1st Moth Night of 2018

Seven folks joined me for the first public moth night of 2018 held, as usual, at the Rideau Comfort Station. The night ran from 8:30 to 10pm and with white and black lights set up moths, beetles, and fishflies were soon attracted to the station. Some of us saw the first Luna Moth of the season, whilst we all watched tiny mites crawling over the bodies of a scavenger beetle known as the Pustulated Carrion Beetle. Apparently these mites are predatory and help the beetles compete against other insect scavengers. We also saw click beetles, named for their unusual clicking sound made when trying to flip over and a dung beetle with its own little 'rhinoceros' horn. Although we did see several species of moth on the evening, the majority were trapped overnight. Once photographed, they were all released back to the wild. In all, we photographed 31 species of moth, beetle and fishfly - many others were too fast for us... We also went out onto the nearby field to find bats using a detector that converts their high frequency calls to one audible to humans. The detector also produces a visual representation of the call known as a spectrogram and with some fancy software tells us the species of bat. Apparently, the unseen visitors included Big Brown Bat and Hoary Bat.

All in all, it was a successful night and the results can be seen here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?captive=any&d1=2018-05-26&d2=2018-05-27&place_id=any&project_id=4708&q=Rideau%20Comfort%20Station&subview=grid&verifiable=any.

Of the 31 species seen, Pustulated Carrion Beetle, Canadian Agonopterix, Striated Phaneta, and Bog Deltote were new for the park. Two of the three currently left unidentified are also likely to be new.

Three more moth nights are lined up for June on 9th, 16th and 23rd. Drop by anytime between 8:30 and 10, or pop back at 7am the next day to see what we find.

Posted on May 27, 2018 03:51 PM by markread markread

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