Underwing moths are one of the most strikingly patterned, beautiful moths. Their hindwings are marked with orange, yellow, pink, red, blue, or purple, and have been one of the most historically prized moths sought by collectors. Some researchers have called them the “legions of the night” because of their large size and species diversity. When at rest on tree bark, the bright hindwings are hidden by their dark, camouflaged forewings. When disturbed, the moth will flash these hindwings to scare predators. Scientists have thought that the markings resemble the eyes of a cat. Some species are known to drink beer, and collectors often use bait to collect them.

The goal for this project is to examine how these moths have shifted their distribution in light of climate change over the last 100+ years. Some species are clearly declining in number, and may possibly be critically endangered, but we still do not know how their ranges have changed because the data are limited. We cannot assess the impact of human disturbance without obtaining these data from historical museum specimens.

In this project, you will be transcribing the numerous descriptive labels that are pinned to each underwing moth specimen from the Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center. The McGuire Center has one of the largest collection of these moths in the world, but researchers cannot access the data because they remain hidden on a label under each specimen. Through this interface you will be looking at two images of the moth, taken from the dorsal and ventral sides of the insect. Please be sure to look at both images and remember your role in transcribing is valuable! And be sure to look at the amazing patterns and colors of the “underwing moth.” Can you see the resemblance to cat eyes?

This project is part of a collaborative network of museums seeking to digitize approximately 2 million North American butterfly and moth specimens. Butterflies and moths are one of the most charismatic groups of insects, yet we still don’t know much about them. Obtaining the data from these specimens is very important for research and conservation of butterflies and moths, so please help!

Photo by Lary Reeves

Happy New Year everyone, and thanks (yet again) for the rapid turnaround on Tiger Beetles 3!

I hadn’t been paying close attention to the progress of the expedition over the holidays, but was expecting there to be a few more days left before its completion upon my return to work today. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to see that on January 1st, you “Beat the ETC” by 6 days. Way to go! Much thanks to Rob G. for providing the impetus to see this happen.

This now completes the E.H. Strickland Entomological Museum’s Tiger Beetle holdings (for real this time), so we’ll be moving on to other ground beetle groups from here on. First, we’ll finish off the remainder of the Trechine ground beetles with our next expedition “Trechine Ground Beetles 2”, of which there are 972 specimens left to be transcribed, and then we’ll move on to the Bombardier Beetles (Brachininae).

In the meantime, I hope to start reconciling completed transcriptions and loading the data into our collections’ database soon. At the end of November we received results from the 1^st Tiger Beetle expedition which I now need to comb through for data issues that I hope to discuss in future posts.

In other news, last month our Tiger Beetles 3 expedition was the focus of a teaching session on digitizing collections for 10-11 year olds put on by folks at the Natural history Museum in London. Much thanks goes to Margaret G. for coordinating this and providing valuable feedback on how it went. Here is some helpful information that might help others working on this project:

• I’ve prepared a list of URLs where you can find common abbreviations that are in use for Canadian provinces/territories¹ and US states². In addition, the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names³ and Canadian Geonames Database⁴ are useful for interpreting place names of both historical and contemporary use around the world and in Canada, respectively. These links have also been integrated into the help boxes.

¹ https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/ref/dict/table-tableau/table-tableau-8-eng.cfm

² https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ansi_statetables.html

³ https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/tgn/

⁴ http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/geography/place-names/10786

• I’ve attached our our current list of ground beetle collecting parties (collector list), along with the earliest and latest dates of their collections. A quick perusal of the list should help determine who the collector of a specimen was if there are any label interpretation issues.
• Collectors of entomological specimens often report the month of collection in Roman numerals, and the year may appear in 2-digit or 4-digit formats. For the former, take note that our collection was founded in the early 1920s and so much of the material will be collected from the 20^th-21^st
• Finally, you can visit any of the following websites for more information on our collection, and the specimens and/or species it contains:

http://entomology.museums.ualberta.ca/

http://www.gbif.org/dataset/8971dfba-f762-11e1-a439-00145eb45e9a

https://www.idigbio.org/portal/recordsets/1f9209f0-ecf2-4c3e-8ec5-bfacec1e5b9c

http://symbiota4.acis.ufl.edu/scan/portal/collections/misc/collprofiles.php?collid=84

Cheers,

–Bryan Brunet, PhD
Collections Management Advisor (Natural Sciences), University of Alberta Museums, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Hello NfN transcribers!

Labels associated with fossil specimens are tricky, they’ve got age and date information about how old the specimen is and the actual date that the specimen was collected. Locality information frequently is confused with geological age info (especially in Indiana because most of our rocks are Mississippian or Pennsylvanian in age!) and abbreviations aren’t always clear.

However, the champion transcribers from NfN have done remarkably well and in an unbelievable time. We’re very grateful for all of your hard work and we’re very much looking forward to seeing some familiar names on some of our upcoming transcription expeditions. A very special shout out to @maggiej is well deserved for over 500 transcriptions!!!

Thanks also to those individuals that helped to craft some of the specialized instructions for this expedition. Fossils and geologic time add a whole new dimension to our inventory of life on this planet and we’re quite pleased at how well everyone handled the extra information. Again, special thanks to @maggiej for being a tremendous help in the Talk section too!

Don’t forget that the @researchers are here for you too. We’re very interested in seeing how we can be better science communicators and your feedback is much appreciated. Feel free to contact us using our tag @researcher or me directly (@garymotz) for the fossil expeditions. Help us help you to help science!

Keep your eyes open for a new fossil label transcription expedition coming soon!

(spoiler alert:  we do have some incredibly preserved soft-bodied forms from the Cambrian Burgess Shale coming up in the next expedition!)

Many of you participated in WeDigBio 2016 on the Notes from Nature platform. It is an exciting yearly event that continues to grow worldwide. The main organizers of the event just posted their own summary that we wanted to share with the Notes from Nature community.

Check it out here: https://www.idigbio.org/content/wedigbio-2016-0

A big thank you is owed to all the citizen scientists who contributed to the just-completed transcription of swallowtail butterfly specimens from the Field Museum of Natural History! This expedition fills in some much-needed taxonomic gaps that remained after the previous expedition, and helps push the swallowtail project forward. Despite the American Thanksgiving weekend, we still managed to get 121 specimens transcribed in 10 days. Way to go!

We have another big push to digitize swallowtail specimens from the eastern United States coming up before the next round of holidays. If you need a break from the festivities, be sure to check back for more butterflies!

The New World Swallowtail Butterfly project has a new expedition up! As you may remember, I am collecting images of swallowtail butterfly specimens to understand how morphological diversity varies across the New World. Museum specimens provide an excellent record of diversity through time and across geography, and the new expedition is no exception.

These butterflies were imaged during my recent trip to the Field Museum of Natural History. The Field Museum Division of Insects houses over 12 million specimens; their Butterfly and Moth collection has a geographic and taxonomic breadth that complements the previous expedition nicely. In addition to helping with my research, the data you transcribe will be sent back to the Field Museum to incorporate into their specimen database for other researchers to use in the future.

As with the previous Swallowtail expedition, remember that there are two images for each specimen—a front and a back. This is important, because in some cases, the labels in the image have different data written on each side. Thanks for your help, and look closely—some of these specimens provide a unique historical record of biodiversity that has since been lost!

Hannah L. Owens, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Associate, Florida Museum of Natural History

A new expedition has been launched on Notes from Nature from the herbarium at Appalachian State University. This expedition contains everyone’s favorite families: Asteraceae and Asclepiadaceae! Look for the title Plants have all the anthers (Pt1) to start transcribing this wonderful collection. As you can tell by the (Pt 1) part of the title that there is more to come. Stay tuned on our herbarium Facebook page and Twitter to see when the next segment of this lovely herbarium is released!

Many thanks to all the participated in WeDigBio 2016. We had a suite of successful onsite events as well as lots of volunteers contributing remotely.

NFN had as many as 23 expeditions active during the event with over 11,000 transcriptions completed over the four-day event! There were NFN events held from Bangalore, India to London, U.K and several across the United States.

WeDigBio event at the FRLHT Trans-disciplinary University

We had several very productive onsite events with volunteers contributing as many 500 transcriptions in a single day. However the most productive event by far was hosted by Travis Marsico in Arkansas U.S. with over 1300 transcriptions in a single day!

As I reminder there is lots of information always available on our Statistics page if you want to explore around. You can also review some of the conversations that went on by searching for #WeDigBio

Best,

The Notes From Nature Team

Whoops, I made an error: there are in fact only about 1250 species of Bembidion, not over 3000 as indicated in the Trechine Ground Beetle Expedition description. My apologies to all those that noticed! Much thanks to James Bergdahl for bringing it to my attention.

In any case, thanks again to everyone that has contributed to the E.H. Strickland Entomological Museum (University of Alberta Museums) ground beetle expeditions. With the completion of these 1180 specimens, our list of transcribed specimens now totals 2278 records. Only 17,839 more to go!

For our next expedition we will return to tiger beetles. Yep, that’s right, more tiger beetles! Apparently, in the scramble to get new images prepared last time around, I overlooked 1141 records.

Check out the new expedition “Tiger Beetles 3”!

Cheers,

— Bryan Brunet, PhD

Collections Management Advisor (Natural Sciences), University of Alberta Museums, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

The Asteraceae (sunflower) family contains the largest number of species world-wide. Thus, it is often broken down into tribes or sub-families in order to make more sense of it. The genus Solidago contains the goldenrods for which there are about 100 species worldwide and 25+ species occurring in Louisiana alone. These plants are a prominent feature of the fall landscape across eastern North America. Goldenrods are characterized by rows of tiny yellow disk flowers atop a green, leafy, and upright stem. Distinguishing between different species of goldenrods can be very difficult, even to a trained botanist. Thus, curated herbarium specimens are highly valuable for comparative studies.

The Director of the Shirley C. Tucker Herbarium at Louisiana State University, Lowell Urbatsch, has been working with a goldenrod specialist in Canada, John Semple, who recently discovered two species never recorded in Louisiana, namely Solidago brachyphylla and S. rigidiuscula, indicating that there is still a lot to learn about this important genus.

Goldenrods are often blamed for fall allergies when they become prominent in fields and roadsides. However, this is not likely the case since the pollen is not airborne. Instead goldenrod pollen is carried by a plethora of insects that favor visiting these bright yellow flowers. Another member of the sunflower family, ragweed, blooms at the same time and in similar habitats, is far more likely the culprit of seasonal sniffles.

Locust borer feeding on goldenrod pollen

Louisiana State University will be hosting a WeDigBio event this weekend focused on transcription of this important genus.