Bugman Jones

On Saturday night I stood in the field just outside our Dordogne holiday gite and gazed skywards. I was looking for Perseids, the late July and early August meteor shower, a product of the Earth sweeping through the ghostly interplanetary remains of the Swift-Tuttle comet, which last passed through this neck of the solar system in 1992. Despite a relatively clearish sky, I saw no shooting stars. I did, however, find a grass star — a glow-worm, Lampyris noctiluca.

Bioluminescence is one of nature’s many magical things, and never fails to enthral me. I cupped the beetle in my hands and rushed indoors to show the rest of the family the glow-in-the-dark fairy.

Holding this small beetle and watching its not insignificant greenish glow on my skin I was reminded, yet again, just how miraculous the natural world can seem, even to the initiated, the educated, the experienced scientist.

Elsewhere in the world, glow-worms (and their New World equivalents the fire-flies) are also sources of childish wonder and nowhere more so than in Jamaica, where I’m reliably informed the children call them winkies, because of their bright and regular flashing.

Jamaica is home to one of the largest and brightest of fire-flies, Pyrophorus noctilucus. It’s not in the usual group of glow-worm or fire-fly beetles (family Lampyridae) instead it is a member of the family Elateridae, or click beetles (named for the audible click they make as they suddenly jack-knife to escape the would-be predator), nevertheless, for many years it was claimed to be the largest fire-fly and to produce the brightest light of any insect.

These claims (later verified) had the unexpected consequence that Pyrophorus was particularly sought after, not by the world’s entomologists, but by its nutritionists.

My informant is Dr Joan Stephen, who in 1954 helped set up, in Jamaica, the Tropical Metabolism Research Unit with Professor John Waterlow of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This was a time when the chemical understanding of nutrition (or malnutrition in this case) and metabolism was being unravelled. A field station in an impoverished and under-nourished Commonwealth country was one of many ways to find out how poor living, poor diet and metabolic imbalance could be a leading cause of death, especially in children.

Coincidentally, During the 1930s and 40s biochemists had finally worked out the basis of photosynthesis, as light photons hitting the chlorophyll in green leaves, released electrons through a cascade of reactions that finally promoted adenosine diphosphate (ADP) to the energetically more available adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP exists through all living organisms as the molecular currency of energy, energy used in every metabolic reaction, and a keystone to understanding how metabolism, and in its turn, nutrition, works.

In today’s high-tech labs it’s easy to forget that, in the 1950s, assays relied on boiling up substances in test-tubes with various reagents, and often manually checking subtle colour changes against printed colour charts. This was OK for roughly measuring the carbohydrate content of a pain-au-chocolat, or how much alcohol is in a bottle of Guinness, but ATP and ADP are highly reactive molecules that occur in truly minute amounts. An assay to measure their activities required a much higher level of analysis. And it was available thanks to glow-worms.

The cold light given off by these beautiful beetles, without heat, without combustion, is the exact opposite of photosynthesis. During a special chemical conversion, that energy-storing molecule ATP gives up its electron to produce ADP and as the reverse cascade of chemical reactions continues it produces back that photon, to shine out into the night sky to try and attract a fire-fly mate.

In the test-tube, though, that small light output could be accurately measured using recently developed photometry devices which offered an electrical means of measuring, comparing, and giving a fixed numerical value to spectacularly minuscule chemical reactions. The light-producing chemicals of the fire-fly, luciferin and its enzyme converter luciferase, offered a unique and super-sensitive assay for the newly discovered ATP/ADP energy reaction.

And, so it happened, Jamaica was also home to that giant and brightly glowing click beetle, Pyrophorus. This beetle’s light-producing chemicals were now in great demand.
In a low-tech twist, though, these chemicals could not be synthesized, but needed to be harvested from adult beetles, laboriously collected in the Jamaican hillside forests. However, rather than the scientists doing the collecting themselves, Joan Stephen was in charge of marshalling the local children. They collected the winkies and she paid them with pennies, she, of course, being known as “the winky woman with the pennies”.

The glow-worms here in the Dordogne are smaller, humbler and more discreet than Jamaican winkies, but still lovely and mysterious to behold. The Dordogne is at the centre of European ‘cave-man’ art, and, for a moment, I was tempted to imagine some long since vanished hairy, brutish Cro-Magnon man, clothed in rough mammoth-skin cloak and aurochs-leather leggings, bending down on a similar limestone hillside 15,000 years ago, scooping up a glow-worm in his gnarled hands and grunting in soft wonderment at his astonishing find. Sadly, there appear to be no insect-related cave pictures hereabouts, glowing or otherwise.

This is a photo taken on my phone, down the eye-piece of my old microscope. Not bad quality, I thought. Depth of field doesn’t really become an issue when it comes to photographing a fly wing, and luckily picture-wing flies (family Tephritidae) can be identified almost exclusively from the wing markings.

I found this fly sitting atop a hollyhock flower in my parents’ garden in Newhaven, Sussex. I was actually looking for a weevil, Rhopalapion longirostre, but there’s still no sign of it away from south-east London.

Instead, this appears to be Tephritis praecox, a fly thought to be extinct in Britain, until my father started finding it in a Malaise trap in his garden in 2003. It breeds in the flower heads of garden marigolds, Calendula species, of which there is a multitude around the house. There are a few scattered records elsewhere since, but the majority come from this small suburban plot.

Nice to know the colony is doing so well there.

I’ve just come back from the second “curious entomologist” workshop, this one held in the classroom at Devonshire Road Nature Reserve in Honor Oak. For useful links, lists of equipment and suppliers, and further suggestions on how to start making an insect collection go to the first report and scroll down. These workshops are funded by The London Borough of Lewisham’s Rivers and People Project.

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How to be a curious entomologist

The title of these seminar workshops came, by way of flattery, from a book by Simon Barnes — How to be a bad birdwatcher. His proposal was that you do not have to be a great expert, or travel the world to exotic places, or own an eye-wateringly expensive pair of binoculars, to enjoy watching birds; you just have to look, and they will be there. He argued that no other group of animals was so amenable to being seen, as birds. Gazing out of the kitchen window of a winter’s morning, you are unlikely to see a mammal (even a grey squirrel) or a reptile, or an amphibian. But you will see birds. They are everywhere, and the fascination got from watching birds can be taken from their everyday behaviour, feeding, singing, flying, perching.

Even more so, insects are always there to be observed. No matter the season, or the weather, insects are so bewilderingly diverse and so mind-numbingly numerous, that you can always find them. And even more so than birds, they are strange beyond belief, bizarre verging on the mythical and, even under a simple hand lens, breath-takingly beautiful.

So why curious? I like this word and have applied it myself often enough. I’ve taken it from a 17^th century apothecary and naturalist, James Petiver. Petiver is credited with coining the first English names for many of our butterflies. A few of his original names are still in use today (brimstone, for example), a few have changed, but are still recognizable (golden brown double streak is now brown hairstreak), but one stands out as the most intriguing of the lot.

In a list of newly acquired specimens published between 1702 and 1706 he describes (and later illustrates) Albin’s Hampstead Eye, “where it was caught by this curious person, and is the only one I have yet seen.” Eleazar Albin, like many entomologists today, may have cut a strange figure as he strode across the Heath with his insect net, muttering Latin names under his breath, but Petiver’s use of the word ‘curious’ is not to suggest some odd eccentric, but someone whose study of wildlife is fuelled by curiosity.

For most people, myself included, interest in the natural world is still fuelled by curiosity — the need to look, to discover, to find out things about the animals and plants we see all around us.

Today bird-watching is, perhaps, the most widespread manifestation of that curiosity, but it was not always so. In the past, the study of birds could really only be pursued by those from a wealthy background — the clergy, landed gentry, aristocracy. They had two things well out of the reach of the general public — guns, and the land on which to shoot their quarry. Entomology, on the other hand, was a much more egalitarian interest; insects could be studied by anyone, and often required little more than home-made equipment and a wander on the local common land.

We are very lucky that we have a proud tradition of amateur insect study in Britain. This ‘citizen science’ as it might now be termed, has given us a wealth of knowledge about British insects, their distribution, their ecology, their life histories.

It all started with insect collecting, but has now moved to collecting insects. There is a subtle, but important, difference here. Insect collecting, a bit like stamp collecting, was simply the amassing of pretty specimens for the sake of ‘getting the set’, making aesthetically pleasing displays, or even a competition to get more than other collectors. Many of these large collections, created by wealthy gentlemen, now repose in the natural history museums of the world, and although we might frown at their almost fanatical zeal nowadays, the specimens they accumulated still tell us much of what we know about these insects. Modern scientists and researchers continue to examine insect specimens collected centuries ago, and they continue to add new specimens to these collections.

Collecting insects, taking a few sample specimens for identification purposes, is the only way to study the vast majority of insects around the world. In Britain we have roughly 25,000 species. Of these perhaps 1500 can be easily identified from a photograph. That leaves 94% of British species where a photograph is little help. Added to this are larval or immature stages, different colour variations, sexual differences, local geographical races. Quite often the differences between species are minute — particular arrangements of individual bristles on individual legs, subtle distinctions in body sculpture and ornament, fine differences in the proportions of antennal segments, or barely perceptible variations in body shape. Even experts who specialize in particular small groups of insects are often pushed to identify specimens unless they can be examined under a microscope.

The reasons for collecting insects may have changed, but the techniques used are still the same as a century or two ago. Books written during the explosion of Victorian empire-expansion on how to collect and preserve everything from dried seeds to whale skeletons are remarkably similar to manuals still issued today. Thankfully, collecting and preserving insects is a relatively easy process. Insects, covered in a tough exoskeleton (hard armour-like shell) made of chitin, keep for many hundreds of years by the simple action of drying them, either on a pin, or glued to a card.

During these workshops we will be practising some straightforward techniques

— Finding insects

— Collecting insects

— Killing insect specimens

— Pinning, setting, mounting and carding specimens

— Labelling specimens

The specimens collected will form the basis for a resident collection at the centre, to be added to piecemeal as and when local workers find time or inclination. It does not matter if they remain unseen for years, or decades. Eventually a time will come when a local entomologist will look through them, and extract some of the records.

There may be marvels or mysteries hidden. The lone specimen of Albin’s Hampstead Eye, Hipparchia hampstedensis, the butterfly that Pettiver had seen only one of, and which had been parroted through 200 years of British butterfly books, was rediscovered in the Natural History Museum at the end of the 19^th century. It turned out to be a specimen of the meadow argus, Junonia villida, a common enough butterfly, but only in Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Samoa and a few Pacific islands. It would have been impossible for a live specimen to get to Hampstead, even brought back in foreign cargo; these were the days of sail and its native haunts were half a year’s journey away. The curious Albin had somehow mixed up his specimens. But at least his ‘Eye’ specimen was still there to be examined.

Making a collection of insects is not a trivial act or vainglorious pursuit, it is a practical and perfectly acceptable way of keeping records of insects, records that can be examined and re-examined again and again. Having the specimen, to look at under a microscope, is still the only way to correctly and certainly identify most insects.

Was Linnaeus having some sort of joke when he named this elegant and handsome hoverfly Volucella inanis? The ‘inane’ hoverfly? The ’empty’ hoverfly?

Perhaps we’ll never know. It is, though, one of the more striking and unusual insects I regularly find in the garden; along with the, if it is possible, even more striking and significantly larger Volucella zonaria.

Both are massive orange and black hornet mimics, both breed in wasp nests, the fat grubs eating the wasp brood in the paper combs, and both are relatively restricted in the UK.

It used to be that zonaria was the rarest. In Verrall’s 1901 monograph on hoverflies only a couple of presumed stragglers were known in Britain, but since a spate of sightings in the 1940s it has become firmly established here and is still spreading through England from Kent to Bristol. On the other hand inanis has always been a London fly and remains almost unknown outside the metropolis’s suburbs.

We get both in the garden, and although zonaria is the one that gets comments from the family because of its imposing size and soft low buzz, inanis, the empty hoverfly, is the one that fills me with delight.

There was a time when I would have been thrilled to find such a spectacular, colourful and rare moth fluttering around the mercury vapour light. But I’ve grown blasé about the Jersey tiger, Euplagia quadripunctaria. Ever since it was first discovered in Lewisham, in 2005, it has appeared increasingly regularly all over south-east London. There are more of them here than in Jersey now.

Wednesday’s moth was the version with orange hind wings.

It is a pretty insect, and both hind-wing colourways were there, yellow on Tuesday, orange-red on Wednesday. The cats were pretty interested too, and I had to keep shooing them away with a broom. We had a few other moths too, the least carpet (Idaea rusticata) is apparently quite local in southern England, the dun-bar (Cosmia trapezina) is very common, and the old lady (Mormo maura) is big and black and irresistible to cats.

The European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilalis was new to me too.

It is never the moths, though, for which I put out a mercury vapour light. The flies and caddises came first, then a swathe of water-boatmen, one of the smaller Corixa species. Amara bifrons is an attractive little ground beetle, and not all that common. The lesser earwig (Labia minor) is much less common than a century ago, something to do with the lack of horse-drawn vehicles in the metropolis and horse-dropped manure in the streets.

But the most interesting insects were two beetles. Prionychus ater is a handsome black tenebrionid beetle, nationally scarce, and associated with ancient woodland, where it breeds in fungoid wood. There is lots of old woodland in Dulwich, and I’ve also seen this beetle in Dulwich Park. Trox scaber is a short squat chafer that breeds in carrion and seems especially attached to owl nests in hollow trees. All the old books describe it as common, but it is certainly scarce nowadays, though probably still widespread. It seems unlikely that there are many owl nests around here and the suggestion seems to be that it is breeding in compost heaps where unwary householders are prone to dump roast chicken carcasses and bones from the Sunday lunch leg of lamb. We were guilty of this too, I’m afraid, until the rat-eviction clear-out.

Oh, by the way, don’t search on Google for images of Labia minor, it comes up with some very disturbing pictures of another sort of labia.

Am I missing something? This is Nunhead station in south-east London. Down the left, where old buildings along the platform have been demolished, there is a thicket of buddleja (buddleia if you like). Down the right, along the trackside, is a sea of Japanese knotweed.

The one is lauded as a valuable and important nectar source for bees and butterflies. The other is derided as a noxious invasive weed. Neither, in my opinion, has any part to play in nature, wildlife, or biodiversity.

The buddleja on Nunhead Station was being visited by one queen bee. One. This is the truth about buddleja. It is a waste of space, an invasive thug of a plant, a crowding shading useless shrub with virtually no value to wildlife.

Gone are the ox-eyes and St-John’s-worts, the hawkbits and wormwood and all the other lovely brownfield flowers that ARE so important. Buddleja, boo I say.

I still call it Strangalia quadrifasciata although I rather suspect it’s been shunted through several different genera over the last 30 years. I still regard it as a scarce species, much more restricted than the common ‘wasp’ longhorn, S. maculata which turns up in gardens, on roadsides and in woodland rides all over the place.

There are lots of them out today, on Addington Hills, near Croydon. This open space marks just about the eastern end of the Surrey heaths.

Also today, my first marbled white of the year, which ever of the native cockroaches, Ectobius species, occurs on acid grassland and Noeeta pupilata, a pretty and pretty scarce picture-wing fly.

Not bad for about the only day this month, so far, with no rain.

Scroll down to the end of this page for some useful links to on-line how-to instructions, commercial suppliers of biological equipment, societies, recording schemes and identification guides. I’ll update this page occasionally to add new links and information.

This was the first workshop, in June 2012, for more information have a look at the report of the second workshop, 29 July 2012. The third workshop is scheduled for Ladywell Environment Education Centre, 13 October 2012.

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Beginning on Saturday, 30 June 2012, at The Creekside Education Trust in Deptford, and funded by the London Borough of Lewisham’s Rivers and People Project, I’ve started leading a series of ‘How to be a curious entomologist‘ insect workshop/ seminars. These are aimed at the complete novice, someone who might be generally interested in wildlife, perhaps even more specifically in birds or plants, but who have only really regarded insects as pretty flower ornaments or small strange buzzing critters.

First Creekside entomology workshop, 30 June 2012.

The idea was very straightforward: teach people some of the basic methods of finding, catching, killing, pinning, carding, mounting and labelling insects to form a simple insect collection.

So often, I am asked to identify an insect from a description, or a slightly fuzzy photo. It’s usually good fun and I hope I can at least identify to family or even genus level. But identifying something to species usually requires more than even the best-lit, most-clearly-focused, highest-definition digital image. It usually requires a specimen, to examine under a microscope, to look at individual bristles on individual legs.

Collecting insects rather went out of fashion during the 1970s and 1980s, partly led by the conservation instincts of butterfly- and bird-watchers who saw butterfly collecting as little better than stamp-collecting, and egg-collecting as the thoroughly disreputable activity of a criminal underclass. ‘Serious’ entomologists studying small-fry like flies, beetles, plant bugs, ants, solitary bees and wasps, ichneumons and sawflies, were sometimes made to feel uncomfortable wielding insect nets in public places, as if they were doing something underhand.

There has, since, been some redressing of the balance, and given that there are over 25,000 insect species in Britain alone, the collecting of specimens for identification is now much more widely recognized as a legitimate and necessary part of biological study. I was pleased to be part of a group who entirely rewrote what was once for the Code for Insect Collecting, but which has now transmogrified into the Code for Collecting Insects. There’s a subtle, but important difference in the title — stamp collecting versus scientific inquiry.

The title of these workshops was partly inspired by Simon Barnes’s How to be a bad birdwatcher, the key point being that you do not have to be a good (or expert) birdwatcher to take fascination, awe, understanding and delight from watching birds. If you look, you will see astonishing, though commonplace, things. My aim was to show that studying insects does not have to be the preserve  of scientific experts or even dedicated amateurs. Anyone can look at insects, and make useful and valid contributions to the citizen science of entomology. And I like the word ‘curious’, meaning, as it does, not just ‘a bit odd’ or ‘slightly eccentric’, as indeed are many entomologists, but also ‘fueled by curiosity’.

These workshops are aimed to give new-comers to insects a chance to understand just how and why to collect specimens, and what to do with them

— how to kill the insects being collected

— how to pin or card them

— how to mount them in museum style

— and how to validate them with credible and valuable data labels.

Finally, there are the problems of storage, until there is the chance to identify the specimens, offer them up to recording scheme organizers, local or national experts, or take them to museums to compare with reference collections.

As a follow-up to the workshops, here are some links, further reference materials and ideas. There is no way that this list can be exhaustive, but at least it can be a starting place should people want to go further.

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HERE ARE SOME LINKS AND FURTHER INFORMATION

Making an insect collection

The basics of collecting, pinning, carding, labelling and curating a collection are pretty well covered in plenty of books, a few sources are available on-line, especially in the USA:

This is from the University of Arkansas

And this from the University of Minnesota.

This rather quaint book, How to make an insect collection, is nevertheless very useful.

Equipment

Much equipment can be home-made. Here is a list of easy and cheap alternatives to many expensive items. When starting out, entomological pins are important, finer, better quality and corrosion-resistant compared to sewing pins. A good hand lens (x 10 magnification is fine) will also be a great help. Here’s a guide to getting a lens. However, for a full range of everything from micro-pins to research-quality microscopes, there are several commercial suppliers including:

Watkins and Doncaster

Alana Ecology

Anglian Lepidopterist Supplies

B&S Entomological Services

Bioquip

Some of these companies also sell microscopes, otherwise there are:

Brunel Microscopes

And GX Optical

To start, a stereomicroscope may seem a bit of a luxury, but cheap models are available for around £80. The most important point is low magnification rather than high: x10 or x20. A stereo-scope with swiveling turret, allowing you to swap easily between x10 and x30 is perfect, starting at £100-£150. A zoom microscope giving a range of about x10 to x45 is a delight from £350. Here’s a brief guide to buying a budget stereomicroscope.

Naming insects

Identifying insects can be tricky. There are now upwards of 200 years of complex entomological monographs and identification guides. Although on-line help is becoming available, much of what we know about insects is still hidden away in books and journals and finding the right identification key for the right insect can be a daunting task. Before launching into book-buying, perhaps the easiest path is to see whether particular groups of insects appeal to the individual more than others. At least by specializing in limited insect orders you can narrow your field of search for identification answers.

There is no point in trying to get a comprehensive list of British insect books together. So many of them are highly technical or complex, enough to baffle even the relative expert. As someone develops an interest in particular groups, they will come across further references to increasingly obscure and arcane papers published in scientific journals; they may also decide to invest in expensive modern monographs or even more expensive antiquarian books.

So here is a list of books that I think might be useful to the novice British entomologist. It is, I admit, a personal list, and it’s just a taster.

Picture books are a start, but they often fail to indicate just how many ‘similar’ species (virtually identical to the naked eye) are not illustrated. I always recommend Collins guide to the Insects of Britain and Western Europe by Michael Chinery, as a good starter because it has so many excellent pictures. It appears to be out of print at the moment, but copies are usually to be had on ebay or through second-hand bookshops and websites.

I also recommend iSpot for getting photographs of insects named. This is a great site, run by the Open University and regularly browsed by experts ready to name whatever is posted up. This would also be the place to post a picture of a pinned or carded specimen too.

Beyond the first ‘easy’ species, the best way to get an insect specimen named is to seek help and advice from an expert. And although they may not be open to naming box-loads of specimens sent unsolicited, many entomologists running recording schemes, or studying particular groups of insects, are often more than pleased to receive material, especially from a new source. Just make contact first to see what help might be on offer.

Local museums often have reference collections of insects, donated by local entomologists, and sometimes the museums are also connected with regional recording schemes. They are often more than happy to allow interested visitors behind-the-scenes access to these collections, either to allow visiting experts to re-identify specimens and confirm names, or to allow others to bring in their own specimens for checking. The Natural History Museum has the Angela Marmot Centre for UK Biodiversity, set up specifically to encourage people to make their own identifications using the facilities available. Here is my take on the centre, and here is a link to their own website.

Further information

Here, to start, is a series of links to societies, recording schemes and the like. They have links to other sources of help and information too.

Amateur Entomologists’ Society Society for the beginner. Publishes a good series of introductory handbooks to various insect orders. An annual exhibition is held each autumn with large numbers of exhibitor stands selling books and equipment, new and secondhand.

Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society Excellent website covering this natural grouping of stinging, but fascinating, insects.

Biological Records Centre, Recording Schemes List Contact details of each of the very many recording schemes; scroll down to find the insect ones.

British Bugs On-line photographic identification guide.

British Dragonfly Society On-line news, identification and fact sheets and recording details.

British Entomological and Natural History Society The society for the up-and-coming ‘field’ entomologist, running field meetings, advanced identification workshops and publishing some excellent identification guides.

Buglife The Invertebrate Conservation Trust, campaigning for insect conservation.

Butterfly Conservation Campaigning for butterfly and moth conservation.

Dipterists Forum Specialist fly-recording society, but useful website.

Field Studies Council Various publications, field courses and wildlife information.

Koleopterologie German on-line photographic identification gallery for beetles.

National Federation of Biological Recorders Names and addresses of regional and county recording schemes.

Royal Entomological Society For the expert or professional, but a large society which publishes important identification guides (some rather technical). The ‘Useful Links’ section of their website is very extensive and useful.

UK Moths On-line photographic identification guide to moths.

Watford Coleoptera Group Includes an on-line photographic gallery.

Other sources of help are: local natural history societies, local museums (which often have insect collections behind the scenes even if not on show in the exhibit galleries), or perhaps even a friendly local entomologist.