JoePablo

Most recent activity

• LFGSS Collective

  in The End is Nigh or The Future of LFGSS • 22 hours, 4 minutes

  

  I've no relevant web/IT or business skills to offer unfortunately. Despite mainly lurking for the duration, this virtual community has been a big part of my life for the last 15 years. I'm really grateful to Velocio and everyone who has made it the place it is - something humane (warts and all), supportive, intensely informed and informative, sometimes banal but so often hilarious. I think its important to try to enable it to continue to thrive in as near it's current form as possible. I'm also more than happy to increase my donation if that will help though am aware that this is not what the central challenge is likely to be.

• Insects and Spiders

  in Miscellaneous and Meaningless • 1 day, 10 hours

  

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

• Insects and Spiders

  in Miscellaneous and Meaningless • 1 day, 23 hours

  

  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/

• Insects and Spiders

  in Miscellaneous and Meaningless • 1 day, 23 hours

  

  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.

• The Bird Thread

  in Miscellaneous and Meaningless • 2 days, 10 hours

  

  I've always enjoyed luring this thread for the great photos. If we need to move to LFGSS Discord I've set up a parallel thread here https://discord.com/channels/605497628259516447/1319361692064551024

• Insects and Spiders

  in Miscellaneous and Meaningless • 2 days, 10 hours

  

  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.

• Insects and Spiders

  in Miscellaneous and Meaningless • 2 days, 13 hours

  

  In other news, I started a Masters course in Entomology this autumn. I'm really enjoying it, meeting some fantastic like-minded people, and learning so much. Part of the course requires us to produce a museum-grade collection of at least 300 representative British insects. So come this spring expect a plenty of ento photos from me.

• Insects and Spiders

  in Miscellaneous and Meaningless • 2 days, 13 hours

  

  I've just set up an Insects and Spiders topic on the LFGSS Discord server at https://discord.com/channels/605497628259516447/1319360737197555712
  Hope we don't have to use it, but just in case.

• LFGSS Discord

  in The End is Nigh or The Future of LFGSS • 4 days, 19 hours

  

  OK, have now just seen the relevant thread :(

• LFGSS Discord

  in The End is Nigh or The Future of LFGSS • 4 days, 19 hours

  

  Sorry if I've missed something but why do we need Discord when we have this site - I don't undrstand?