Lepidoptera ← ChrisR

Morphos

Jan

2012

As a quick follow-up to the “More butterfly wings…” post I thought you might like to see full-sized images of the butterflies used in the tests – starting with the most glamorous ones – the Morpho butterflies. The intense, metallic blue colours on a Morpho are not caused by pigments but instead are iridescence caused ...

More butterfly wings… 1

Jan

2012

I got an unexpected “gift” the other day of a Melles Griot 16x/0.32 160/0.17 microscope objective lens. I had ordered the 10x version (which is probably all I need in terms of magnification) but the eBay seller sent me the wrong one – but, being a nice chap, he said he’d refund me and I ...

Butterfly wings 1

Dec

2011

One of the standard ways to test a macro photography set-up is to photograph a butterfly’s wing and then show the image as a crop at the maximum digital zoom. Here are a few photos taken with my EL-Nikkor 50mm f2.8 lens reversed on bellows to give 3:1 magnification on the sensor: These photographs have ...

Tachinid Recording News

Thelyconychia solivaga January 23, 2015
Recently I have been working on adding a new species to the British list to our key. Thelyconychia solivaga is a small tachinid that seems to live on fairly stony/rocky coastal sites and is very rare in the UK – in fact only 3 specimens have been found so far (by Laurence Clemons in Kent […]
The problem with Phryxe … January 20, 2015
The genus Phryxe contains a few common species (nemea, vulgaris & heraclei) and a few very rare ones (magnicornis & erythrostoma). The key pulls out nemea first by the wide gap between the facial-ridge bristles and the descending parafrontals – wider than the width of antenna-3 plus the mustardy/yellow frontal area. Splitting off heraclei has […]
Gonia face colour January 20, 2015
In the keys to Gonia one of the couplets asks you to consider the shininess of the face but this can be a confusing thing to judge when you only have one specimen. In this mini article I have taken photos of the 2 choices to make it clear. The first thing to do is […]
Linnaemya picta, tessellans & rossica confusion features November 27, 2014
For many years Linnaemya picta had been confused with rossica because early workers (e.g. Fonseca) hadn’t tried using the European keys. Since the ‘discovery’ of picta in Kent it has spread across southern England as far as Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire & Berkshire and so now we have another fairly common black-legged species to confuse with tessellans. […]
Siphona urbana or geniculata? September 9, 2013
In Andersen’s 1996 book “The Siphonini (Diptera: Tachinidae) or Europe” he made several changes to the names of Siphona spp., which have proved a bit confusing. The changes (and subsequent reversions) illustrate a few nice aspects of modern taxonomy and so I thought I would write a little piece on what happened. Every species is […]