E-moth Moths Count Update April 2017 Sponsor a moth in the new atlas To help raise funds to produce and publish the forthcoming Atlas of Britain and Ireland’s Larger Moths Butterfly Conservation (BC) are running a moth auction. If you have a favourite moth that you would like to sponsor, either in your own name or as a dedication to another person, you will be able to make a bid for the species. There will be six auctions in total, each lasting for a calendar month, and the species featured in each has been randomly generated. Further details and the catalogue detailing the dates of each auction and the species ‘up for grabs’ can be found by following this link. We hope you will support this worthwhile cause whilst enjoying the fun and excitement of the auction. Alternatively, to guarantee sponsorship of your chosen species you can reserve the moth for double its initial list price. It will not be possible to reserve a species once the auction it is listed in has started. The first auction starts at 8am on Monday 1st May 2017; reservations for this auction will be taken via [email protected] up until 2pm on Friday 28th April 2017. National Moth Recording Scheme update With the atlas looming large on the horizon, the NMRS database currently holds 21.8 million macro-moth records, as well as an impressive 1.3 million micro-moth records. Since 1st January 2017 we have received 84 refreshed vice-county datasets, 16 of these have been imported to-date. Les Hill, Senior Data Manager, is processing the other 68 datasets for importation in to the NMRS database. The arrival of the VC52 Anglesey dataset was very welcomed as the last update for this VC was in 2010 for the Provisional Atlas and we are particularly grateful to Andrew Graham for his hard work in sorting this out. Other datasets that we have not had data refreshes from for some time but have received recently include: VC 18 South Essex; VC 19 North Essex; VC 20 Hertfordshire; VC 21 Middlesex; VC 32 Northamptonshire; VC 56 Nottinghamshire; VC 61 South-east Yorkshire; VC 62 North-east Yorkshire; VC 63 South-west Yorkshire; VC 64 Mid-west Yorkshire; VC 65 North-west Yorkshire; VC 76 Renfrewshire; VC 85 Fifeshire; VC 81 Berwickshire; VC 90 Angus and VC109 Caithness. Many thanks to everyone concerned for their efforts in collating, verifying and submitting their datasets to the NMRS. The deadline for guaranteed inclusion of datasets for the forthcoming Atlas of Britain and Ireland’s Larger Moths has now passed. We’ve been in touch with several County Moth Recorders’ who are still busy collating and verifying their local datasets and we are expecting these imminently. Dr Zoë Randle, Surveys Officer, will be contacting the remaining County Moth Recorders to check on progress in the coming weeks. Dark Bordered Beauty in England: decline of the Strensall population and hopes for recovery. The Dark Bordered Beauty Epione vespertaria is currently found at a single site near York, Strensall Common, a protected lowland heath where it has been known since the 19th Century. As part of the 1999 species action plan, the ecology of the Strensall population was researched in 2005. The foodplant, Creeping Willow, was found to be aggregated into a small number of dense concentrations that held the majority of adults and larvae. Plants hosting larvae were also large and near trees. In 2007 a monitoring transect for adult moths through the known concentrations was established. Between 2007 and 2014, adult moth numbers dropped by about 30-40% annually. Surveys of Creeping Willow in 2013 showed that density of the plant in the hotspots had declined by 90%, and by 70% overall, and that hardly any plants were of a size that supported larvae in 2005. In 2015 nine small grazing exclosures (to exclude Dark Bordered Beauty (Peter Mayhew) sheep, the main grazing animals on the site) were established over existing Creeping Willow, and augmented with pot grown plants. More and larger exclosures were established in 2016, augmented by over 1000 pot-grown plants, and more are planned for 2017. Surveys show that the Creeping Willow in these exclosures is taller and grows by about 10cm annually, in contrast to plants outside exclosures, which are not growing significantly. In 2016, adult moth numbers showed an improvement that, hopefully, is the start of a more general recovery. In the longer term, a more sustainable grazing strategy needs to be found so that Dark Bordered Beauty can persist at the site, and populations need to be established in new sites. Dr Peter Mayhew (University of York) Studying the moths of bird nests Bird nests are pockets of highly concentrated resource that are easily exploited by detritivore invertebrates, including several British moth species. The British Trust for Ornithology recommends that the contents of nest boxes are cleaned out annually to help reduce parasites and disease. This represents an excellent opportunity to study the invertebrate communities within them. Obviously this must been done over the winter, once the birds have finished breeding. At this time of year, any moths living within the nest are likely to be in the larval or pupal stage and, therefore, the material should be collected and kept in an unheated outbuilding until the spring. Storage of 250 birds’ nests (Douglas Boyes) I first reared moths from bird nests in 2013 when I cleaned out four nest boxes from my garden. Four species emerged the following May, including 19 specimens of Niditinea striolella, which was the first time the species had been seen in north Wales. For my undergraduate research project I went one step further, collecting over 250 nests! I sampled from seven sites in Montgomeryshire during January 2016. Most were Blue Tit and Great Tit nests, but I also had some Pied Flycatcher, Redstart and a selection of species that nest in the undergrowth. As you can probably imagine, 250 nests take up an awful lot of space - they had to have their own dedicated shed! Each nest was stored in a plastic takeaway container and was secured with a sheet of muslin instead of a lid. This prevents a build-up of condensation and the nests rotting. I certainly had a very busy summer; identifying and counting the 4,657 moths that emerged! Three-quarters of nests contained moths, with single nests sometimes supporting over 300 individuals! When compared to nests in bird boxes, open nests had fewer individuals and species, however, they did appear to host a slightly different community. Tinea semifulvella, for example, showed a distinct preference for these open nests. It was interesting to note that, while moth species that had life histories specialised for living in bird nests were present, I found that the generalist detritivore species (Endrosis sarcitrella, Monopis laevigella and Hofmannophila pseudospretella) were the most abundant. A total of seven moth species were seen in the project, however, there were a number of species that were conspicuous by Tinea semifulvella in nest material (Douglas Boyes) their absence. It was widely thought that the Common Clothes Moth, Tineola bisselliella, occurs in bird nests. The fact that none were seen during this study adds to recent research that suggests the species does not occur naturally in Britain and is restricted to human habitations. Collecting bird nests over winter is an extremely easy way to study the micro-moths that live within them. This is especially useful as some of the species don't readily turn up in moth traps so are very overlooked. If you have any questions about my project or about giving it a go yourself, please feel free to get in touch. I'd also be very interested to hear what species people find in their bird nests, if they do give it a go (or have done in the past). Douglas Boyes, www.douglasboyes.co.uk, [email protected] Micro Magic At the UK Moth Recorders’ Meeting in January 2017 Stella Beavan and Bob Heckford gave a talk entitled ‘Micro Magic’ about six species of Microlepidoptera, all designated pRDB1 by Butterfly Conservation, and their biology. They are the only people both in Britain and mainland Europe to have seen all these moths in the wild. In order of presentation the species were: Aethes rutilana (Tortricidae), Plutella haasi (Plutellidae), Infurcitinea albicomella and I. captans (both Tineidae), Coleophora linosyridella (Coleophoridae) and Ectoedemia heckfordi (Nepticulidae). The early stages of most were illustrated as well as adults of all, together with habitat shots of all. Some of the latter were of rugged, mountainous areas in Scotland, with one image showing a sign advising people not to go beyond – but beyond turned out to be the best area in Britain for Plutella haasi. This is a species that was only known in Britain from one specimen found at 2,500 feet on a Scottish mountain in 1954 and not Aethes rutilana (Bob Heckford) found again, despite searches there by various eminent Lepidopterists, until 2009 when Bob rediscovered it in probably the same area as the first. In mainland Europe the species is only known from six sites, all in Norway and Sweden. The larval foodplant was unknown there. In the autumn of 2009 Stella and Bob found the larva and, as a direct result, over the next couple of years recorded over 500 larvae at three new sites in two other vice- counties. This was one example of where knowledge of the biology helps increase knowledge of distribution. Illustrations of the genitalia were shown of four species: Infurcitinea albicomella and I.