Sorry for the weird downtime over the last two days – the Southern Fried Network has been experiencing wonderful growth that has severely taxed our servers. This high traffic happened to correspond with a move of our physical servers the host was undertaking. The result was corrupted files that ended with our account placed on…
Everyone is familiar with the famous death’s head hawkmoth, but I think it’s a shame we have popularized such a grim character. Above is a much more cheery Neotropical Arctiinae from French Guiana that looks like it’s sporting a clown face. Sadly this isn’t my photograph, but you should take a moment to explore…
It turns out that Richard Branson has a new idea; to save the ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) by importing them to his private British Virgin Island. As the article points out Branson spent millions of pounds and years of effort to turn the island into “the most ecologically friendly island in the world”. But…
A few weeks ago I was invited to join a Berkeley entomology class out in the field for the weekend. Our destination was the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve; one of the newest reserves to the University of California system located just outside of San Jose on Mount Hamilton (map below). It was a joint spider and…
OK – a few apologies for not having full images *yet* of the larvae in question (I will in a few days!). Over the weekend I was out with a group of Berkeley students on Mount Hamilton and PhD candidate Meghan Culpepper collected a few species of Scaphinotus and a some larvae! So the specimen…
Came across this guy while out in the field the other day, what’s going on here? Points awarded for Order/Family/Genus – but even experts in this group can’t figure out the species quite yet. (everyone in the field with me should hold their comments until the guesses come in!)