"...To make a prairie, it takes a bee.
A bee and reverie.
The reverie alone will do if bees are few."
-Emily Dickinson
Insects Insects Insects
This information is being forwarded to you from the Prairie Smoke Chapter of The Prairie Enthusiasts because it may be of interest to our members. Please direct all inquiries regarding this page to mjhatfield@oneota.org
All interested persons:
You are invited to join the Iowa Insects Mailing List. Send an email to: listserv@list.uiowa.edu. Leave the subject line blank. Type the message: subscribe Iowa-insects
The Iowa Insects Mailing List provides a forum for those interested in Iowa's insects and, more generally, invertebrates, their identification and ecology. Its purpose is to encourage novices who are trying to expand their knowledge about the incredible world of insects. Another objective is to support the Iowa Native Plant Society.
This list is owned by Diana Horton and MJ Hatfield, managed by MJ Hatfield, and sponsored by the University of Iowa Department of Biology. For assistance, contact the List Manager, MJ Hatfield, mjhatfield@oneota.org. Many thanks to Diana Horton for doing all the work to get this list up and running. Thank you to the University of Iowa Department of Biology for sponsoring this list. And thank you to the Iowa Native Plant Society and the Iowa Native Plants Mailing List for encouraging interest in native plants and through the web of life, the insects that depend on them. Thanks, MJ Hatfield
FOR MORE DETAIL, READ ON . . .
Many insects can be identified by sight. Digital photography and the internet have greatly enhanced our ability to identify some insects. Of course many, many insects cannot be identified just by a photograph.
The Iowa-Insects Mailing List will involve the posting of digital images. Please refer to the Welcome Message for protocol as some subscribers do not have a high speed connection. There are several methods to post insect photos.
Examples: This past summer the INPS sponsored a 2-day sedge workshop. As we collected sedges at Engledinger Marsh in Polk County some of us were also looking for insects. Jennifer Filipiak caught a good looking fly, a Stratiomyidae, a genus associated with water, seeps, and such. I posted the photo on Bug Guide and within a few days someone had identified it to genus. Last week it was identified to species. http://bugguide.net/node/view/200758
So registering & posting your photos on BugGuide is a way to send a link to an insect you've photographed.
Or you can identify the insect using any of a number of resources. Although this photo http://bugguide.net/node/view/19361/bgpage is not the same individual that we saw on the picnic table at the Iowa Prairie Network annual meeting this past summer, it is the same species, a distinctive looking critter.
But please don't rely on memory as there are several Cleridae: Enoclerus species and they look quite similar. http://bugguide.net/node/view/288/bgpage
You can post a photo directly to the list as an attachment. This tortoise beetle was photographed this summer at Brushy Creek near the Iowa DNR Prairie Resource Center. (This photo was sized for BugGuide, 560 on the longest side, but wasn't posted because they had plenty of photographs of these.) This Chelymorpha cassidea was identified from this photo by Iowan Doug Veal.
You can send a photo to Jim Durbin who manages the Insects of Iowa http://www.insectsofiowa.com/ website. He will record the accompanying information. Jim added Boone County as a location for the imperial moth, Eacles imperialis because Danielle With gave me a pupa from Boone county which emerged spring of 2006. http://www.insectsofiowa.com/Moths/saturniidae/7704%20eacles%20imperialis.htm
Another way to post photos is to convert them to a PDF file and post that file as per the attached Harris' 3 Spot, Harrisimemna trisignata, a wild looking creature if I've ever seen one! This was found one night, outside my front door, on the back side of an ash leaf. Honestly, I didn't know what to make of it.
So what's the point of all of this? Well, insects are fully one half of all the described species on earth. Those numbers probably hold for organisms in Iowa as well. We pretty much know our plants, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Together, helping each other, we can start to learn the insects that live in our prairies, our woodlands, our creeks and our yards.
MJ