Sixteen insect species photographed for the first time

November 26, 2024 9:10 PM

Sixteen insect species photographed for the first time by citizen scientist. Phil Warburton is one of millions of citizen scientists around the globe helping fill the gaps in knowledge for entomologists by taking photos of insects that weren't possible a generation ago.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (7 comments total)

I try my best to take pictures of KNOWN insects and I'm mostly useless. This guy is a saint and a scholar! Thanks for sharing.
posted by es_de_bah at 9:38 PM on November 26

I don't know about this one, I'm pretty sure someone has photographed sixteen insect species before.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:47 PM on November 26

I don't know about this one…

Nope, they were all only one species, but of different sexes and different stages of life (Thanks Jack Horner!… for destroying childhood by murdering the triceratops).
posted by rubatan at 11:42 PM on November 26

Tech has come a ways. A pal of mine was drawer-in-chief for E.O. Wilson in the 1960/70s. It was impossible to capture the diagnostic detail of Ed's ants with any 35mm camera at that time. Quite apart from having to wait until the film was developed to see the results. In the 2010s, I taught Bio 101 in an Inst.Tech and made the students draw what they saw down the microscope; while they wanted to take a snap with their phones and paste that into their lab books. My argument was that their protocol could entirely bypass their brain; whereas mine required a bit of focused attention and they might learn something.

On finding / photographing new species, another younger pal had one season of ant-adjacent field work on Barro Colorado Island in the middle of Panama. She turned over a rock and found a species new to science. Her assessment was that such a feat was common enough down there because, like, god has an “inordinate fondness for beetles.” and the deity had spent a lorra time crafting in tropical rainforest.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:55 AM on November 27 [3 favorites]

Biological drawing is such a fun and amazing skillset, I do miss it
posted by eustatic at 2:51 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]

That’s a lot of citizen scientists!
posted by Captaintripps at 4:21 AM on November 27

A good friend of mine is a citizen scientist. By trade he's a photojournalist, but he's big into cicadas. He helps map the broods each year in conjunction with a university's entomology department, and he can tell species apart by sight and sound. He was the cicada wrangler for a BBC documentary a year or two ago and has contributed to scientific papers about cicadas. It's great when someone's hobby pushes our knowledge forward.
posted by bryon at 11:52 AM on November 27