Oleh Chris Grinter, on April 19th, 2011
 Source: Wikipedia It turns out that Richard Branson has a new idea; to save the ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) oleh importing them to his private British Virgin Island. As the article points out Branson spent millions of pounds and years of effort to turn the island into “the most ecologically friendly island in the world”. But it appears Mr Branson has decided to forgo conservation science and rewrite it in a more PR friendly way. In come the lemurs despite the cautions of his own ecological assessment because he wants “…to create a second island habitat and the conditions on Moskito are perfect.” Perhaps Branson has a bizarro world dictionary where the definition of the word perfect is “something completely dissimilar from the original”.
OK sure, at first the idea sounds like a fine one – the lemurs are endangered, why not try to give them a second wild refuge? Baik, Dr James Lazell of the Conservation Agency has had 31 years experience in the Virgin Islands and has pointed out that “Lemurs are agile, dexterous, aggressive, omnivorous animals that could have a detrimental effect on these simple island ecologies. They eat absolutely everything – lizards, fruit, roots, serangga, birds’ eggs.” Oh but don’t worry, nothing bad can happen when you introduce primates to an island (introduced primates devastate Florida Key). Branson knows that the lemurs will only “take the odd gecko” (like the rare endemic dwarf-gecko Sphaerodactylus parthenopion), not to mention they probably won’t spread to other islands since they “hate swimming” (ring tailed lemur swimming).
So why then the ring-tailed? Not because it is the most endangered (ada banyak of other more endangered lemurs), but because it is the most iconic. That is what really drives me up the wall about this ridiculous idea. Not only is he naively introducing a possibly invasive species into a sensitive island habitat – but because he is spreading a false message of conservation. Like a slow child Branson has rushed to the ring-tailed to save it while completely missing the entire idea behind conservation. The ring-tailed is a flagship species, one that draws attention to the devastation that is occurring in Madagascar. One cute cuddly animal to represent the staggeringly unique and diverse habitats of its homeland. But not if Richard Branson has anything to say about it. Why bother protect Madagascar when you can swoop in and create a new home for a primate everyone loves? Fiuh, crisis averted. Richard fiddles while Madagascar burns.
I suspect this freakish island zoo is simply masquerading as conservation and the real incentive behind it is commercial. Over the next few years there will be a handful of “luxury, carbon-neutral homes built on the island”. A pretty brilliant scheme to incentivize the purchase of homes that undoubtedly will cost tens of millions of dollars each – and you can pretend to feel good about protecting the world while you do it. After all the Virgin Islands lack any charismatic wildlife; nature sure does a terrible job of creating a billionaires wonderland. What comes next to the island?
Maybe… just maybe… Branson has Dr. Moreau moving in first.
Oleh Chris Grinter, pada tanggal 18 April, 2011 Beberapa minggu yang lalu saya diundang untuk bergabung dengan entomologi kelas Berkeley di lapangan untuk akhir pekan. Our destination was the Biru Oak Ranch Cadangan; salah satu cadangan terbaru ke University of California sistem terletak tepat di luar San Jose di Gunung Hamilton (peta di bawah). It was a joint spider and beetle class trip, hosted by Charles Griswold dan Dave Kavanaugh respectively. And despite a frost on Saturday night we managed to find some interesting insects. You’ve already seen my images of the Scaphinotus (Carabidae), but here is a larger set of images from both myself and colleague and fellow blogger Tamas Szuts.
 Staphylinidae: Aleocharinae?  Pholcidae : likely Pholcus sp.  Salticidae: Phidippus sp. Continue reading Blue Oak Ranch Reserve
Oleh Chris Grinter, pada tanggal 6 April, 2011 Oke – a few apologies for not having full images *yet* of the larvae in question (I will in a few days!). Over the weekend I was out with a group of Berkeley students on Mount Hamilton and PhD candidate Meghan Culpepper collected a few species of Scaphinotus and a some larvae! So the specimen from Monday was indeed the larvae of a Scaphinotus beetle feasting inside the shell of a native terrestrial snail. This challenge was a hard one since these predatory Scaphinotus larvae are rarely encountered and there are zero images of out there – and none of them feeding. Better luck next time!
For now, here is an undetermined Scaphinotus species. In the coming weeks I will have 4-5 species photographed and identified (by Meghan) – and the larvae will have to be sequenced for species ID. Stay tuned.
Oleh Chris Grinter, on April 4th, 2011 
Came across this guy while out in the field the other day, what’s going on here? Points awarded for Order/Family/Genus – but even experts in this group can’t figure out the species quite yet.
(everyone in the field with me should hold their comments until the guesses come in!)
Oleh Chris Grinter, on March 30th, 2011  Lasia klettii: Photos by April Nobile, CAS
For the most part flies are not an insect I get overly excited about. Namun, the enigmatic family Acroceridae are the exception. I’ll start sharing some interesting genera from time to time – the morphology of the family is amazingly diverse. Most of my days are spent at the museum inventorying our massive collection of over 16,000 Acorcerids (aka small-headed flies). That may not sound all too impressive when you compare it to other more abundant families (and it does pale in comparison to the over 17,500,000 other specimens we do have in the museum); but it turns out to represent many, if not most, dari semua known specimens for the entire family. While there are likely large assemblages of these flies in other institutions, the California Academy of Sciences can easily claim the record ever since receiving the collection of Dr. Evert I. Schlinger (who occasionally comes in to work from the museum).
Acrocerids turn out to be a rather difficult group to study because of how rare they are in nature, their parasitoid biology, and how difficult they can be to catch on the wing. Their large thorax is packed with muscles that rocket the fly through the air – so if you don’t catch them at a flower you’re left longing for a Malaise trap. Ev did tell me one story of learning to catch these on the wing in Costa Rica. You stand downwind from a colleague in the field – as soon as someone hears something zip past, you swing wildly hoping to snare the fly by chance… it does work every once in a while. These flies are also the only known endoparasites of adult spiders (there may be a record of a Tachinid…). The above genus, NeoLasia, is a parasite of Theraphosid tarantulas (something like aphonopelma). As a larvae the fly works its way up the legs of a spider and burrows into the abdomen where it then settles in next to the book lung and pokes a little breathing hole. Then it waits patiently for the spider to near maturity. With female tarantulas, the fly could be dormant for decades. Eventually something akin to the movie Aliens happens and the larvae feeds on the internal organs of the spider then emerges to pupate. But figuring out whether or not a spider has a parasite is impossible without a dissection – so large collections of live spiders must be maintained to obtain host records. Parasitoid biology is just so cool.
The above specimen (Lasia klettii a new, unnamed, jenis) was collected in 1977 by Schlinger near the town of Alamos, Meksiko – on flowers with the likely mimic model, a Chrysomelidae beetle (beetle people, any ideas beyond family?).
Oleh Chris Grinter, pada 24 Maret, 2011 Lebih baik berhati-hati dengan apa yang Anda lakukan saat keluar di pedesaan. Peternakan bisa menjadi tempat yang berbahaya, terutama jika Anda seorang fotografer. Usulan undang-undang di Florida, berjudul hanya “peternakan”, mencoba untuk membuat fotografi atau gambar di, pada atau dari sebuah peternakan tanpa persetujuan tertulis eksplisit FELONY tingkat pertama (sampai 30 tahun penjara). Apa yang mungkin menjadi pembenaran untuk undang-undang ini?? Wartawan Barry Doyle menyarankan Senator yang baik ada di kantong Agribisnis – mencari petani miskin yang menjadi sasaran kelompok hak-hak binatang atau bahkan lebih buruk – kelompok hak asasi manusia! Saya cenderung setuju, undang-undang ini adalah bagian korupsi yang menjijikkan. Ini menjadi sangat buruk:
(2) Orang yang memotret, rekaman video, atau dengan cara lain menghasilkan gambar atau rekaman gambar, digital atau sebaliknya, di atau di pertanian atau properti lain di mana operasi pertanian yang sah dilakukan tanpa persetujuan tertulis dari pemiliknya, atau perwakilan resmi dari pemilik, melakukan kejahatan tingkat pertama…
Saya sangat mendorong setiap pembaca Florida saya untuk menulis ke Senator Norman dan ungkapkan rasa jijik mutlak Anda dalam undang-undangnya.
14031 n. Dale Mabry Blvd.
Tampa, FL 33618
(813) 265-6260
VOIP Senat: 41200
Saya juga mendorong semua orang di tempat lain untuk menulis surat kepada perwakilan AS Anda dan menyatakan kemarahan Anda atas kemungkinan pelanggaran hak amandemen pertama ini (hanya pelanggaran yang diusulkan saat ini).
Dan hanya untuk ukuran yang baik, ini adalah gambar ponsel buruk yang saya ambil saat berada di Oregon dengan banyak peternakan.
Oleh Chris Grinter, on March 22nd, 2011 Usually I come across horrible entomology articles regularly enough that I save a backlog for future series. This hasn’t been the case over the last few weeks, I haven’t come across the normal array of terrible media crud. Maybe I just get jaded and stop looking as carefully – but this week I even came across a moth related correction from the Maui News. They fixed their error, but must have deleted the original article…
And for this week I found artikel ini with the image below. Should be pretty easy to spot the weirdness (mereka do at least manage to point out that the moth is tidak the LBAM (light brown apple moth)).
Oleh Chris Grinter, pada 18 Maret, 2011 
Perhaps the only place in the world where you can find an American bison (vs. buffalo) standing near a beach next to a palm tree. The week on Santa Catalina was an wonderful one, and despite a cool spring with a few unseasonable frosts, some decent collecting was done. Here are just a few amusing images and you’ll notice one thing right away: no fields of wildflowers! As it turns out, almost a century of goat, pig and bison grazing has left mostly grass and cactus on the island. At one point there were over 1000 bison and countless herds of goats; it’s a wonder anything survived at all! Hari ini, there are thankfully only a modest ~200 bison left that are even on birth control (you guessed it, you can’t shoot the damn things since people “love” them – just like the stupid eucalyptus you can’t cut down). Di 1924 a small heard of bison were brought over to shoot the movie The Vanishing American. Tentu saja, the project went over budget, the scene was cut and the animals were let loose instead of paying to return them home. 80 years later and you’re left with an island you can only fight to “conserve” and not restore. Sad fact is that we have no clue what the island actually used to be like. It’s even hypothesized that the endemic island fox (of which we saw 6!) was brought over by indigenous peoples a few thousand years ago from neighboring islands. I guess it’s in our nature to mess with our environment.
As I was photographing the above, this beast walked up behind me. It wasn’t running, I was!
Oleh Chris Grinter, pada 8 Maret, 2011 [cetsEmbedGmap src = http://maps.google.com/maps?ll = 33.393039, -118,416824&SPN = 0.359452,0.715485&t = h&z = 11 width = 600 height = 330 marginwidth = 0 marginheight = 0 frameborder = 0 scrolling = auto]
Besok pagi aku pergi untuk 10 day collecting trip down to Catalina Island. Aku sudah cukup beruntung diundang untuk bergabung Dr. Jerry Powell dari UC Berkeley pada survei ngengat, dan ini akan menjadi pertama kalinya saya ke salah satu pulau. The Channel Islands are known for their high levels of endemism, and none is more famous than the Channel Island Fox. There are also a handful of endemic butterflies and moths that I’ll be hoping to find, but at the very least I know it’s wildflower season and I’ve got my camera primed.
I will likely have little or no access to the internet while staying on the island, so hang tight for a week. Had I planned ahead I would have scheduled posts or a guest author! Please do stay tuned for some of my first images of the 2011 field season.
Oleh Chris Grinter, pada tanggal 3 Maret, 2011 
Rupanya something in the Mazda 6 fuel line is warm and inviting for the yellow sac spider, enough so that they are building webs over the vent systems of the 4 cylinder vehicles (and not the 6!). The problem has been deemed a “spider infestation” by the car company, and the clogged vent lines then can lead to a cracked gas tank and the possibility of a fire.
“A certain type of spider may weave a web in the evaporative canister vent line and this may cause a restriction of the line”
So far only 20 cases are confirmed, but this problem is prolific enough that it has lead to a recall of over 52,000 sedans! I think it’s high time the major car companies hire entomology consultants – after all, my retainer would be a lot less than the cost of that recall…
I consulted with our resident team of arachnologists here at the CAS, and the above image does appear to be a sac spider. It’s too hard to tell from the image, but it’s probably not an egregious taxonomic failure.
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