Photo credit: Glenn Montague

Welcome to a new Notes from Nature Project and a series of upcoming Expeditions: Host Plants of Virginia. This series expands on the Pollinator Plants of Virginia theme to include vascular plant genera that support the larvae or adults of moths and butterflies. Herbivorous insects may pollinate our agricultural crops and native plants but they also sustain wildlife in Virginia U.S.A., notably many of our migratory songbirds.  These insects are often specialists of particular plant groups or a particular type of food, such as sap, leaf tissue, pollen or nectar. Consequently, documenting local plant diversity is essential for studying these critical ecological relationships. For instance, the massive larvae of the Regal Moth (Citheronia regalis) are consume large quantities leaves from a limited number of tree genera, such as walnut (Juglans nigra) and persimmon (Diospyros viriginia) (see photo), yet consume nothing as adults! In this project, we have assembled herbarium specimens from 70 vascular plant genera that are known to support the larvae or adults of moths and butterflies in the Mid-Atlantic region. This information assembled primarily from the resources: Using native plants to attract butterflies, moths, bees and other pollinators in the Washington, D.C. area (Green Spring Garden, Fairfax County Park Authority, Virginia; 2016) and Bringing Nature Home: How you can sustain wildlife using native plants (Douglas W. Tallamy, Timber Press; 2009).

Andrea Weeks, George Mason University

Wahoo, with your help we are at 60% completion! Keep up the good work for we are more than halfway done. Be sure to get the word out to transcribe these spectacular underwing moths. Thanks again, this important work can’t be done without you all!

-Stacey Huber (@huberlstacey)

Thank you to all who helped complete the inaugural Pollinator Plants of Virginia expedition! Pollinators are essential for our environment’s health as well as our food supply. With the completion of this first batch of specimens, we now know just a bit more about pollinators’ favorite foods and where they could be observed feeding.

The Xerces Society (http://www.xerces.org/) is an international society dedicated to the conservation of invertebrates – a taxonomic group that includes the majority of pollinating animals in the mid-Atlantic region. We have used their online resources to assemble this Expedition, which included specimens from over 50 plant genera known to be very attractive to native pollinators. By transcribing these herbarium records, you’ve helped us refine our understanding of these plants’ locations and flowering times, which can be used by pollinator researchers to find their quarry.

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

Thanks to everyone for all their hard work on the four expeditions near completion late last year.  Quick update – we are done!  All those expeditions are finished. Finito.  Done.  Awesome.

Here is a quick summary about how you beat the ETC (estimated time to completion)!

1. Pinned Specimen_Tiger Beetles 3. That one had an 8 day ETC on Dec. 30th, and finished on January 1, beating the ETC by 6 days.
2. Herbarium_Arkansas Dendrology: Part 8: Hickories and Walnuts.  You beat the ETC by 3 days, also finishing on January 1.
3. Aquatics Aquatic Insects of the Southeastern United States expedition had  a 3-day estimated time to completion (ETC) and finished within the first day.  You beat ETC by 2 days.
4. Magnified_The Killer Within: Wasps, but not as you know them had a 19 day ETC and those are some challenging labels, as well.  We finished that one in 15 days. So we beat the ETC by 4 days, but it was a major effort to get those last, and likely hardest ones, done.

Overall, you shaved off 19 days in total, and we couldn’t be more thrilled.  Now that we have cleared out some of these older expeditions, we are looking forward to some new ones coming on board in the next few weeks.  We’ll have more information on those, and some other plans for 2017, to share soon!

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!)