Digitisation Lab, Australian Museum

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallaba_ochropepla
Gallaba ochropepla. One of the Gallaba species in drawer 184.

I have been volunteering at the Australian Museum. They have trained perhaps 100 or so people to digitise the collections. (We are volunteers but the project is managed by a permanent officer.) First cab off the rank has been entomology, and today I teamed with Clare to photograph Drawer 184 which featured the Gallaba genus.

Rhiannon, one of the project leaders has now started a blog (Rhiannon's blog), and you can see what we have been doing here. It is an exceedingly fiddly task. Each specimen in a drawer has all its labels removed using tweezers. The labels are put onto a piece of plastic foam so that all the information is displayed, while the insect is placed beside. An extra label (our K label) is added, and when the insect and its associated information has been photographed, the labels are rethreaded on the pin and the specimen replaced in the drawer.

Many specimens are over a hundred years old and most are quite fragile. The aim of the exercise is to make the entomology collection (6 million specimens (?)) available and to obviate the need to pull out the actual physical specimens.

I was pleased with our work today. We took good photographs (but we did manage to damage 6 specimens..) I had hoped to find images of our moths on the internet, but only a single reference to just one of the three species we photographed in drawer 184 popped up on my Google search for "Gallaba". (Now found references but no photographs for G. dysthryma, and poor photographs for G.eugraphes). Utimately our work will show the animal, its species name, when, where, and by whom it was collected.
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The photograph is of my driveway using the effects menu ("sketch) on my new Nikon D5100. Fun software, but I hope that is not what I was paying for, but rather for the lens...


Driveway, Palm Beach.

Not haiku at all.

Phytochemical stimuli
direct and modify
insect pollinator responses.

Quoted from
Williams, G & Adams, P. (2010) The Flowering of Australia's Rainforests A Plant and Pollination Miscellany, CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Australia.

Phytochemicals
direct, modify
pollinator responses.
(5)(5)(7)


In the misty rain at Mt Coot-tha.

Insect haikus, again.

Four hundred thousand(1)
In Australasia alone.
And man is special?

(1) Cranston, P.S., Insect Biodiversity and Conservation in Australasia, 2010, Annual review of entomology, 55: 55-75.

And Jean Hort has so many stunning photos of them: e.g.,
a Robber fly, and an even more stunning robber fly, a mantis, a mantis fly, some ants, an ant's head, and many, many more.

Originally, I wrote four million, but on checking Cranston, I realised I had added another zero to the guestimate of species numbers. He says 400,000 insect species. So I had another go. But it definitely needs a context to be understood.


The photos below show evidence of the many insects here.. And sometimes show an insect.

Insect effects on a Eucalypt, Timber Creek, Northern Territory


On a hakea, Barrenjoey Head, New South Wales.


Male Pandanus flower, North Stradbroke Island, Queensland. I think it was crawling with ants, which led me to ask whether it was wind, bird or insect pollinated?


Ant nest, high on a Boab, Angalarri River, Northern Territory.


Termite nest on a casuarina, Barrenjoey Head, New South Wales.


Paper wasp nest on a Buckinghamia, Kedron, Queensland