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.

2024 April 27

Aziza Cooper writes, re spraying for Gypsy Moths:

See this government site for the spraying schedule.
These are the dates that poison is sprayed from airplanes, 5 AM to 7:30 AM and the droplets drift on the wind and settle gradually on the ground and everyone who is outside. This weekend, Saturday and Sunday April 27 and 28, Colwood will be sprayed. Think about that if you’re out birding at Esquimalt Lagoon.
The government says it’s harmless, but advises people to stay inside during the spray. Two women in Communities United for Clean Air tell of their children wheezing and gasping for breath after the spray came down. One man in Metchosin lost a crop after the spraying.
The spray has been stopped in Sweden, and on Salt Spring Island in 2006.
Please join with Communities for Clean Air to stop this dangerous and unnecessary poisoning of our world.
For more information, listen to this broadcast (25 minutes) from last year. Dr. Jennifer Tynan is organizing the efforts to end aerial spraying.
Get in touch with Communities United for Clean Air here:
 

And as well as the above impacts, the insects that birds depend on for food will die in large numbers from the spraying.