Insects and Spiders

Thanks. Do you keep bees by chance? I know that both the wax months are increasingly common and a bit of a pest to apiarists. We've been advised to not collect too many Lepidoptera for the collections. The butterflies don't need to be caught for ID purposes and although many of the moths can only be ID'ed by microscopic examination / dissection they shed scales and make a real mess of the collection boxes unless you're really careful apparently.

No - we have a wax moth research colony. We do have a research apiary here too, so can chat with the manager there if there’s anything we can try collect?

Not big here on pointlessly pinning wild samples so fully agree, but we have lots of lab moths we dispose of. If they could be of use would be happy to send.

a museum-grade collection of at least 300 representative British insects

Do you mean as a photographic collection or corpses on pins?

Many thanks for the offer. Will see how the collection goes this spring. I don't think I'll have any issues making the 300+ samples and yes definitely against pointlessly pinning samples. My views on collecting for science have evolved as I've begun to appreciate the critical role of collections in documenting invertebrate diversity. There are some great re-wilding initiatives going on but we can only manage those if we've got good information about positive changes in biodiversity and at least for invertebrates this means collecting. And to be in a position to do this we need trained entomologists with experience of collecting and documenting the collections.

I am taking photos as well but no the collection is a physical one with pinned, carded or pointed samples. This is because its not possible to ID the vast majority of insects (we've over 24,000 species in a nature-depleted UK) without microscopes and in many cases dissection of their genitalia (or using parts of them for various DNA analysis).

Having said that, the NHM are working through their collections of millions of invertebrates to make as many as possible available as photographic images on-line, see https://www.flickr.com/people/nhm_beetle_id/

I fully get that, plus it’s an invaluable genetic resource to look at things like cryptic speciation, new phylogenies and adaptive mechanisms - all of which essentially you have decades/centuries of snapshots of thanks to collections. What the NHM/Sanger are doing with the Darwin tree of life project is amazing too.

If you haven’t already - join RES as a student member!

Brilliant, thanks. Another one of my must read threads and one that made me more aware to look closer than my normal gaze when out and about.

No problem - but lets hope we don't need Discord after March.