Pterostichini Blog

Preliminary analyses of Tar Pit insects provide evidence for more aridity and warmth than previously proposed for the transition from late Ice Age to modern times. by Anna Holden, American Museum of Natural History, La Brea Tar Pits and Museum …

Together with a group of undergraduate students, I am comparing the trapping efficiency of standard pitfall cups and ramp traps. Preliminary results suggest that the ramp traps perform quite well. They catch a similar diversity of insects and don’t trap …

Part of the Hopland Bioblitz effort is comparing two styles of traps for ground active arthropods, ramp traps and pitfall traps. There is a lot more sorting and identifying to do, but the tenebrionid catch visually appears to tell us something. …

    The recent Hopland Bioblitz was a chance to really dig in and sample insects. One exciting find was a wee beastie in a family of silverfish that is very little-known in California. These blind soil-dwellers were only recently …

Please share: You can participate remotely! Our big Hopland scientific bioblitz is this weekend (9-10 April, with some events on the 8th) and I look forward to seeing some of you there. If you can’t make it to HREC, there …

Students will be team members in an NSF-funded multidisciplinary research project: The Genetic Basis, Biosynthetic Pathways and Evolution of Geadephagan Chemical Defense that includes collaborations among researchers at UC, Berkeley; San Diego State University; University of Arizona; and Steven’s Institute of Technology. …

Perhaps you are like me and need to run a UV light for insects even when it rains, or especially when it rains (think rain beetles). I have chewed through a bunch of the off the shelf UV lights over …

See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 Day 5 – June 13, 2015 [by Riva Madan]          Our last day going out in the field at GBNP. We started off by picking up all the traps we …

Creative control over the formation of names is one privilege taxonomists have. While most are run of the mill descriptive or locality-based names, patronyms are also very common. Flies have been named for Beyoncé’s voluptuous derrière, carabid beetles named for Governator’s …

See also part 1, part 2, part 3 Day 4 – June 12, 2015 [by Riva Madan] Today was our trip to the higher elevations, reaching about 11,000 ft. It is an easy drive to the trail head at Wheeler …

See also Part 1 & Part 2 Day 3 – June 11, 2015 [by Riva Madan & Frank Hsu]         Sunrise!! And we got little sleep since the water kept dripping on us inside the tent. On further inspection we …

See also- Part 1 Day 2 – June 10, 2015 [By Riva Madan] Today our primary objective was to reach Great Basin National Park.  Along the drive there, we saw stretch after stretch of flat, brown landscape, with mountains in …

Thank you to everyone that filled out the little survey for Sarah’s class project. For this small project she was looking only at records for Pterostichus californicus and P. vicinus in the Bay Area. The conclusion for this small exploration are: 1. Specimens in …

THEM!   that amazing, big rubber ant monster movie, was released in 1954. Let’s celebrate this classic big-bug movie turning 60 years old by watching it [again] over the next week. If you have seen it before (I have more than …

A few days ago I posted some images I took while on my recent trip to the MCZ at Harvard that show an odd wear pattern in the wooden floor. I asked people to guess what caused the marks and …

In the Diptera section of the MCZ, on the floor is evidence of something historical. Do you know or can you guess what it is (i.e. how it was done) and whodunnit? Need some clues? I’m interested in this and …

I have been sampling once or twice a month this year on Wilcox Ranch, a Solano Land Trust property just a bit south of Dixon. Last night will be the final trip until the rains return in the fall or …

  Text Extracted from G.E. Ball & R.E. Roughly 1982 The Hypherpes-like taxa of southern Mexico: classification, and evolutionary considerations (Coleoptera: Carabidae: Pterostichus). Transactions of the American Entomological Society. 108(3) 315-399.   Introduction The wealth of nations is generally assessed …