At the museum

Walking from the Museum to Circular Quay (click on photo for the story)

Tuesday is Museum day, and today I transcribed moths and cicadas (would have stuck to one but the database is still in throes of development). So I transcribed records for the cicadas:
Tanna japonensis, Huechys celebensis, Huechys fusca, Huechys pingenda. Try googling these. You won't have much joy if you are looking for an image or some information.

It may sound entirely boring to look at an image and to try to transcribe the information in the labels photographed together with that sad pinned and very dead insect. But it's not. Today's interest lay in a bloke called Hans Fruhstorfer, the larger part of whose insect collections are in the British Museum of Natural History, but it seems the Australian Museum acquired parts of his collection (perhaps not wanted by the BMNH, or perhaps the colonial museum proposed a sufficiently interesting sum of money to acquire them.) So Huechys celebensis came from Bua-Kraeng, in the South Celebes and was collected (I think) in February 1896 by Hans Fruhstorfer in his wanderings. Other specimens came from Than Moi, Tonkin, from Montes ?, Tonkin. Part of what we do is to take the collection site and put a latitude, a longitude and an uncertainty on these. This can be difficult when you are struggling to read an ancient hand written or even type written label and you have to experiment to find the place. So my first reading of Than Moi was Than Mei but this was not recognised as a Vietnamese place name. Experimentation and the database suggested Than Moi so I went with that. A large part of the Asian species I was transcribing came from Fruhstorfer's collection, so following his career and wanderings through the years was very interesting.

Place names test one's geography and resolve. I struggled for ages with Matang, thinking it might be Malang and a few other things, finally resolving on Matang since it matched the country... In Australia, I struggled with Menninga Q, reading it as Meninga Q, but Meninga only brought up a place in New Guinea...

So my day was spent following the adventures of Hans Fruhstorfer in Asia and S.E.Asia, and also those of a certain L.M. Courtney-Baines who by the last beautiful Cerura australis moth had become L.M. Courtney-de Baines. What was also extraordinary, was that he had collected this moth at Bayview, in the years of 1966, 1967, 1974, 1984, 1985, and 1994(not sure about this last one, perhaps because at this point he had adorned himself with the particle). I remain amazed, and wondering how it was that this moth was collected by this bloke, at just this one place and over so many years. What is the story?
(Another image for this moth is at Butterfly house.)

Losing heart

Poinsettia

I have gone very cold on the Australian Museum's rapid digitisation project. Possibly because I am not very good at using the databases, which are very clumsy to correct and still full of logical errors... leading data to be easily destroyed.

Yet the need to continue is very evident. I flicked to this picture of Katipo rubivenosa, and wanting to find out more, I googled Katipo rubivenosa and found exactly nothing, except for the image in a discussion of the project. And so far, this seems to be the case for most of the insects we have photographed.

It cannot be the case that such information is so impossible to find, only that I am poor in finding it...

I have also gone cold on my camera. Nikon does not supply a printed verson of the reference manual which is pretty poor. I hate trying to read documents on my computer. And I am not happy with my photographs.....


Plate 6 in Wiener Entomologische Monatschrift 3 (1859). Poster on the door of the digitisation lab.
(Plate identified by Ian Riley) But as Ian says
"Actually the names of most of these are quite obscure. Charaxes bohemani seems to get a bit of coverage on the web, and its name has stood since first described by Cajetan and Rudolf Felder (father and son) in 1859. Despite this, in the Zoological Record there is only two papers referring to the species, one in 1870 and the other in 1985. Your photo is Plate 6 in Wiener Entomologische Monatschrift 3 (1859). The Felders had four papers in that volume entitled "Lepidopterologische Fragmente" I, II, III and IV."

Which reinforces my point.

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.