INVERTEBRATE ALERT
This blog provides an informal forum for terrestrial invertebrate watchers to post recent sightings of interesting observations in the southern Vancouver Island region. Please send your sightings by email to Jeremy Tatum (tatumjb352@gmail.com). Be sure to include your name, phone number, the species name (common or scientific) of the invertebrate you saw, location, date, and number of individuals. If you have a photograph you are willing to share, please send it along. Click on the title above for an index of past sightings.The index is updated most days.

July 5 evening

2020 July 5 evening

 

   Continuing with Mr E’s queue of difficult ones.

 

   First a fungus covered with numerous springtails and a few mites.  It took several seconds for Dr Heather Proctor, University of Alberta, to reply to my query re the mites.  Her area of expertise is mites, so I didn’t really expect her to work on the springtails – but she had a go at them, too!   This is what she wrote, as I say just seconds after I asked!

 

   The long-legged mites belong to the prostigmatan family Cocceupodidae (or Eupodidae, depending on whether you accept Cocceupodidae as a separate family). Probably the genus Linopodes. For the springtails, I will guess Hypogastruridae but don’t take my word on that!

 

   Jeremy Tatum writes:  Since I have never seen the long words Cocceupodidae or Eupodidae before, I am quite happy, for the purposes of Invert Alert, to accept the former as a separate Family!

 

Springtails (Coll.: possibly Hypogastruridae)

Mites, probably Linopodes sp. (Prostigmata: Cocceupodidae)

Mr E

 

 Thanks to Libby Avis for working on the identification of the following two micro moths:

 


Hellinsia (possibly homodactylus) (Lep.: Pterophoridae)  Mr E

 


Zeiraphera (possibly canadensis) (Lep.: Tortricidae – Olethreutinae)  Mr E

 


Zeiraphera (possibly canadensis) (Lep.: Tortricidae – Olethreutinae)  Mr E

 

 

   Rosemary Jorna photographed this bumble bee.  Annie Pang makes a very tentative identification, but she remarks that often it is easier to identify a bumble bee if photographs are available from several different angles  (e.g. dorsal, lateral, frontal, etc.).


Bombus (possibly bifarius) (Hym.: Apidae)  Rosemary Jorna

 

  Jochen Möhr,  Metchosin, sends photographs of a Pale Tiger Swallowtail, his first-of-season Lorquin’s Admiral, and a Sculptured Pine Borer.

Pale Tiger Swallowtail Papilio eurymedon (Lep.: Papilionidae)  Jochen Möhr

 

Lorquin’s Admiral Limenitis lorquini (Lep.: Nymphalidae)  Jochen Möhr

 

Sculptured Pine Borer Chalcophora angulicollis(Col.: Buprestidae)  Jochen Möhr