ભૂતનો જન્મ થાય છે

નવા વર્ષનું સ્વાગત છે, અને બ્લોગિંગનું લગભગ આખું વર્ષ! તે આશ્ચર્યજનક છે કે સમય કેટલો ઝડપથી પસાર થયો, પરંતુ ફરીથી તે હંમેશા કરે છે. જેમ તમે કદાચ નોંધ્યું હશે કે ડિસેમ્બર મારો સૌથી નબળો પોસ્ટિંગ મહિનો હતો 2 પોસ્ટ્સ. ઠરાવ: વધુ પોસ્ટિંગ!

હવે મેં સંગીત વિશે બ્લોગિંગ શરૂ કર્યું નથી (for those who get the Wilco reference), but I am taking us back to the ghost moth of previous posts.

Progress has been made and unfortunately it is pointing toward a direction I was not particularly hoping for. As it turns out my moth may not be new after all! I finally managed to track down two specimens of a species known from the same general vicinity as my specimen above. Gazoryctra lemberti is known from the central Sierra Nevada near Yosemite but has been so rarely collected I can only find 5 specimens known to science in the literature. Two additional specimens are housed at the Field Museum in Chicago (which was totally unknown to me, and nearly knocked me off my feet when I found them during a random drawer sweep!). When I saw this moth I knew what I was seeing – my moth from the Sierra!

The two Field Museum specimens are rather special in that they date from the collection of Harrison G. Dyar, 1894. (Read more about this crazy eccentric lepidopterist over on an old Bug Girl post). On the data label was a small tag indicating a publication: I looked it up – જી. lemberti OD (.પીડીએફ).

Hummm that’s a pretty good coincidence, 2 specimens collected at this exact locality on the exact year… રાહ, these are probably the original type series! What are the chances that a moth known from 5 specimens would have another two specimens from the same date in another collection? More work to do, but it’s always nice to find a “lost” type.

But what this means is that the bug above is most likely Gazoryctra lemberti, and not a new species after all. Glad I didn’t start too much work on this…