Over time the netting material has disintegrated. I am trying to rebuild them and have tried using other netting materials but really liked that stuff better. Does anyone know/ recall what it was made out of? I think he used plastic screen door material in his traps. Very heavy and UV resistant. John

More impactful, I left a zip lock bag full of cigars too close to a cabin window once in the Dominican Republic. Someone reached in and swiped 5 of the cigars (leaving about 10 probably thinking I wouldn't notice). In the frigg'in cigar capital of the world! I beg to disagree John. Much as I like D...

If anyone subscribed - but they hate skippers - let me know! I can buy them new - but I'm hoping for a better price than retail. Butterflies of the World 49 Hesperiidae II. New World Pyrrhopyginae (Text) by Mielke, O.H.H.; Brockmann, E.; Mielke, C.G.C Butterflies of the World 50: Hesperiidae III. Ne...

Although I've "lost" a kayak and other equipment, it was sneak thieves that saw an opportunity. Ah yes, the opportunistic petty thieves. Overall, I would say that petty theft (particularly from foreigners) has a level of cultural acceptance in many places. Certainly in parts of, or most o...

As a follow-up, It's not all that expensive to get to the tropics from the US. If you split the costs with someone, I bet you can do a week for about $1,200 to Central America with good advance planning. I just did a 11 day vacation in Panama for 2 people, for around $3k (including airfare for 2) - ...

Hi Tim, It’s been a while and welcome Back. And congratulations!!!! First, I personally can’t imagine just building a collection made up of purchased specimens. Yep – I purchase bugs from places I can’t get to, but I treasure the bugs I’ve caught myself. If I had a couple of thousand bucks to spend ...

Are the new one and spatulata sympatric? No difference at all in wing morphology? Seems like a pretty subtle difference to hang a new name on... wonder what DNA analysis might show? That'd at least be a 2nd character to consider. Nice work, jh Yes, the potential new one is sympatric with both spatu...

I am not, at this time, pondering attendance.

John

I have a bug that I'm about 90% sure is a new one. It's in a genus (Aguna - Hesperiidae) where adults are mostly indistinguishable from one another, until of course, you dissect them. Well, I've dissected about 70 of them recently, and have stumbled on three definite new species, plus this one. Turn...

I can - and it's not very convincing either good or bad. First - Panama is in a serous drought. We were there for 11 days - and it misted for a couple of hours on one of those days. Lots of trees had no leaves. There we not many insects around. Almost no mosquitos! Butterfly-wise, mostly common spec...

Not the first time USFWS has seized something and screwed the pooch. They grabbed a bunch of rare turtles some guy was breeding, and they all died. Makes you wonder. About that time of the National Parks, and I think it was specifically THAT time, there was something about Parnassius that USFWS wer...

Great, all the new bags I bought are black. The "good" news is that it didn't matter on my last trip, since 10 days in FL I never had cause to take the net out. I think black nets work for many people. I focus on little brown and black bugs, and I rarely pinch a bug because I invariably d...

Are they allowed to seize his whole collection, or only those specimens which were illegally imported? Adam. So, back in the days when those guys were poaching from US national parks and stuff, there was another less known case involving John Kemner and his commercial collecting in Mexico. In that ...

By the way, I was just in the field where I found out that my open-weave white bag was in pretty bad shape. I used it for w few days, and then switched to a spare I brought along - BioQuip's black, very fine mesh, blunt ended net - pretty much identical to the bag in the video above. It sucked. The ...

Akito was in high school when he started attending lep soc meetings. He was really interested in snout butterflies back then. He has expanded his horizons to say the least - and is the most impressive person that the McGuire Center has on staff.

John

In theory, these James Scott Names are captured on the BOA website - at least the names that they consider to be valid. If you didn't know, James Scott passed away recently. Scott was a complex mixture of genius and mildly crazy. He was seeing cryptic species long before DNA started showing us that ...

I'll tell you what - I'm headed to Panama with a Lepi-LED next week. I got it for evening entertainment mostly (since all I really care about are Hesperiidae). I'll run it for sure, and let you know how it works. John John, Please let us know whether the dry conditions in Panama seem to have limite...

I'll tell you what - I'm headed to Panama with a Lepi-LED next week. I got it for evening entertainment mostly (since all I really care about are Hesperiidae). I'll run it for sure, and let you know how it works.

John

A friend who collects "dirty" beetles (like Histerids) uses an ultrasonic water bath. These are generally used to clean jewelry and not that expensive to buy. These beetles come caked with mud, fungal spores, and general dirt. The ultrasonic cleaning removed this dust completely, while lea...

Yes - it's Todd Stout who is doing this. He has been very aggressive about getting kids in Utah out with a net in their hands as part of the Lep Soc's "OuterNet" program. I think he started making them because he needed them for the new kids he tries to get excited about collecting.

John