I'm glad I missed this one entirely. A few months ago, I spent a couple hours deleting a Russian spam bots contributions. Just 20 or thirty posts - but this one sounds massive.

John

So - we are looking for species that retain the most "plesiomorphic" traits - right? My AI generator defines plesiomorphic as - In evolutionary biology, plesiomorphic refers to a trait or character state that is ancestral, meaning it is inherited from a common ancestor of a group of organisms. A ...

Some semantics.

What do you mean - oldest species? All species are constantly evolving, Life emerged on the planet about 4.2 billion years ago, so we have the misconception that humans are the most evolved species. But Archeobacteria have been evolving the entire 4.2 billion years as well and are ...

When I retired - exactly three months and 10 days ago, I decided to clean house. Largely because over half my literature was in the office, and now had to come home. So, decades of old journals went into the recycle bin - If it is online - I don't need it! And books, well I'm still dealing with ...

Having collected perhaps 100 or so morphos, representing a half dozen species or so, I can say that I've never seen a specimen grease up with attached abdomens. Perhaps with reared females - this could be a problem. But as long as you take care of the bugs once they are dead, I've never had a ...

The agents are always on the look out for invasive species that could damage our economy.Just like you can't ID every insect you see, neither can they.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/10/coconut-rhinoceros-beetles-deal-fatal-blow-to-hawaii-palm-trees/ . The coconut palm beetle has now been fond in ...

I should adds something here. My Malaise trapping days ended when we caught a deer in the autumn. Apparently a buck with a full rack of antlers. The trap was ripped to shreds - an expensive lesson for me.

John

i ran one for a summer. It was an alcohol kill system, so the few leps that were captured were pretty much destroyed. If you just wanted to count bugs - it was fine. But nothing could be mounted.
John

Looks like a maggot (fly larva). Pretty small - right? Could be a fruit fly larvae is so.

john

This is a common mis-use of the term migration". Most people use it in two ways. To describe "round trip" movements - like migratory birds or monarchs in North America, or movements that establish new homes, like a lot Europeans migrated to North America over the past couple hundred years. In both ...

Beautiful work.

Bioquip adhesive is great. I've worried about where I might get it in the future. Does anyone have any idea what this adhesive is or where it can be sourced?


I don't know what is in this but I do know that it is similar to model aircraft "dope" - which is a paint that has a ...

Too often, big skippers rot in the tropics if they are not property preserved. They simply fall into pieces after you relax them, and I almost always throw them away. But every now and then, an important bug (at least for me) comes in, and I try and piece them back together. Here is an example of ...

MikeH - you may well be on the mark for California. Here in Indiana, we have very similar rules, but the protection hinges on the definition of "wildlife" which as defined in Indiana statute, excludes all invertebrates except for crawfish and mussels. Basically wildlife equals those two groups plus ...

There's an updated CA "do not touch" list as of Jan 2024 that adds a couple taxa, takes a couple off. .... Hilariously--the opening paragraph of the list even states that the species on it have no legal standing. ...


PT


It's worth noting that this is a list "California Terrestrial and Vernal ...

When I was at Cornell in July, they have a display area dedicated to Nabokov. And in big letters, they quote him something to the likes of "I wish I'd never given away my collection [to Cornell], if I could steal them all back I would."

That gave me a shock. Wow. Notably, Nabokov never really ...

Nicely done, i love catching these but hate pinning dried and rehydrated specimens they are near impossible for me to set unless they are fresh off the lantana


They really aren't that hard if you relax them well. See my personal method in the old forum - https://collector-secret.proboards.com ...

but still, people who kill insects for fun are not working towards nirvana - that's for sure.


Hmmm... I've always thought nirvana to be a rather flexible concept. I think I remember enough of the quote to paraphrase Nabokov, who wrote something like "heaven is to be with a net among rare ...

John- you make me laugh. Do you really believe that about Brazil? I'd be willing to bet two weeks in country and you'd come up with something interesting/ new. Europe and Japan and most of USA are well surveyed, but beyond that even a novice can add to science. Case in point, sometimes I ...

Plus, in Brasil at least - it's hard to imagine that "tourists" like me really add much when they have people who are aggressively sampling across the country and house university collections of South American bugs that put the holdings in the Northern hemisphere to shame. And - they fight the ...

I think many entomologists who go overseas do it for "the greater good." I've spent tens of thousands of MY dollars in field work "for the greater good" - to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!

As nature is destroyed ...