Today I received a very exciting parcel of peruvian tachinids from John Smit and Menno Reemer. The samples were taken during the last half of 2009 in the Sachavacayoc Centre, Tambopata river region. This is a very species-rich part of the world with a very interesting fauna to me. I will probably take another few weeks to mount the specimens before accessioning them and trying to identify some.
It goes without saying that I am very grateful to John & Menno for their hard work! 
EDIT (17/2/2010): So far I have seen lots of anonymous, black things but I have also seen:
- Beskia aelops (a fairly ubiquitous phasiine tachinid found right across the neotropics and into the southern states of North America)
- a few black Cordyligaster sp. (wasp-mimic tachinids with long bodies and very narrow waists)
- 2x Belvosia sp. (one of my favourite goniine tachinids – black with bright, white dusting on the apical tergites)
- lots of small Cholomyia sp. (a long-legged dexiine with a superficial similarity to Rhagio spp. in their body shape and coloration)
- a few even smaller Borgmeiermyia sp. (one of the small multifissicorn tachinids)
- and a very large Zelia sp. (a large, long dexiine with wide beige squares on the tergites)
Share on Facebook
Today Matt & I ran a tachinid identification workshop at the BENHS collection at Dinton Pastures. This was the 4th or 5th year that we have done this but it was still very well attended with a variety of people from experts to complete novices. The day started with a brief run-through and PowerPoint of what tachinids are and how to recognise them in the field. Then we moved pretty quickly over to the collections and got everyone identifying specimens.
The day was very tiring for Matt & I but it was good to hear happy dipterists at the end of the day all saying they’d enjoyed themselves and learned plenty! 
Share on Facebook
After 3 days of frantic reorganization in the Palearctic collection I have finally accessioned most of the tachinids I caught or was given last year – approximately 400-500 specimens!
This included batches from:
- southern Bavaria (donated a long time ago by Dr Donald Quicke from a sample collected by Dr M. Kuhlmann)
- Galicia in Spain (donated by Jose José Luis Camaño Portela as part of his species-recording project)
- southern Portugal (donated by Jorge Almeida)
- Provence (donated by Helene Dumas from her garden)
- French Pyrennes (collected by myself many years ago)
- Estonia (donated by Villu Soon)
- and a variety of single specimens given to me as part of my work in the Tachinid Recording Scheme.
All are very welcome and very much appreciated as they fill in important gaps in my collection and improve my knowledge of this group.
I have also sorted out a parcel to send to Peter Tschorsnig, containing a lot of the flies that have been causing me problems. These are specimens that either key with little confidence and that have no secondary / confirmatory characters to back up my determinations or species that belong to complex and difficult genera where a truly expert eye is required. I have also included several specimens of things that are possibly new to their region – e.g. a “Eumea mitis” caught by Ivan Perry in the UK, and a “Ceromya dorsigera” that could be a second record for Spain. I am very grateful for Peter’s help and I hope to have these specimens back in the coming months – and in the meantime I will keep my fingers crossed that I was close-enough with my determinations! 
Share on Facebook
It has been very ‘birdy’ in the last few days. Yesterday I went to a local lake with my girlfriend and we saw a really superb Red-crested Pochard – a possible released species but still quite unusual. Then today, while having our breakfast we saw 2 new garden species – a flock of 4 Redpoll on my bird feeders and a male Brambling in my Magnolia tree! Sadly my camera wasn’t handy to get some photos but hopefully they will be back in the next few days so I might update this post later
Share on Facebook
At long last I am very pleased to say that the OPAL cabinet project is finished! Yesterday I collected the final batch of drawers from Max at the NHM in London and slotted them into place – as in the photo The observant amongst you will notice that I have only 36 drawers in the cabinets, not 40, but I have bought 4 extra drawers as ’spares’ for working on accessions outside the cabinet.
Many thanks again to everyone at OPAL, the NHM and the AES for helping make this aquisition go so smoothly. The cabinets are already proving to be incredibly useful and will revolutionize the way we work at the Tachinid Recording Scheme
Share on Facebook
Whilst at the NHM last week Max Barclay kindly sorted me out with some new unit trays for the OPAL-funded cabinets. I have spent a few days transferring the collection over to the new trays and this is the result:
I’m sure you’ll agree, they look really professional and they fit much better than the old, mismatched ones. Many thanks to Max for working late and helping to find and sort-out all the boxes etc.
Hopefully I will be able to go back next week and pick up the remainder of the drawers to finish off the project completely.
Share on Facebook
Southern England had another blanket of snow last night – about 40cm in my area, which is the most snow I have seen since I was a child. Of course, the town was pretty much at a standstill and most people didn’t go in to work because our infrastructure just isn’t set up for this kind of weather.
After lunch I braved the conditions and went out for a walk to see what the neighbourhood looked like:
Share on Facebook
Last night we had one of the heaviest snow storms in many years and I woke to about 15-20cm of snow blanketting everything. Several friends have said they took hours to drive home from work last night and it seems that many people had to abandon their cars on the main road, rather than try to get up the hills to my road. At lunch time I walked down to the local shops and took a few photos:
Share on Facebook
I have just spent a really fun day with 2 friends of mine, Becca & John, driving up to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London to pick up the OPAL-funded insect cabinets!! Max & Howard were away in Peru on a NHM jolly but Paul Brown stood in for them and looked after us very well.
C&D had delivered the cabinets in the previous week and they were there ready for us to collect on arrival. Sadly the supply of drawers had temporarily dried up and the new unit-trays still hadn’t arrived from the suppliers so I can’t fit-out the second cabinet or move my collection over yet but I will collect those in December or January.
Once we had loaded up the van we went off to meet Erica McAlister (Diptera curator) & Silvio Nihei, a very eminent “tachinid-ologist” who is based in the Sao Paulo University Zoological Museum. Silvio is over here working on the types in the NHM tachinid collection, recording them and selecting material to take back with him to Sao Paulo. I gave him some of my French Guianan specimens and in return he will give back as much information as he can to me. He seemed very impressed with them and thinks that I have a few very interesting things in there – including possibly a new species of Borgmeiermyia!
Then after lunch I called in at the Angela Marmont Centre (AMC) to thank Lucy & John at OPAL for their help and funding and let them know how the project was progressing. Lucy showed me round the AMC, which looks like a superb resource for anyone interested in British wildlife and I passed on a few ideas that I have had for the next year’s funding round.
Then we all piled back into the van and came home for a bit of furniture removal, cabinet making & a slap-up curry! The cabinets went together fairly easily with a lot of help from Becca & John and I slotted in the first batch of 20 drawers, stood back and admired them … they look superb!!
Share on Facebook
I like to split the processing of Malaise trap samples into several distinct phases. The first phase is to empty the tubes of insects suspended in alcohol into individual tupperware trays and then work through them, splitting out the groups that I am interested in (mainly tachinids) and that I collect for friends.
The tachinids are then dried out slightly on filter-papers and then micropinned into flat, plastic boxes (as on the right of the photo). During this process I hook-out the male genitalia so that they can be viewed easily later. The other sorted samples that will be sent to other entomologists are stored in alcohol-tight tubes – one tube per date/collector/family.
Once the tachinids have dried out fully the next phase is to move the flies onto foam stages, give them a data label and pin them into working drawers. These drawers are work spaces where I can start looking for taxa that I have already described and pull out new taxa.
In this batch I have 273 tachinids plus about another 50 Hymenoptera and other Diptera families. I haven’t seen anything stunning this time but there are a lot of interesting taxa … lots of Borgmeiermyia cf. brasiliana etc.
Share on Facebook
Newsflash – the third batch of flies from Jean Cerda in French Guiana has arrived. Looks like a really big sample too so I am keeping my fingers crossed for plenty of fun this winter! More news to follow as I work through them
Share on Facebook
The 20 NHM drawers
The funding hasn’t come through yet but I always planned to make a contribution myself so last Friday I bought the first 20 drawers from Max Barclay at the Natural History Museum in London! I didn’t have to buy them so quickly but I wanted to make a tangible start to the project and it coincided very nicely with my girlfriend wanting a trip up to London so … I am now the proud owner of 20 hardwood drawers – glass-topped and unlined.
Max (curator of beetles and one of the new faces of the Darwin Center) also kindly agreed to provide me with as many secondhand large unit-trays as I needed – they are slightly short but in all other respects fit the drawers perfectly. I also have an option to buy new unit-trays through the museum – they’re not cheap though so I am counting my pennies and trying to use secondhand as much as possible.
Unit trays are quite a problem because, although you might think that a ‘unit’ implies a standard size, there are multiple sizes. Oxford University Museum and Edinburgh have standardized on a wide ‘accession-type’ drawer; while the Natural History Museum & Cardiff Museum have standardized on a narrower, squarer design of drawer. There are other sizes too and the whole thing screams out for a revision but these massive museums have so many drawers already that it would cost a fortune to rehouse them, not to mention the years of work to transfer specimens into new drawers … sadly it will never happen.
A close-up of a drawer with unit-trays
Share on Facebook
Earlier this year The Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) network announced that they had made grants available to UK natural history societies and recording schemes. OPAL are a multipartner organization that aims “to create and inspire a new generation of nature-lovers by getting people to explore, study, enjoy and protect their local environment.” They are funded by the Big Lottery Fund.
Traditionally funding has been very scarce for amateur entomologists so I was very keen to apply for some – despite the rather pesimistic grumblings I got from other entomologists. Coincidentally I had been experimenting with unit-tray drawers and could see that this was the way I should be keeping my expanding collection so I had an immediate project to be funded – to rehouse the Tachinid Recording Scheme’s collection into cabinets with drawers fitted-out for unit-trays.
I did some research and the choice was between modern, steel cabinets; hand-made wooden cabinets; or second-hand Hill’s units from ex-museum stock. In the end I went for the steel cabinets (new) fitted with recycled, ex-museum, hardwood drawers (from the NHM) with unit trays (new but also from the NHM). The steel cabinets are sealed units and should provide a really pest-proof primary barrier against museum/carpet beetle (Anthrenus), which is common in most houses, while the tried & trusted hardwood drawers will provide a secondary barrier. This should mean that I need to use the minimum of insecticides/chemicals against pests – something that I am keen to do because I have to breath the air around these cabinets on a daily basis!
There was a little problem with the minimum requirements that all applicants must meet, but Lucy Carter at OPAL was very helpful and made it very clear that we were the kind of organization that they wanted to support. So, after a little negociation, OPAL changed their rules to allow me to apply through another society that fulfilled their requirements – such as the Amateur Entomologist’s Society (AES). Dafydd Lewis (the AES Secretary) was very helpful and agreed to support my application so after a few evenings of work pulling together costings and writing out my application form we got the application in just in time to meet the July 31st deadline! I waited nervously until a few days ago when I received the message I had been waiting for from Lucy Carter to say that they had approved my grant for the full/maximum amount allowed – 2000 pounds!! This money will be suplimented by 650 pounds of my own money to form the project funding.
This was really great news and marks a quantum leap in the way the recording scheme will work from now on. Instead of storing all specimens in jumbled store boxes with all the attendant problems (bad organization & greater risk of damage/pests) we will store our main collection in state-of-the-art cabinets. Every species will be catalogued in a logical way and it will be easy to find anything I need for comparisson. At the moment the palearctic collection fills 11 non-standard (wide) drawers so in a standard cabinet I am expecting it to fill at least 15 drawers (with expansion space in each drawer) and the new cabinets will give me a total of 40 drawers. This sounds a lot of space but actually I am sure that I will fill this over the next 5-10 years because I receive at least 300 specimens from foreign donors every year.
So, although I haven’t received the money yet, I would still like to thank everyone at OPAL for their very generous grant and the AES for their support in the application process!
Share on Facebook
It might sound like a strange question to ask an entomologist but a recent debate on bug_girl’s blog got me thinking. Obviously, I have no qualms about collecting insects for my studies because my work contributes to scientific knowledge and indirectly benefits the things I am interested in. But are art displays like those by Jennifer Angus doing entomology any favours and could they in fact provide a catalyst for lobbyists to bring down a lot of very negative and emotive feeling against people who collect any insects?
Read more…
Share on Facebook
Just having a few days away in Dorset, visiting my parents. Lovely warm, sunny weather so far and the scenery in wonderful down here.
First trip was to Powerstock Common and although we didn’t see the Marsh Fritillaries (having a bad few years apparently) we did see a few Wood Whites and my favourite – a Narrow-bordered Bee Hawkmoth. Didn’t see any tachinids though, which was a little disappointing and it was a bit difficult to collect off the main tracks due to there being so many ticks on the foliage waiting to grab you.
Second outing was to West Bexington where we collected a carrier-bag full of cuttlefish ‘bones’ (for the neighbour’s budgies) and admired the really lovely shingle habitat complete with Horned Poppy, Sea Kale, Sea Campion (over), Houndtongue and a small patch of Thrift.
Back home I noticed a few Ruby-tail Wasps (Chrysis sp.) running and flying around the shed so I crept up and got a few photos as one stopped to preen.
-
-
Thrift
-
-
Sea Kale
-
-
Houndstongue
-
-
Horned Poppy
-
-
Ruby-tail
Share on Facebook
Ta Da!! I have finally arranged my palearctic specimens into their correct drawers – alphabetically by genus. It started off in 8 drawers but allowing for gaps and slack-space it finally stretched to 11 drawers (195 species). Amazing really – I didn’t know I had so many tachinids!! The first drawer in the photo is actually “V-Z” so it has more gaps than the others.
… and yes, I do really have a white, fluffy sofa … and no, it wasn’t my idea …
Share on Facebook
Just received an update from Dr Owen Lewis, the manager of the Sturmia bella project, a project set up to investigate the role of Sturmia bella in the decline of the Small Tortoishell (Aglais urticae) butterfly.
I have attached his first-year report below (in PDF format) and it makes interesting reading. While Sturmia is undoubtably a very common parasitoid of Small Tortoishell it is by no means certain that it is responsible in any significant way for the decline in the UK population. However, the project is still ongoing and more data is necessary before any real conclusions can be made.
sturmia_bella_report_may09
Read more…
Share on Facebook
I decided not to avoid it any more and started organizing my Palearctic collection into glass-topped drawers and unit trays. This means bringing together my British material (3 store-boxes); my Russian specimens (1 store box), Finnish specimens (1 store box) and my existing European specimens (1 store box).
Having everything together in one place makes much more sense and will mean that my reference material will be more accessible and easy to use.
I have also decided that they will be ordered alphabetically – bypassing the nighmare of tachinid subfamilies & tribes. One of the commonest problems when looking for a species in a traditional tachinid collection is to know which drawer the specimen is in because the tribes are all very similar and very unmemorable. Alphabetic sequencing is unconventional and means that subfamilies are broken up across the whole collection, which isn’t ideal, but it is a sacrifice worth making.
Share on Facebook
Just packaged up some flies to go back to Jari in Finland – he lent me some of his Malaise trapped tachinids to identify, with the promise of sharing the identified ones between us. Towards the end I had to admit defeat with the Siphona sp. (the Finnish fauna is totally different to what I am used to and I don’t have any reference samples) and some “small black jobs”, which I just didn’t have time to work through.
Jari has been very generous and let me keep a number of very exciting specimens – namely: Graphogaster brunescens (very rare in England – see photos below), Loewia erecta (a relatively new species), lots of Cylindromyia interupta & brassicaria, Ceromya silacea and a scattering of other nice species. I hope to add some more photos here in a little while.
Many thanks again to Jari – I am looking forward to seeing the results of this year’s collecting!
Share on Facebook
