annikaml's Favorites

Well this gaudy Tortricid turns out to be pretty interesting. It is a member of a diverse set of moths which have converged in a mimicry complex with the overall pattern of orange wings with bold black-and-white marginal banding. Other members of this complex are in this genus, related genera, and even in other moth families. Franziska Bauer created an array of images of some members of this mimicry complex (images from BOLD) and uploaded it to Flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/franziskabauer/25772488391
Some of these, particularly the Tortricids, can be confusingly similar, with minor variations on this color scheme, wing shape, venation, etc.
This species was originally described from Guatemala by Walsingham in Biologia Centrali-Americana, Heterocera, Vol. 4, p. 214, 270, Tab. 8, fig. 8 (1909-1915). I finally tracked down a relatively recent revision of this genus by Obraztsov (Proc. US Nat. Mus. 119, No. 3543, 1966). His key allows me to fairly readily key this out to Idolatteria simulatrix, but even at the time of his revision, the species was only known from the original holotype from Guatemala. I subsequently found another example from nearby in El Salvador on iNat which appears to match this species:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/86929756
Here's a link to the Obraztsov paper:
https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/16916/USNMP-119_3543_1966.pdf%3Bjsessionid=FA96FE806EF6C41C0C1BE6D9AF4A35C9?sequence=1

Mills county, Texas; Timberlake Biological Field Station Bio Blitz
6/12/2021
Snakes

At the sound of rustling behind me I thought maybe a fellow iNatter was sneaking up on me among the junipers, but closer inspection from a distance revealed a mass of snake bodies entwined on the ground. Upon moving closer, they slithered at amazing speed into a small juniper nearby and then I could see that two were entwined.

I don't know if I got enough for ID, being unfamiliar with the characteristics needed and not wanting to get too close.

I love the Lower Rio Grande Valley! On my last evening down here, I set up a few lights just outside of Resaca De La Palma State Park. Wonderful night!

Will work a lot on the ID's of these -- just uploading them first.

A typical Payne's Prairie eastern king snake. They were common 50 years ago, when the prairie had huge numbers of water loving snakes. Over a thousand snakes (mostly banded water snakes and Florida green water snakes) were often run over and killed on a given night in the summertime on the two major highways that cross the basin, and eventually the snake populations crashed. Now, there are far fewer water snakes and perhaps no king snakes at all.

Toxomerus marginatus mating in flight

Annika and I agreed that we had both seen this species mating numerous times but never mating in flight.

Only the male's wings were moving and he seemed to be generally steering them in the shade. We watched them for a few minutes during which they never landed or exited a perimeter more than 18"² or so.

What a great evening of moth-ing with fellow naturalists at LLELA! We spotted thousands and thousands of moths (mostly armyworms), and we documented quite a few species. These are all part of the LLELA fall 2018 bioblitz.

What a great evening of moth-ing with fellow naturalists at LLELA! We spotted thousands and thousands of moths (mostly armyworms), and we documented quite a few species. These are all part of the LLELA fall 2018 bioblitz.

We saw the snake eagle as it flew up from the ground. It flew in slow circles while it controlled and started to eat the snake. One minute from pic 1 to pic 8 where it started to eat the snake. Total time for this series, three minutes.

Snake at https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/14774517

What a great time I had with fellow naturalists at Palo Pinto Mountains State Park (it is still closed to the public, so we had special permission to access the property). It was mighty dry, and the plants were pretty crispy, but we still spotted lots of cool things. It makes me tremendously happy to hang out with this community. :)

The black-lighting was pretty great too -- we had like 11 stations set up and loads of bugs came to each station. I'll have to work on ID'ing lots of these later on.