April 18, 2016 Moth Survey at Glendening

Some useful links for the April 18 survey:

All observations
Leps only
Taxon list

Interesting finds

Most of the moths we observed were common, and we're likely to see them again. One of my goals in this project is to help the folks at BAMONA (http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/) and MBP (http://www.marylandbiodiversity.com/) improve their coverage of Maryland's biodiversity. Any new county record that we find and they lack is of some interest.

Jennifer Rooks photographed a Yellow-dusted Cream Moth, an apparent new record for Anne Arundel County. I suspect it's not as rare as it is underreported. BugGuide reports the larval foodplants as "birch, blueberry, willow, and occasionally poplar."

The mayfly I photographed on the Plummer House was identified by Roger Rohrbeck as a female imago of Cloeon dipterum, one of the small minnow mayflies. This is a new county record for MBP.

Tips for contributors:

1. Make sure the location of each observation is specified.

2. Do give each of your observations your own identification based on your own identification skill, and avoid guesses in the ID. This can be a coarse ID (like Order Lepidoptera or even Phylum Arthropoda) if you cannot identify further -- and this is perfectly OK. No observation should show "Unknown" or "Something".

   If you want to guess a finer ID than what you're certain of, include the guess as a comment. The iNat community and I will ID many observations for us, and we can seek IDs from other resources (like BAMONA and BugGuide) for others.

3. Use the Observation Source field for any IDs you've sought from outside iNat and that aren't your own. For ID resources that give each observation its own page (like BAMONA and BugGuide), put the observation URL in the field. Otherwise give the name of the identifier.

   You can add this field to an observation by viewing the observation page like
   http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/2977578
   and clicking on "Add/edit more fields" below the observation photos.

Posted on May 4, 2016 02:32 PM by treichard