NC State University Insect Museum

photographer: Clyde Sorenson
title: Adult Polyphemus moth (about this moth species)

Congratulations go out to Clyde Sorenson, whose adult Polyphemus moth (Saturniidae: Antheraea polyphemus)) photograph was selected as the best in the Adult Lepidoptera category. Rumor has it that this particular specimen ended up in an ENT 502 collection! Hmmmm...

We held our annual banquet last Friday, and I've been slow to announce the winners of the NCES Insect (and other terrestrial arthropods) Photography Contest. We had a total of 98 entries this year, which is 14 more than last year! The quality of this year's entries was exceptionally high, and I extend a hearty thanks to the judges for grinding it out and doing their best to narrow the field to just four per category.

The winners (it was a tie!) for the best photograph of an Adult Insect or Other Terrestrial Arthropod are:

photographer: Marshal Hedin
title: Leiobunum harvestman with prey

photographer: Steve Frank
title: Texas skies

Congratulations Marshal and Steve! The other winners will be posted here tomorrow. Stay tuned.

It's not much to look at just yet, but here's how the new room is unfolding:

Main work area - good for sorting and processing specimens, etc.


Slide collection and some of our bulk. We need to block the light from that window, but it's not hitting any specimens directly.

The new space is still a bit of a hodgepodge, but once it gets those certain decorative touches and acquires more equipment it'll start to look like home.

Beautiful rows of new insect cabinets await collection expansion.

I've been slow to get this info to the Web, but here marks the first in a (short) series of posts that describe the most recent (major) changes in the NCSU Insect Museum. We were awarded a collections improvement grant (NSF DBI-0847924) in September that has several components (read our proposal). The bulk of this funding goes towards addressing space issues, and this post outlines why we needed new cabinets and additional room.

Reason 1: With almost 96% of available drawers and unit trays occupied by specimens we were functionally FULL (i.e., more time was spent shuffling specimens than curating). We ordered 22 cabinets to give us some b-r-e-a-t-h-i-n-g room (we need to accommodate a rapidly growing Hymenoptera collection, for one), but where should they go? Our rooms were also functionally FULL. Well, the department assigned us about 500 additional square feet on the 3rd floor of Gardner Hall. We moved the slide and alcohol-preserved specimens down there and made that new room our primary work area (in order to prevent the orphaning of these components of our collection; check out what SPNHC has to say about threatened collections). The new cabinets for expansion now fill the space left by the wet and slide collections.

Reason 2: We needed to replace an array of 56 twelve-drawer cabinets that were substandard in a variety of ways. They didn't seal properly, which potentially allowed pests in and definitely leaked fumigant out:

You probably can't see it in this photo, but the doors of these cabinets don't close all the way and are not properly sealed.

And the cabinets wouldn't allow you to pull a drawer out unless the door was alllllllll the way open. This resulted in many incidents where the drawer (and its specimens) were jolted by a hard slam against the door:

THUD! One cannot pull a drawer out unless the door is open at some ridiculously obtuse angle. Those poor specimens...

That is definitely not good for the long term safety of delicate insect specimens. We ordered an additional 28 cabinets (each with slots for 24 drawers) to replace these old cabinets. Once the drawers are transferred to their new cabinets we'll start reducing our naphthalene use and begin the processes of drawer imaging and collection profiling. More on that next time.

I came across an awesome series of photos by renown photographer Brian Valentine that show an Aphanogmus wasp (Hymenoptera: Ceraphronidae) approaching a potential host (maybe a cecidomyiid larva?), antennating it (mmmmmm...smells good!), and then ovipositing before walking away. Here's one of the images:

István Mikó and I have slowly built up a complete reference list for the superfamily Ceraphronoidea, and the most descriptive statements about Aphanogmus oviposition behavior (in fact, the only statements about Aphanogmus oviposition behavior) we can find are from Jaramillo and Vega (2009):

During the dissection of berries we observed that Aphanogmus sp. spends most of its time inside the coffee berries within the coffee berry borer galleries. Before parasitising P. nasuta [a bethylid wasp, which parasitizes the coffee berry boror], [Aphanogmus] probes with its antennae the older host larvae or pupae just before construction of the cocoons... [Aphanogmus] usually oviposits on the abdomen of P. nasuta, and up to three Aphanogmus sp. larvae or pupae were found inside the...cocoons.

Aphanogmus has been reared from several orders of insect host, and Jaramillo and Vega (2009) describe a species that parasitizes Bethylidae. I made an animated GIF from the Flickr images so that I could estimate the behaviors for the species captured by Velentine, but alas he was way ahead of me and stitched one together himself! Check it out: Aphanogmus oviposition behavior.

What other treasures will emerge from Flickr's parade of naturalists...? Thanks for sharing your wonderful photos!