geared towards children, aaand PHDs. python!

[bryoinformatics]

Bioinformatics student, programmer and amateur naturalist. Particularly interested in entomology and bryology. He/him. I post field and specimen photos here sometimes and other related stuff

Any photography used in my profile (icon, banner etc) is my own.

Tags:

- photography: #my photo

- book recommendations and excerpts: #naturalist literature

[bryoinformatics]

go into your local woods and you will find some very normal things

[trainthief]

honestly the only reason im not an old man is that i happen to have been born somewhat recently. other than that 

[extraterrestrialavian123]

(rant?)

Please actually do your research before buying insect specimens online and taxidermy. Please.

"Ethically sourced" is an extremely subjective statement and it's also one sellers will slap onto their products in order to appeal to buyers more.

The same goes for "naturally dead" / "naturally sourced." This isn't always true.

The large majority of insect specimens and taxidermy you buy online will have come from insects that were killed for this purpose. Some of these insects will have been farmed/bred for this, mostly Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) as they're easy to breed in captivity.

However, plenty of insects cannot be farmed on a large enough scale/ not farmed at all and so will have been wild caught just for the purpose to be sold. For example, cicadas or dragonflies.

There's a reason why shops seem to have a ton of perfect insects available for sale. A lot of insects are difficult to find already dead in the wild and it's also not unusual for insects to be damaged after natural death. This is for example one of the reasons why in entomology, insects have to be killed for study rather then found dead. But this isn't a post about scientific collecting/collecting for study.

Instead of being honest about how their insects are sourced, shops would rather lie and hide behind the label of "ethical" instead of being upfront about their sourcing.

There's also the issues of sketchy practices going behind the scenes. The owner of Bic bugs, one of the biggest specimen shops, was previously caught smuggling protected and endangered butterfly specimens into the USA.

https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/irvine-native-to-face-federal-charges-of-trying-to-smuggle-endangered-butterflies-into-u-s/

Oh and don't even get me started on how a lot of shops are seemingly allergic to listing their sources. They will say things like "we get our insects from farms/breeders/universities/museums etc" but not once have I seen a shop actually state their sources. Never. I've never heard of anyone get told by a shop this information either. These shops seem to never have any collection data either, no location, no collector info.. no nothing. They're scientifically worthless and it also just seems like a way to avoid being honest about sourcing.

Final thing, avoid any shop that sells bat specimens. These are always sourced through killing and this does include poaching. There's concerns of bat populations being threatened by this practice and also concerns over how these bats are being preserved and the risk of disease being spread thanks to the bat specimen trade.

Personally, I'd also consider any dried reptile and amphibian specimens as red flags aswell as there's a good chance these are sourced like bats.

https://unfortunatecadaver.com/pages/the-unethical-impact-of-bat-taxidermy

https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/nature-wildlife/2021/12/stop-buying-these-bats-scientists-and-conservationists-plead/

Please do your research before buying specimens if you're unsure and think twice before buying them. Don't impulse buy.

There's plenty of small collectors in entomology groups who might be willing to give away specimens they've found dead or collected themselves that they don't want anymore. There's breeders who might have dead insects they don't want. There's pet owners who might be happy to give away their deceased pets.

Do your research!!!!

[great-and-small]

One of the things I really like about Tumblr is there seems to be a healthy appreciation for invertebrate biology here, which I don’t always see as much on other social media websites. Tumblr users overall seem to love bugs, and it’s important to me that every person who loves bugs knows the name Charles Henry Turner. If you’re not yet familiar with this man, I’m delighted to introduce you to one of the most remarkable minds ever born of this earth, and a true pioneer in the field of entomology and animal behavior.

Charles Turner was born in the United States just a few years after the end of the civil war. His brilliance was evident from the start, and after graduating valedictorian of his high school class he quickly went on to earn his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in short order. While in school, Turner’s relentless curiosity became his greatest advantage. He was drawn to and fascinated by topics that were largely ignored by modern science at the time, namely the cognitive behaviors of insects and other invertebrates. While many of his colleagues believed insects to be mindless automata acting on instinct alone, Turner felt deeply that the brains of these oft overlooked animals were far more complex than the scientific community suspected. He performed extensive experiments to test his theories and found overwhelming evidence of problem solving and individualism among organisms as small as ants and spiders.

By the time Turner earned his zoology pHD in 1907 he had published dozens of papers in highly esteemed journals and had even co-authored a book. It is likely that Turner was the first African American to earn a pHD from the University of Chicago. With such a sparkling academic reputation and enormous body of research, one would expect this candidate to have no issues obtaining a professorship at a prestigious school. Though by every right Turner should have been head of science department at a top university, the systemic racism that permeated academia meant that doors a white man would have walked through were locked and bolted shut for Charles Henry Turner.

Turner did not allow this prejudice to dim in any way his blindingly bright passion for knowledge. He took a job as a high school teacher, and continued to perform and publish research on his own all while he instilled his students with a love for zoology. He published more than 70 papers in extremely respected journals and he remained passionately curious for the entirety of his life. If I tried to list here all of the incredible discoveries Turner made in his lifetime it would take me days to sufficiently express the impact he had on the field of invertebrate behavior. His experiments were so ahead of their time that entomologists today marvel at his research and wonder how much more we would know if Turner’s work had been given the attention and respect of other scientists working at the time. Turner’s mind was about a century ahead of those entomological contemporaries who had no interest in giving him a seat at the table. His tombstone simply reads “scientist”

Like many people of color throughout history, Turner’s exceptional contributions to our world have been unfairly overlooked by many. His name has historically been left out of entomology textbooks and courses, despite laying down groundwork that is still used today. I really recommend that anyone interested in entomology or even biology in general read up on Charles Henry Turner and his works. This is an excellent article that discusses his many challenges and triumphs in the field.

[silverfinned]

what is this, some kind of strange house?

[inaturalist-unofficial]

[bryoinformatics]

Epichalcoplethis velutipes (Arrow, 1900) 1987, Venezuela, secondhand specimen mounted by me in 2025

[bryoinformatics]

A stupid pet peevee of mine is when people call bug pinning taxidermy that's not what taxidermy iiiis. Arguably caterpillar inflation could count and I've seen people skin and stuff caterpillars as well but regular insect pinning is just dry preservation, with *sometimes* the abdomen being emptied and filled. And wet specimens are especially not taxidermy

[passengerpigeons]

she jack my pine (P. banksiana) till my serotinous cone's sealing resin melts at 50°C (122°F) allowing my seeds to disperse and colonize shortly following a stand-clearing fire (Larsen & MacDonald 1998).

[razehider]

good news i'm finally getting around to killing all the people who own shitty aesthetic blogs that post unsourced photos half of which are AI. if you're one of those people and you're not dead i just haven't gotten to you yet. remain in your room browsing your collection of airbrushed pink moths that don't exist and i'll be on my way soon

[bryoinformatics]

TENSOKU : insect preparation, book review/overview

I got this book after someone pulled it up in an entomological association meeting when we were discussing Japanese entomology media: seeing the cover, I immediately thought "wait woah a book that's entirely on pinning???" and eventually made my way to ebay for it.

The book advertises itself as the first illustrated book fully dedicated to insect specimen preparation, and it might currently be the only one. I know of a couple technical guidebooks on collecting and preserving arthropods, but this book focuses entirely on the mounting of specimens beyond the bare minimum required for identification. That does mean it lacks any info on collecting techniques and identification resources, though.

The authors are Keiki Fukui and Kazuho Kobayashi, photography is by Koji Sakai, and English translation is by Carim Nahaboo.

Full review below. To be completely honest, I'm writing this as I actively procrastinate on studying for a midterm, so it may not be the most thorough : feel free to let me know if you think something deserves more elaboration.

While the book is Japanese, almost the entire book is accompanied by English translations. Tensoku (展足) is a verb and noun referring to spreading and arranging the legs and antennae of an insect specimen, and it is used directly in the English text. One thing to know is that the book focuses almost entirely on beetle specimens (expected for Japanese entomology) and does not deal with spreading the wings in lepidoptera or other orders. The author in charge of most of the book, Fukui, specializes in mounting beetle specimens. It would've been more accurate for the subtitle to be beetle preparation, really.

The first section and the one that takes up the majority of the book is dedicated to specimen "glow-ups" : one of the authors, Keiki Fukui, was given permission to clean and remount some old specimens from the NHM collections that had discolored from leached oils over time, underwent other weathering like pins corroding and creating verdigris, and/or were initially pinned unspread. There are also some before and after comparisons of more recent unmounted specimens.

I found the NHM specimen remounts particularly inspiring as someone who's often on the lookout for old personal collections to acquire and restore. There are some short explanations about each specimen at the end of the section.

The next section is focused on preparation techniques. Keiki Fukui explains the purpose of tensoku, as it's not required at all for a proper specimen : the most important parts are always the data label and that the body structures required for identification remain intact and observable. Fukui argues that proper tensoku enhances the appeal of specimens for collections that are used in outreach, and facilitates observation of important characters. The styles recommended in the book aim to strike a balance between aesthetic appeal and practicality.

Tools, degreasing and cleaning steps, rehydration steps and different mounting techniques are then presented. The cases in which you should avoid a specific method of degreasing or rehydrating are highlighted which is appreciated, but again, limited to beetles.

I had seen the double-sided tape method used for small specimens that are card-mounted in some Japanese tutorials online before, but only really started using it after getting this book and I've been getting some really nice results, spreading things as small as a 20-spotted ladybeetle without loss of tarsi or antennae.

As any book on insect specimens should have, there are also a couple pages on collection curation: preparing labels, the most important part of a specimen, and long-term storage. Japan deals with humidity problems that we mostly do not have in North America so there are some concerns that are less applicable in my case (like clear plastic mounting boards warping), but UV exposure and dermestids are worldwide problems.

The final section, written by Kazuho Kobayashi, is on the history of insect collections and how they rose to popularity in Japan. Unfortunately, this is the only section of the book to have no English translation. I can't comment a whole lot on this part since I had to read it with a machine translator (I'm not yet at a level where I can read Japanese text without furigana) and that isn't representative.

Overall, I do have to say it was fairly short in terms of text content (and beetle-centric) for the price tag when getting it shipped to North America. The photos are beautiful, but you can also find a lot of high-res photos of Keiki Fukui's work online. It's still a really cool book that I'm glad to have gotten, but I would probably only recommend it if you're hardcore into pinning/specimen prep (especially of beetles) or particularly interested in entomology in Japan. Especially worth picking up if you can avoid the hefty shipping fees, the base price is 3,500 JPY.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

I always wanted a cranberry bog.

[bryoinformatics]

pretty sure noone will get this but had to get it out

[hometoursandotherstuff]

I always wanted a cranberry bog.

[great-and-small]

Please enjoy some valentine greetings from the animal world- if you decide to pass them out to coworkers/classmates make sure you have enough for everyone ❤️

1. Satin bowerbird

2. American alligator

3. Prairie vole

4. Marine flatworm (genus Pseudobiceros)

5. Bedbug

6. Galapagos hawk

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Even Darwin had his bad days.

[bryoinformatics]

Sphagnum papillosum Lindb. : showing the diagnostic shape and namesake papillosity of the chlorocysts in a branch leaf cross-section. To get past subgenus Sphagnum, that was all I needed, but getting a pretty 1 or 2 cells thick cross-section isn't easy. This subgenus is easy to recognize macroscopically by its large cucullate (spoon shaped) leaves, but the main thing that helps get them to species is these cross sections.