Spot spotted, or not spotted?

The spot in question is Lempke's Gold Spot, a rather lovely moth named after the Dutch lepidopterist, B.J. Lempke, who I believe was the first to discover this species in Europe (it had long been known in the USA). In Britain it's mostly found in the northern half of the country, but there are a few records for the south.

© Jim Vargo at Moth Photographers Group via EoL

Earlier today, Roy Leverton (author of the excellent Enjoying Moths) contacted me, in my capacity as Berkshire county moth recorder, regarding a potential Berkshire record of Lempke's Gold Spot. This was published in a note by R.F. Bretherton, in the Entomologist's Record for 1966 (available via the Biodiversity Heritage Library). In the note Bretherton refers to discovering that a specimen from his garden in Cumnor Hill, near Oxford, in 1940 had turned out to be Lempke's Gold Spot, a species that had only recently been recognised as European at the time of the note.

I had no record for Lempke's Gold Spot on the Berkshire database, and the species is not included in Brian Baker's book on the county's moths either, so this could have constituted a new species, the 638th, for the county list - always an enticing prospect! However, the question arises why Baker did not include the record in his book; many of Bretherton's records were included, and Bretherton's moth collection went to Reading Museum on his death, the museum for which Baker was natural history curator for many years, and retained an active interest in after his retirement. 

So I am left wondering whether Baker saw the Lempke's Gold Spot record or specimen and rejected it, or whether it didn't get into his book because he was simply unaware of it. The 'normal' Gold Spot is very similar to Lempke's Gold Spot (sometimes needing dissection to distinguish the two), and in Bretherton's article he states that the specimen was of a worn individual, so there is an element of doubt.

What all this adds up to is that, unfortunately, the verdict has to be "not proven", and the idea of Lempke's Gold Spot being a Berkshire moth must remain an intriguing possibility. If only we could travel back to 1940 and have a look round at the habitats then available.

Identifying invertebrates: downloadable keys

The previous post listed some identification keys that run online, as more-or-less interactive websites. This post includes some sites that have keys you can download (usually as pdf documents) and print out. See also my bookmarks on delicious.

Various groups
Some excellent materials, many produced by Brian Eversham, are available on the website for The Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Peterborough [link updated at October 2012]. These include keys to insect orders, grasshoppers and bush-crickets, water bugs, ants, beetle families, longhorn beetles and soldier beetles (plus other non-insect groups). NB that most of these are tailored to the Bedfordshire area, and do not necessarily include all UK species (the exception being the soldier-beetle one by Dr Mike Fitton, which does have all species).

Lepidoptera
Various resources, including an identification guide to grass moths (Pyralidae: Crambinae) compiled by Nick Asher, can be downloaded from the Berkshire Moth Group.

Hymenoptera
Some keys to selected groups of bees and ants are available from BWARS.

Diptera
Dipterists Forum has produced some really good downloadable keyes, some of which are available only to DF members; these include a very well-illustrated key to Diptera families, a key to Scathophagidae (dung-flies and allies), both of these by Stuart Ball, and a version of Alan Stubbs key to hoverfly tribes illustrated with photos by Stuart Ball - Dipterists Forum is worth joining just for these, let alone all the other benefits!

Available to anyone is the set of draft keys to craneflies, by Alan Stubbs, and keys to stilt and stalk flies, by Darwyn Sumner.

Coleoptera
The recently established Beetle News has included keys to various small groups of beetles in its first few editions, and they can be downloaded from the Amateur Entomologists' Society.

Field Studies Council
This listing from the FSC includes many of their published keys, available to purchase, but also some older papers that are free to download, including Unwin's key to Diptera families, and the now slightly out-of-date key to slugs by Cameron, Eversham and Jackson.

Identifying invertebrates: online keys

On Saturday 30 January, Roger Hawkins and I are running a workshop for the BENHS on using keys for insect identification. We'll mostly be working with published hard-copy keys, but we'll include some online keys as well. Below are some examples for various invertebrate groups.

[Migrant Hawker photo by Jonathan Silvertown, annotated by Martin Harvey]

I must admit that I don't yet make much use of online keys. This is partly because I'm fortunate in having a good range of printed keys available to me, and I'm sure it's also partly a case of 'sticking with what I know' rather than spending time learning the online ones (all keys require time spent on them to get familiar with their particular approach). However, I think there are still some problems with online keys, from the practical one of having to have a computer within easy view of your specimen or microscope, to more intrinsic issues about the ease of flicking through a book to compare different sections, as opposed to having to switch between different windows on a computer.

However, online keys are likely to become more widespread and will no doubt get better as time goes on, just as printed ones have (and continue to do so), and no doubt the two will be seen as complementary rather than an either/or choice.

See below for some online keys to try out. For a longer list (including plants and other groups as well as invertebrates) see my bookmarks on delicious, and let me know if there are any other good keys out there, or any thoughts you have on using online keys. A post on downloadable keys will follow.

Various groups
The most comprehensive set of online keys that I am aware of is the DELTA Intkey system. This requires you to download some software onto your computer, after which you can either download various individual keys, or run them from the web.

At the moment there is quite a wide range of keys available within this system, for various taxonomic groups (not just invertebrates) and different parts of the world, but for UK insect purposes they include:

Orders of insects, families of Coleoptera, families of Diptera, genera of Ephemeroptera, families of Hemiptera, families of Hymenoptera, families of Lepidoptera, genera of butterflies, genera of Geometridae, genera of Noctuidae, species of Phyllonorycter, species of Odonata, genera of Orthoptera, families of Trichoptera.

These are multi-access keys so that you can answer the set of questions in any sequence, and need only answer the ones you're confident of - the system will endeavour to give you a best match of one or more names for your specimen. I've made most use of the family keys for Coleoptera and Diptera, but I have to admit they've not proved as helpful as I hoped, and I still tend to return to paper-based single-access (dichotomous) keys for backup. But it is always good to have additional keys available for comparison, and no doubt if I used them more I'd get more used to their idiosyncrasies and perhaps find them more helpful.

There are some draft online keys available on iSpot (part of OPAL), including a simple 'key to minibeasts' - this part of iSpot is still under development, and there'll be more to come.

Coleoptera
The Watford Coleoptera Group (click on "ID aids") are making a range of identification aids available, some in the form of keys, some as notes on particular species or groups of species.

Hymenoptera
[added on 10 February 2010]
The Natural History Museum provides a very useful key to bumblebees.

Diptera
These online keys to various families of Diptera are managed by Paul Beuk, who also runs the excellent Diptera.info. You may need to register on Diptera.info to get full access to the keys. Some of these keys are online versions of existing printed keys, others are new (e.g. includes the best key I'm aware of for genus Sylvicola in family Anisopodidae).

Not a key, but some very helpful support for keys is provided by the Anatomical Atlas of Flies, from CSIRO in Australia. This is a truly excellent web implementation of a morphology diagram and glossary of names for parts of flies, using detailed close-ups of real insect specimens. But it needs a good broadband connection to work at any speed!

Mark van Veen's Faunist is a Dutch site with keys to various families of Diptera, plus Odonata, Orthoptera and sea-shells. The latter three are in Dutch only, but most of the Diptera keys are in English. They are well-illustrated and easy to use, and I think cover most of the British species in the families included. Plenty of information about the species is given (but remember that this refers to the fauna in Holland, which will include additional species and different habitats/behaviours compared to the UK).

Some of these keys to robber-flies (Asilidae) by Fritz Geller-Grimm are applicable to the UK (others cover various parts of the world).

For those flies with larvae that produce leaf-mines (largely Agromyzidae, plus a few Anthomyiidae etc.) there are keys based on the foodplant on the excellent UK Fly Mines site.

Lepidoptera
Similarly, for leaf-mines of Lepidoptera try Barry Dickerson's online key, on the British Leafminers website. This is largely based on volumes 1 and 2 of "The Moths and Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland", but with some additions and revisions. A very useful resource (but be aware of all the non-lepidopterous insects that also make leaf-mines, most of which are listed, but not keyed, elsewhere on the site).

Butterfly Conservation/Moths Count provide a simple key to day-flying moths.

Odonata
There is a good identification key to Irish dragonflies and damselflies, but it covers males only, and not all UK species are included.

Mollusca
The Conchological Society provide some online keys and other identification notes for various groups of snails and slugs.

Arachnida
This German website has a key to European spider families.

iSpot features moth new to Britain

The OPAL iSpot project (see previous post) has had an exciting few days - a moth, found by six-year-old Katie Dobbins in Berkshire, was posted on iSpot, and has turned out to be a species not recorded in Britain before: Pryeria sinica, the Euonymus Leaf-notcher. This is native to Asia but has been found in a couple of places in the States since 2001.

Further details and more photos are on the Berkshire Moth Group website.

Thanks to Katie Dobbins for getting her dad to report the moth, and to Martin Honey of the Natural History Museum for his help in confirming its identity. Full details will be published as soon as possible, and the specimen is being passed on to the NHM.

This may well be just a one-off importation with plants or packaging, but it's emerged via the Back Garden Moths forum that the Euonymus Leaf-notcher was also seen in Spain last June, the only other record for Europe that we've heard of (so far!).

The Open University press office have made good use of the story and so far it's been picked up by the Express, Mail and Mirror. As usual the papers have their own perspective on this, and according to taste the moth is either the "UK's rarest moth" or the next major pest outbreak.

All good fun, and hopefully Katie has enjoyed her encounters with biodiversity and the media!

more moths and media

The Moths and Media talk (see below and below) gets another outing on Monday 8 June, 7,45pm, for Wycombe Wildlife Group - all welcome if you're within reach of High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. Details are here.

links from Moths and the Media talk

Here are the links to many of the websites referred to in the "Moths and the Media" talk I gave in Newbury on 19 May 2009, for Butterfly Conservation and BBOWT, and again for Moths Count at the South Wales Moth Recorders’ Gathering, September 2009.

Many of the links, including most of the 'serious' mothing identification sites and online resources for moth recorders, have already been listed in my previous post on this subject and aren't repeated here. The ones that are new:

Additional mothing sites

• Berkshire Moth Group
  
• Butterfly Conservation moth pages (including key to day-flying moths)
• BC Upper Thames Branch moth sightings (up-to-date news of what's been seen in Berks, Bucks and Oxon)
• Netherlands Microlepidoptera (Dutch text, excellent photos)
• Moths aren't scary they rock! (moth supporters on Facebook)

Online mapping and grid references

• Where's the path - OS maps and Google aerial photos side-by-side (this site has recently moved URL)
• Grab a grid reference - excellent innovation from Keith Balmer for Bedfordshire Natural History Society, displays grid reference squares at various resolutions over Google maps and aerials (works throughout UK)

Moth-related blogs (a small and fairly random selection from among many)

• Garden Critters (moths and other wildlife from Tilehurst, Berkshire)
• Martin's Moths (i.e. Martin Wainwright of the Guardian)
• Calderdale Moths, Butterflies and Dragonflies
• Thornton Moth Man (complete with great illustration of a moth-er in action)
• St Margaret's at Cliffe Photo Diary (various wildlife including moths)
• North American Moths Backyard Inventory (interesting comparison with mothing in the UK)

Moth miscellany

• Rachel talks to a moth (Big Brother 2008)
• Recycled wool anti-moth sachets (from Instructables website)
• Make your own moths from felt
• Dr Who scenes created by moths (actually a well-reported story from Daily Mail)
• Vampire moths (this story got widely and rather sensationally reported, but there is some interesting science behind it)
• The Moth Generator - using magnetic moths to produce electricity (fun but not terribly practical concept!)
• Moths mimicking spiders
• Grizzly Bears feed on moths

moths and ... contemporary music

In a former life I spent ten years as a professional musician (trombonist and composer), specialising in the further outreaches of contemporary classical music. The kind of stuff that gets dismissed as "squeeky-gate". It's what I've enjoyed listening to since I was a teenager.

My 'favourite composer' all this time has been Harrison Birtwistle, who writes music that is joyously, gratuitously dissonant and beautiful. As well as performing his music whenever I got the chance, I was a full-on fan, collecting his printed music and getting him to sign it for me.

There is definitely an elemental feel to his music, some of which is explicitly based around the idea of landscapes (Silbury Air being a prime example), and it has always felt in keeping with my love for the natural world. But I didn't realise until I read it in last Saturday's Guardian that I share another interest with Birtwistle, namely a fascination with moths. Apparently, Birtwistle has collected moths since he was 13:

Moths are magical - you can never see them until you trap them. I have an idea to write a requiem for all the species of moth that are extinct, using their Latin names.

From almost anyone else that would sound an unpromising idea for a piece of music, but I bet Birtwistle could make something of it. Can't wait to find out what.

[Photograph of Silbury Hill by Greg O'Beirne]

analysing county moth datasets

County moth datasets tend to be large and 'messy' affairs - messy in the sense that they are large aggregations of data from a variety of sources, collected using a variety of methods. Some people will run a mercury vapour trap all night long in their garden, several times a week; others will run an occasional actinic trap for a few hours on a nature reserve; others will just send in a few sightings of moths they've found by day. Is it possible to draw any overall conclusions about which moths are increasing or decreasing from this mass/mess of data?

In an attempt to look at this for the Berkshire moth database, I've set up some user queries for use in MapMate that compare numbers of records and of individuals of particular species against total numbers for the year. Full details and a download of the queries are here on my kitenet website. Here are the resulting graphs for Mottled Rustic, currently doing very poorly in Berkshire:

moths on the web - news update

Positioned somewhere on the sublime–ridiculous scale ...

• Moths provide inspiration for green energy: the structure of moths' eyes enables them to 'harvest' light extremely efficiently, and this is providing a model for constructing more effective solar cells
  
• This is weird and possibly sinister, but US Defense researchers are trying to produce living insects with electronic implants so that they be controlled and directed - Cyborg moths
• Man finds moth in pre-washed, pre-packed salad shocker (well, at least it was a clean moth - what would be most appropriate in a salad, Mamestra brassicae?, Cucullia lactucae?)
• Is it a batman, is it a superman, no, it's ... Killer Moth

Not being too familiar with Killer Moth I consulted this review, "What is there to say about Killer Moth? He’s probably second only to Kite-Man as Batman’s goofiest foe ... Killer Moth is a fairly standard figure, but his wings push his rating up a little higher."

web resources for moth recorders

I've been invited by Moths Count to give a presentation at the English moth recorders conference (Birmingham, 31 January 2009) on how moth recorders are using the web. The presentation itself (with audio now available again) can be seen below, and below that are links to the sites mentioned in the presentation. This is by no means a complete set of useful moth websites, but it does pick out some that I think are really good examples, and especially useful to moth recorders (and if you want more here's my full list of Lepidoptera-related links.)

Moth recording resources on the web

View more presentations from Martin Harvey. (tags: wildlife_recording moths)

Information and photos
Perhaps the most familiar site for information and photos of adult moths is UKmoths. For early stages, UKleps has an astonishing set of photos, covering the full life cycle for many species. British leafminers gives comprehensive information on that group of moths (and see also British insect miners, which covers non-Lepidopterous leaf-mines as well). For those moths that need dissection to be identified see the Lepidoptera dissection group.

Egroups and forums
The best-known and longest established egroups are on Yahoo: UKmoths, UKmicromoths, the migrant recorders network and UKleps. There are an increasing number of web-based wildlife discussion forums as well, many of which include moths. One of the most popular of these is Wild About Britain, with over 25,000 registered members. You can also discuss moths on Facebook via Moths aren't scary they rock!!

Making identification easier
Ideas for improving identification resources on the web include making it easy to compare similar species; making it possible to annotate images online; and encouraging better labelling of photos and of the 'determinations' (identifications) associated with them (e.g. documenting who has identified them and when).

The Suffolk Moth Group has an excellent feature on its species pages, which allows you to compare similar species - you can compare photos, flight periods, habitats etc. (example species account). Kuvia ja havaintoja perhosista (moths in Finland) covers some moth species in detail (including carpets and pugs), and has a great feature where you can click on the moth photos and each opens up in its own window, making it easy to arrange and compare them side-by-side.

One of my current jobs is with the iSpot website, part of the OPAL project at the Open University. iSpot aims to connect beginner naturalists with a supportive community of experts and fellow enthusiasts. If you're knowledgeable about moths or wildlife, can you spare some time to help others learn about what they've seen? And if you're involved with a recording scheme or society then get in touch to find out how you can be 'badged' on iSpot, with links through to your own website.

Other resources
For maps and grid references (including 1940s maps and aerial photos) try the superb Where's the Path (but you may need to catch it early in the morning as Ordnance Survey restrict the number of map views per day). The BSBI's Herbaria at Home project has a tool for checking which vice-county a grid reference of place name falls in.

For researching associations between plants and moths (and other insects) the Biological Records Centre has put its Database of Insects and their Foodplants online. And try the Suffolk Moth Group again for the Field Tips - month-by-month info on what moths (especially caterpillars) can be found where.

Predictive mothing
Several county websites have set up a "what's flying tonight" feature, using the county records to show which species are most likely to be seen (as adults) on any date. See versions for Norfolk, Suffolk and Somerset (I find they are useful even if you live a long way from these counties).

New developments
One of the most innovative moth websites is Norfolk Moths. Species info, distribution maps, online recording and many other features, including Mobile Moths, which reformats all this mass of data so that it can be accessed via mobile devices such as iPhones and Blackberries. You can also follow Norfolk Moths on Twitter.

Don't forget to turn the computer off and do some mothing sometimes as well!

Peppered Moth extinction - let's celebrate!

I've been enjoying Martin Wainwright's blog (Martin's Moths) - lots of mothy goodness but also examples and anecdotes about how moths are perceived in a wider cultural context. Martin's day job is as northern editor for the Guardian, and his latest blog post links to one of his articles, where he correlates the news that more people are living to a hundred with the decline in the melanic form of the Peppered Moth. It's a fascinating read, and full marks to Martin for getting some proper moth science into a national newspaper article.

However, the language used implies that the decline of the melanic Peppered Moth might be something to worry about - Martin's article says that the decline "looks terminal" and talks of "extinction" of the melanic form, and I've noticed similar language in other articles. I'm not sure what it means to say that a genetic variety of a moth is extinct - presumably the form could reappear if conditions change again (e.g. if sooty pollution were to return)? And in any case, the loss of this form is all good news isn't it - the reduction in this form of pollution is surely a success story? And the Peppered Moth as a species is still doing okay, thankfully.

There's plenty of actual species that are declining fast, but the evolution of Peppered Moth forms is something to celebrate for once!