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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:

Last week I received my Spring 2010 copy of “The Bulletin of the Dipterists Forum” (The Bulletin). In addition to having a much improved redesigned layout compared to Spring 2009, this is undoubtedly the best entomological publication that I subscribe to. Even though my main interest lies with the Hemiptera, The Bulletin is always an engaging read and contains a range of generally interesting to specialised articles. One of the features I particularly like is the separation of the newsletters for the various recording schemes and study groups because you can quickly find information on your taxonomic groups of interest.

The Dipterists Forum is a good start for those interested in finding out more about our British flies. This handsome individual is the Hornet Robberfly, Asilus crabroniformis.

The other really great thing about The Bulletin (and the Dipterists Forum) is the value for money. The annual membership fee is £15 and includes two publications (twice yearly bulletins and the journal, “Dipterists Digest“). The Dipterists Forum website is also particularly useful and you do not have to be a member to use it, although additional material is available to members (test keys, unpublished material, PDFs of past Bulletins and distribution maps). As previously mentioned, Diptera are not the order that I work with, but such good value means I can happily subscribe anyway.

In the latest issue alone there were six articles that I want to comment on and discuss. Some other entomological societies should take note and try to offer similar online services and good content (e.g. PDF back issues and extras).

After failing to find a reasonably priced LED ring light which does what I want, I have decided to build one myself. My electronics knowledge was never particularly good at school, so it should be fun!

My basic requirements are that it:

1. Illuminates small (~5mm) to medium  (~2cm) sized insects without casting too many shadows
2. Fits on different microscopes
3. Is powered by a (rechargeable) battery

Additional requirements are:

• The option to power it from the mains
• The ability to dim the LEDs
• Switch groups of LEDs on/off

I shall start with a basic prototype consisting of 8 white LEDs, potentially adding more and making the circuit more complex. It shouldn’t be too hard but I haven’t used a soldering iron for years!

At work (and soon at home) I will be taking many depth stacked insect images from both a microscope and using a macro lens. Whilst I have a ring flash for the camera, I need a constant light source for the microscope, so I’ve started thinking and searching for a cheap LED ring light. My target price is under £50.

I remember seeing some fluorescent and white LED ring lights at an entomological fair and thinking they were rather expensive. The cheapest ring lights were the fluorescent ones, costing about £30 each. The LED rings were more, costing over £50. A quick Google search brings up a ring light for a Marumi compact camera ring light for £40 (RRP £77.62!) which still seems expensive and I don’t know how it attaches or if it would fit a microscope. Further searching turns up some in-car lights which could be adapted and an  LED microscope light which does exactly what I want (AC power, adjustable lighting and thumb screws) but costs a mere £500 and is not for sale in the UK.

DIY Ring Light © fdecomite

I am beginning to think I’ll need to build one… Any ideas?

I am a fan of Flickr and think it’s a wonderful place to store and tag photos. Recently I’ve been wondering about how useful Flickr is as an entomological resource and thought of a few questions:

• How many new insect photos are being added daily?
• How common are misidentifcations?
• How many insect photographers add geographic data (geotags)?
• What is the number of unique insects represented on Flickr?
• How could Flickr be used in an insect-based meta-analysis?

As I wrote this there were (searching everyone’s uploads with no filter):

• 839,123 results for ‘insect’
• 28,014 results for ‘hemiptera’
• 1,673 results for ‘pentatomidae’
• 816 results for ‘palomena prasina’

Flickr map of Palomena prasina © Yahoo 2009

I found that there have been around 1,000 extra hits for insect everyday in the past week and that searching for ‘palomena prasina on the Flickr map gave ~217 results (depending on the type of sort) which were spread around the UK, France, northern Spain, Germany, Finland, Belgium and the Netherlands.

As I browsed through general search results for the Palomena prasina photos, I saw a few that were obvious misidentifications. I think that misidentifications are probably the biggest limiting factor that would be hard to control if you wanted to use Flickr tags/information in an academic way. Whilst there are plenty of very knowledgeable Flickr entomologists, it’s hard to know which photos are identified correctly.

Whilst the map search was interesting, it wasn’t overly useful in it’s basic form. I think that a more sophisticated map search might be possible using of the Flickr API, but you would still be limited by the proportion of images that have geographic data.

Finally, everyone tags and organises their photos differently. I try and enter in as much information as I can without it being too long or bothersome. For an insect shot I try and include: country, county, area name, specific location (like the nature reserve), class, order, family and genus+species. By doing this I can search for particular insects in different areas quite easily. I started added a few six-figure grid references to the images, but as every specimen has a map location, this isn’t a priority for me.

I feel that Flickr could be used in a more powerful way and have a few ideas how, but I’ll save that for another post.

For now, why not check out some of the Flick insect groups? I’ve linked a few below:

• British Bees, Wasps and Ants
• British Beetles
• British Bugs
• British Flies
• British Lepidoptera
• Fly Day Friday
• UK Orthoptera

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.

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

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.

ScienceDaily continues to be a good source of insect-related news with one particular study catching my eye earlier this week:

A recent study by Gross et al (2009) looked at the counting ability of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, by using a series of numerical patterns in branched mazes. The researchers found that bees trained with a sugar reward could tell the difference between patterns containing two or three elements by counting, rather than remembering the patterns. For a control the researchers altered the colour and layout of the elements in the patterns.

Without any further training the researchers found that the bees could differentiate between patterns containing three or four elements but could not differentiate between four and five, or four and six.

The authors also note that “this is the first report of number-based visual generalisation by an invertebrate”.

I wonder if octopuses can count…

Reference:

Gross H.J., Pahl M., Si A., Zhu H., Tautz J. and Zhang S. (2009) Number-Based Visual Generalisation in the Honeybee. PLoS ONE 4(1): e4263. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004263