator of millipedes (Larsen et al, 2009).

In comparison to other dung beetles, D. valgum has a modified head, hind legs (the tibiae) and abdomen (pygidium), which makes it suited for attacking and feeding on millipedes. The beetle uses part of its head, the clypeus, as a lever to prise apart segments of a millipede’s body, often resulting in decapitation.

To test food preference the experimenters used a variety of bait traps containing dung, carrion, fungus, fruit and millipedes. They found that D. valgum was only attracted to millipedes and that it preferred millipedes which were injured but still alive.

Thanks to Linda for showing me a BBC News article on this. Irritatingly the BBC had inadequately referenced the study, so it took me a little while to find the actual article.

References:

Larsen, T.H., Lopera, A., Forsyth, A. and Génier, F. (2009) From coprophagy to predation: a dung beetle that kills millipedes. Biology Letters, 20th January [Online] Available at:

http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/g17124g4q8733365/

[Accessed 21st January 2009]