Over on Arthropoda, fellow SFS blogger Michael Bok shared an image of his field buddy, Plugg the green tree frog. My first thought was of a similar tree frog that haunted welcomed me everywhere I went in Santa Rosa National Park, Costa Rica. Needless to say, Costa Rica instills a sudden habit of double checking everything…
Maps/containment % updated: 16 June As July approaches I being to look forward to the Pacific Coast meeting of the Lepidopterists’ Society. This year it will take place in Prescott Arizona, about 2 hours north of Phoenix. And as of this moment it is one of the few places in Arizona not on fire. I’m…
I know what I’m hoping for from santa this year! Well, not really. In actuality I don’t collect butterflies, and especially not these giant birdwings. They are stunning animals, but aside from being huge, they are also expensive (the average specimens go for about a hundred bucks). The newsworthy part of this story is how…
Might be a day late, but still worth a try. Boo! Aphonopelma species from Western Texas.
Tomorrow begins stage 1 of field work/crazy driving and vacation time. I will be focused on collecting for this stage of the trip, hitting southern Texas just in time for the tail end of fall flying moths in the genus Schinia. But microleps are my primary interest, and I’m sure I’ll come back with hundreds…
Wow it’s been a few weeks since my last post, and I’m a bit embarrassed having let it go so long. What have I been up to? Not a whole not. No impressive collecting trips, no new species or discoveries. Actually I’ve been sitting at a microscope dissecting genitalia or databasing parasitic flies. I’ll have…
News in from India, a butterfly photographer has been kidnapped. A local park official who was visiting the north eastern province Arunachal Pradesh was taken at night by a gang of armed youth-rebels. Efforts to find him have been hampered by the weather and remote terrain. India has recently become one of the most difficult…
From a peppermint Pericopinae. I recorded this video on-site in northern Costa Rica a few years ago. When I reached down to pick up this moth, it was hard to avoid noticing the behavior. The moth, Chetone angulosa (Erebidae: Pericopina) ((used to be Arctiidae)), has a common defensive mechanism for this group – they excrete…
For the last four weekends now I have been on a goose chase, for one moth, Heliolonche celeris. It’s a beautiful small Noctuidae with pinkish forewings and stunning orange-red hindwings. It isn’t very often encountered and only found along the northern California mountain ranges feeding on Malacothrix floccifera – a CA endemic flower. Every trip I have…
to fake a UFO encounter? I recorded this video two years ago over the desert of Arizona. To confess, it made my heart skip a beat at first. I turned around and there were three glowing lights floating silently above me. I literally thought to myself “holy s#@% I don’t believe in this crap!”. The…