For the last week or two I have been adding photos of moths to the website and attempting to identify many of the species that Doug and I have photographed in the last few years. It turns out that this one Ornarantia dyari has not previously been recorded on the island. It is known from Florida and the Bahamas and the larvae feed on Ficus. It's in the Family Choreutidae of which there are 11 other species (4 endemic) but not this one.
At the time of publication of updated checklist of Cuban Lepidoptera in Zootaxa back in 2012 there were 1378 moth species on the list. It was acknowledged that the micro-lepidoptera families had been poorly studied and that there was much sill to discover. For the last week or two I have been adding photos of moths to the website and attempting to identify many of the species that Doug and I have photographed in the last few years. It turns out that this one Ornarantia dyari has not previously been recorded on the island. It is known from Florida and the Bahamas and the larvae feed on Ficus. It's in the Family Choreutidae of which there are 11 other species (4 endemic) but not this one. And here are two more species that are not on the Cuban list either. The first is one of the plume moths Alucita sp but don't know what species and the second is a Gelechiid and almost certainly Perimede erransella though it would really need dissection I think to confirm it.
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Part 4 - When politicians lie - Democracy dies. It should be clear to everyone that the US is a failed state with what has happened there in the last few days, weeks and months. Four plus years of Trump's utter incompetence and never-ending self-serving lies enabled by the billionaire press and social media owners. Let's hope that President Biden manages to reverse the worst of the ills and corruption and brings back proper democratic government. Until we break the billionaire moguls of the press and social media that are spewing out the lies 24/7 on the likes of Fox news it's difficult to see how things can change much. And in a society that is so entrenched and invested on one side or the other that if you see the light and change sides it means you lose all your 'friends'. Here in the UK Johnson and the Tory party are busy following the Trump playbook enabled by the same Murdoch press stoking racist division. And soon we will have not one but two new TV news channels pumping out the far-right views of our corrupt government. Even without that it is amazing to me that the Tories are leading in the polls. I can't put it better than the eloquent George Monbiot and so I suggest you take ten minutes out of your day and watch his excellent video here.
And what is the solution? Simple really - we need a vaccine for the gullible as much as we need a vaccine for Covid. The Pyraustinae is a large subfamily of the lepidopteran family Crambidae. There are 190 species of Pyraustinae on the Cuban list and many are beautiful and attractively coloured species sometimes with clear panels in the wings. During the last week I have added quite a lot more open source photos of species that occur in Cuba although many of the photos were actually taken in the US or Mexico with some from elsewhere in Central or S America. So currently about 55% of the species can be found here on the website. |
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November 2024
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