Sarah Arnold

I think it's going to be one of those autumns of many, many ladybirds. Seeing multiple reports of this sort of thing today, and enjoyed watching them all flying around in the sun outside work as well.

They do seem to have suddenly all decided to congregate and look for somewhere to settle. After noticing them all over my office window I popped out and found many, many individuals all over the sunny, south-facing walls of the building. (Kent) I'm sure I've seen similar reports from elsewhere too.

Threshold-based management reduces insecticide use by 44% without compromising pest control or crop yield - Communications Earth & Environment Pest control programs using pest density thresholds cut insecticide uses by 44% and costs by 40%, while maintaining yield and pest suppression, and enhancing beneficial insect populations, as revealed...

Exciting new meta-analysis: compared to calendar spraying, threshold-based management cuts insecticide use by 44% and costs by 40% without reducing yields, and supports more beneficial insects. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

I agree! Maybe the research community could do something like develop and share some hypothetical case studies of how a conservation project could look different if relevant researchers were involved...?

... Or because practitioners have specific experience-based knowledge of what works/what doesn't in that type of environment that they consider trumps theoreticals?

Not sure and probably depends on scale as well (e.g. 0.3ha LWS/field edge v 400 square miles of forest!).

Or because they once tried and the cost of including researchers blew the budget apart? Or they once tried but bringing in a research org as a partner created a layer of admin complexity that delayed the project too much? ...

Was there discussion over how to widen the community involved in review? Summer is a challenge, but not all countries have "summer", and not at the same time. Are researchers from Africa, Asia, Latin America getting same opportunities to be involved in peer review? (Do y'all want to?)

Interesting new paper discussing fieldwork risk assessments and policies in UK HE (but which has some good ideas that other orgs could also incorporate) and how to make fieldwork safer, more inclusive and consider individual needs/intersectionality/etc. #Fieldwork #RiskAssessment

Yes. Some of the males the queens produce are genetically entirely the different species, but the queens can also produce same-species male offspring via the "normal" routes. We know there are 2 species of males produced because morphologically they are different, & their genomes are very distinct.

...It doesn't feel like one of those ring species that exist in a continuum with species A at one end, species B at the other, and lots of individuals that are a bit in-between. These are distinct and discrete species.

The fact that the two ant species diverged basically millions of years ago implies they they ought to be really different. So the fact that a queen ant can lay eggs which hatch out as males of a totally different, separate species is not really like anything that's "supposed" to happen...

True! I think I love it even more when fairly common species do the fun, whacky stuff right under our noses. (Milder example: I *still* feel delight when I remember that common "solitary" bees like Lasioglossum morio are just quietly being primitively eusocial on the edge of strawberry farms!)

Wow. That is...quite weird and wonderful. (And now I have shared this paper to basically everyone I know who is even remotely interested in insect biology. Or evolution.)

My mind has just been blown and everything you thought you knew about biology is a lie... Seriously, this is one of the coolest "now rethink everything" type papers I've encountered in a while.

DesignShedCymru does some brilliant stuff.

Not long now till the 2025 Kent Wildlife Conference! This year's themes are urban biodiversity and citizen science - check out the impressive list of speakers here -
www.kentfieldclub.org.uk/programme/up...

Also - tickets only £22 including refreshments and lunch! So why not book your place today?

An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.

I totally don't have internal training materials that are written a bit like that for new techs. Definitely not...

"flowers were pollinated daily by shaking plant canopies and flicking individual flowers by hand" - is this feasible at scale? I wonder if/how the light setup impacts managed insect pollinators if using them?

A top-down image of 12 various moths on a green egg carton.

Do you do moth trapping in the UK? We'd love your help! 💡

At @ukceh.bsky.social we're training & testing AI to detect multiple moths in a single image.

Send us top-down photos of multiple moths on egg trays to support this work.

More info & form: forms.gle/e3HzBPEd7RVV...

#mothsmatter #TeamMoth

Sorry! Forgot alt-text. Alt-text = Close-up images of a small (<5mm) long mostly-black beetle in a glass tube, in a human hand. The beetle has red-brown legs, as well as red head and thorax.

I checked the common mallow & sure enough, there was a Podagrica sp. In this case, P. fuscicornis, the red-legged one. I need to do a thread about the Podagricas of common mallow in the UK as they're more interesting than you'd expect for tiny flea beetles...

#KentNature #Kentomology #Coleoptera

A pinkish purple thistle flower with a bright yellow crab spider sitting underneath looking quite obvious and not at all cryptic!

I am not sure if this Misumena thought it was well-camouflaged... [3/]

#KentNature #Kentomology #Spider

A black beetle with distinctive orange shoulders, on a brick wall that has holes in the mortar. (Sitaris muralis.)

Foreground shows at least 3 black beetles with orange shoulders in a big pile. They all have weird reduced elytra that don't fully cover the wings or abdomen. Background shows another beetle. All are on concrete with sandy surface.

A very distended S. muralis in a glass tube. Abdomen is dark brown, rest of beetle is black apart from distinctive yellow-orange shoulders. Beetle is right way up but legs scrunched under it as dead.

A hole in brickwork/mortar with spider webbing forming a tunnel, in which a large dark coloured spider sits among at least 2 dead Sitaris muralis beetles.

A particular feature of the site is that is has a population of Sitaris muralis that was first noted by @baldbirder.bsky.social in 2024 and was back in force this year. The beetles parasitise nests of Anthophora plumipes. [2/]

A very cute small bee with big green eyes sitting on the tip of a person's finger (Anthophora quadrimaculata)

A large bee on a yellow Asteraceae type flower. She has brown-golden hair on her thorax and her hind legs are covered in spectacular yellow-golden flowing hairs. (Dasypoda hirtipes)

A fairly large bee in a petri dish, with a black and fairly unhairy abdomen upper side, but you can just about see the underside has thick, stiff orange hair (black at the tip) for pollen carrying. Her thorax is hairy light brown and has lots of yellow pollen on. (Megachile willughbiella)

Yesterday's @kentfieldclub.bsky.social meeting was at @niab-uk.bsky.social's East Malling site, which has orchards of various ages and management, and wildflower areas (though the visitor car park was also biodiversity-rich).

The site has a wide diversity of bees! [1/]
#KentNature #bees #entomology

Sometimes when they go funny colours like that it's because they have either a virus or a parasitoid inside!

Hoverfly. I think Eristalis pertinax maybe?

This is amazing!

A tiny, oval beetle on a leaf. The beetle has brown elytra with a darker, horseshoe-shaped mark at the centre.

A wet day for our field meeting last Saturday, but several members braved the weather. Amongst the species recorded was this Horseshoe Ladybird Clitostethus arcuatus, found and photographed by @sejarnold.bsky.social. #beetles #coleoptera #ladybirds #microladybird

While Polistes spp. (especially P. dominula) are pretty common in nearby bits of continental Europe, they haven't really established in the UK much yet. But there is increasing evidence of a bit of breeding in southern England. Last saw an individual near Ashford some years back...