La polilla Skeptical

Wow que han pasado unas semanas desde mi último post, y estoy un poco avergonzado de haber dejarlo ir tanto tiempo. ¿Qué he estado haciendo? No es un no a todo. No hay impresionantes viajes de recolección, ninguna especie o descubrimientos nuevos. En realidad he estado sentado en un microscopio de disección genitales o databasing moscas parasitarias. I’ll have to do a followup post to delve into those a bit more…

But for now, here is a picture form last August. I was standing on an open stretch of Chihuahuan desert right outside of Douglas Arizona; a whopping one mile from the Mexican border. I arrived that evening with my collecting colleague, microlepidopterist Peter Jump, and we had just set up camp as the roll of thunder grew close. Aside from the extinct cinder-cones surrounding us and an occasional illegal immigrant, we were the only (and highest) thing around for miles. But the lightening was too hard to resist, I need a picture! But I didn’t have a cable release, nor a tripod, or even a good camera. So what to do… I chose the genius option of standing outside for 40 minutes with my Canon point-and-shoot. I missed 99% of every shot I took, while with every passing minute the lightening grew closer. Finalmente, I stumbled upon this decent image. The storm ended up being brief, we huddle in the car (that you can just make out in the picture) while the lightening approached and it drizzled on us for an hour then moved on. Collecting that night was impressive. There were so many moths in the trap that everything had gotten beaten to bits. I managed to rescue a handful of good specimens, but lesson learned for next time.