To reignite the Monday Moth series here is a stunner: Melemaea magdalena (Geometridae).
This rare beauty has previously only been known from scattered localities across the mountain west and only from a few individuals every other season. That is until Denver Museum volunteer Barbara Bartell began inventorying moths on her property near Golden Gate Canyon State Park in the Rocky Mountain front range. Over 8,000′ these moths turn out to be a regular visitor at her cabin blacklight and we now have the largest series known of this stunning species (and all perfectly curated!).
Leave it to Denver to combine two things perfect for this blog – entomology and skepticism! If you haven’t seen these clips then take a second to watch the video above. At the very least this appears to be a real phenomenon, camera crews from the news station were able to record the very same effect. So what could they be?
I had an instantaneous recognition of what these UFOs were – flying insects, probably flies of some kind (Diptera) mating in the warm afternoon sun. It has been nice here in Denver and the hours around 1pm are always the warmest (strangely the same time the “UFOs” are most active). But it’s hard to tell with any degree of certainty what these objects are because of the way that KDVR shows the clips. Odd angles, 2 second flashes, fast forward, super slow motion, super contrast… you only have fractions of a second to see the clip in real time. But when you do it seems so very obvious – and in my professional opinion – that these are insects.
Unfortunately they now have a quote from a Denver entomologist, Mary Ann Hamilton (misspelled as Mart on the KDVR website), saying these are not insects. Facepalm. I don’t know Mary and I certainly can’t blame her for being uncertain as to what these are after staring at the footage over and over and over again. In my opinion it was too hasty to rule out insects. Especially because once you enhance… enhance… and ENHANCE the footage you being to lose all track of reality. The camera footage has recorded very out of focus insects, and the very nature of optics means you have lost most of the information outside of the depth of field. And so enlarging and slowing down these images only makes this problem infinitely worse. The pixels become too large to render any meaningful information and an effect known as pareidolia starts to kick in. Our brains start jumbling together often meaningless data into something recognizable. This is why people see a face on Mars, or rocket boosters coming out of the butts of these insects flying over Denver. And I don’t blame Mary for looking at some of these shiny objects whipping around in weird directions and not seeing insects. But perhaps KDVR could have requested an interview with someone at the Denver Museum (which they did not) – they would have been given an entomologist with much more field experience. I can’t say Mary is unqualified and I don’t mean any disrespect to her, but I don’t believe running a butterfly house is the same thing as being an active research entomologist.
This video is pretty excellent for explaining insect UFOs – although these are much larger insects than the ones captured above Denver.
And check out this cool video of a Syrphidae fly hovering in the sun – imagine these out of focus and hurtling around in front of the camera…
That summer sure flew by, and I have to admit that being unemployed really, really turned my productivity into crap. But the good news is that I’ve just relocated to Denver for a job in entomology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science! I’ll be working on databasing and photographing insects for the Southwest Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN). It’s wonderful to be back to work and I’m feeling a lot more blogging coming on… not to mention this is one of the most amazing ecoregions in the United States. I am already plotting lots of ways to take advantage of these mountains in the spring.
So why not take a brief tour of my new office through the looking glass of creationist wackos. It’s nice to remind myself why I love talking about science.
A Monday moth in fuzzy pink – Dryocampa rubicunda (Saturniidae). These rosy maple moths are pretty common in southern Illinois, but always a stunner when they come to light.
Not an uncommon moth, but a distinguished looking one. This is Catocala ilia (Erebidae) ((formerly Noctuidae)), and it feeds on a handful of Oaks. It came into my light over the weekend in Southern Illinois, down in the Trail of Tears State Forest. As with so many other moths this widespread species has a number of variations which may turn out to be distinct – pending a monograph of the species…
I’ve now banked a handful of nice moth images so expect more Monday moths! (even though this is a Friday moth).
The local news for most of the eastern US and Canada has been aflutter (ha) recently with reports of the irruption of Vanessa atalanta – the Red Admiral butterfly. While this is a common occurrence every spring for these butterflies to migrate north from their overwintering grounds in the southern US, the sheer numbers this year are staggering. There are quite literally thousands of admirals in our back yards.
So what’s different this year?
There is much speculation about the warm spring weather (warmest March on record for many places) and often lots of misinformation to go along with some armchair entomology. Most of the news sources I’ve come across say the warm spring has allowed these butterflies to flourish and reproduce in abnormal numbers. That isn’t quite possible however, V. atalanta overwinters as an adult. The southern states provide temps just warm enough for adult Vanessa butterflies to hide in the fall and be the very first to awaken in the spring to get a jump start on mating. Even if the butterflies were awake in February the host plants were not yet up (thistles); the butterflies in our backyards are from last year.
But what if weather did play a role in this boom cycle? Last year was a La Niña year with our beautiful and mild winter. The year before was an El Niño, most of the eastern US was assaulted with winter and we suffered at the hands of the epic Chicago “snowpocalypse”. Perhaps this combination depressed population numbers sufficiently in 2010/2011 which then decreased parasitoid load, allowing for greater overall butterfly fecundity in the summer of 2011. Those overwintering butterflies were then granted a warm winter that could have allowed for a lower winter mortality. As the butterflies moved north this spring there were no frosty nights to cut into populations – just lots of hungry birds. The result would be an abnormal influx of migrating butterflies.
Today’s moth is an understated brown Crambidae, Loxostege brunneitincta. While this isn’t a particularly captivating moth it does have an interesting story that illustrates the need for scientific collections and museum loans. If you read the label image you will notice the moth was originally collected in 1927 by E. P. Van Duzee in Truckee, CA. Van Duzee was a noted Hemipterist and a curator at the California Academy of Sciences for 24 years until his death in 1940. His collections of bugs (in the literal sense) alone totaled 164,442 specimens, and like many entomologists Van Duzee collected everything he came across and likely added another 100,000 specimens to the museum of groups he wasn’t even studying.
And so this little brown moth remained in the CAS until the 1970’s when Eugene Munroe borrowed specimens for his work on the genus Loxostege. The resulting 1976 fascicle described this species as new to science and even used this specimen as an illustration in the book. If you’re unfamiliar with the term paratype it’s a specimen from the series (excluding the holotype) that was used to describe that species. And while this particular moth doesn’t seem to be abundant, the genus does have some more notorious pests like the southern beet and alfalfa webworms. More often than not the pets themselves are well known but the genera they belong to might be enigmatic. But thanks in part to Van Duzee and many entomologists like him, Munroe was able to assemble a collection of specimens that would have taken decades (if not longer) to gather. And only with a sufficient collection is a comprehensive assessment of species possible.
On a brisk 37 degree morning in Northern Illinois I decided to dust off my camera and explore the progress of “spring”. I hit Rollins Savanna Forest Preserve by 6:30am, just in time for first light to melt the patchy frost. A week and a half ago temps were pushing the upper 80’s and summer felt in full swing. In typical Chicago fashion things didn’t last long, the weather returned to its fickle spring form with storms and (what now seemed like) bitter cold.
Despite a 3 hour hike I only came across one butterfly – a red admiral, Vanessa atalanta, and about a half-dozen dog ticks (Dermacentor sp.). Beggars can’t be choosers, there was hardly a single insect out. I might as well take photos of birds…
The very first and most abundant birds were the Tree Swallow, Tachycineta bicolor. These two were just greeting the dawn and stretching out their little legs. They seemed to be rather patient subjects, a good first-bird-to-ever-photograph!
A prairie isn’t complete without a chorus of Redwinged-Blackbirds.
Despite my best efforts this is one of the better Sandhill Crane images I could get. If you click through my Flickr set you’ll find one more, but sneaking up on them in the marsh was rather difficult. I don’t get birds yet…
This Coyote let me get pretty close, looks like they are fed well in suburbia.
Back to the Monday Moth! This beautiful insect is Stiria dyari (Noctuidae) collected on a February trip outside of Cataviña, Baja California Mexico. I believe the host plants are still unknown, but all of the moths in the genus Stiria have these brilliant yellow forewings that help camouflage them on the stem of a yellow flowered plant. There are 7 currently described species most of which are found in the SW United States and northern Mexico, but Stiria rugifrons makes it into the great plains. All of the species have poorly defined and often overlapping ranges, not to mention the genitalia can highly variable. It’s very likely the final word has not been written about these beautiful noctuids quite yet.
Back from hiatus and back to the Genius of the Press insect-news-failure series! Fresh off the presses from last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK was shut down for a massive infestation of clothes moths. The picture shown here from “The Nation” story is a far cry from a proper clothes moth (Tineidae) – looks like a Noctuidae of some kind.
But it’s hard to blame them for getting this moth wrong when UK pest control companies don’t even know what a clothes moth is. Here is Instakil’s version of “the moth” that happens to be a Plusiinae noctuid.
And the winner for failed identification goes to this other UK company “Hawk Force“. Not even a moth – but a skipper butterfly!
