Wisconsin Entomological Society N e w s I e t t e r Volume 43. Number 3 October 201 6 Photographing Insects for a Group This is the recipe that we used if By A1ike and Marcie O 'Connor you·d like to try it yourself. marcie(a)haven2.com Ingredients: • Two people - a photographer and a We came up with a new idea for our projector-operator annual moth party event this year, and it • A camera that writes pictures to an SD worked so well that we thought other people card might be interested. • An Evefi WiFi SD card ($70 - $100) One of the problems people always • A laptop with a WiFi interface have - especially folks who have never • A projector, attached to the laptop looked at moths before - is that moths are • A screen (we asked our friends if they had hard to appreciate by just looking at them any hand-me-downs and wound up with with your eyes. The colors are often subtle, three to choose from) and the designs tiny. So we came up with • Extension cords with enough plugs to this idea - to let people see the enlarged power the laptop and the projector photos as I'm taking them (Fig. 1) . • Two things to sit on, one for me and one for the projector Get ready. Setting up the camera-to-laptop connection the first time: • Put the card in the camera and turn the camera on Fig. 1. Photo by Wendy Johnson. • Install the EyeFi Mobi Desktop software on the laptop and launch it • Go through the --Activate Mobi Card'' comes back within range, the photos will steps resume transferring - and catch • Take some pictures up. Consider it an opportunity to take a • Find the folder on the laptop where the break. pictures are being \.\Titten • Decide how to quickly crop/edit the photos • and move them over to the projector Po a trial run: window. Practice this a bit, in conj unction I did a couple of trial runs before the main with the photographer (Fig. 2). event. The first one was just Marcie and me, while the second was a party of close bug­ friends who wouldn' t be cranky if the whole thing fell apart. • Collect all the ingredients • Set up the screen, chairs, projector, power cords, etc. • Figure out your workflow. Mine is to open/edit the pictures on the laptop screen Fig. 2. Photo by Marcie O'Connor. and then drag the picture over to the monitor screen for people to look at. So I Good luck, and let us know how it works set up the projector to be a separate out! monitor, rather than mirroring the laptop screen. • Practice your workflow. Here are some The Wisconsin Entomological Society Newsletter is useful things to learn during this practice published three times per year. The newsletter is session: provided to encourage and facilitate the exchange of • Determine where to position the laptop in information by the membership, and to keep relation to the photographer. How far away members informed of the activities of the can the camera go before it loses organization. Members are encouraged to contribute items for inclusion in the newsletter. Please send all connection with the laptop? news items, notes, new or interesting insect records. • Note: If the camera gets too far away, it seasonal summaries, and research reports or requests will stop transferring photos. Once it to the editor. 2 Tutorial for Determining Pulse Rates of tends to prefers grassy fields and thin­ Male Tree Cricket Songs stemmed plants. Forbes' has a faster rate By Nancy Collins with a buzzy sound; Four-spotted has a [email protected] slower rate with a flute-like sound. Yet, most tree crickets trill so rapidly Tree crickets, Oecanthinae, are often that the human ear alone cannot decipher the identified by the male's song. Like many individual chirps, whose rates can extend up orthopterans, the warmer the temperature, to a hundred times or more per second. the faster they sing. In tree crickets, this Nonetheless, the identities of these tree sound is produced by the stridulatory teeth crickets may be determined from their pulse on one wing passing over the stridulatory rates, along with a measure of the ambient file on the other wing. The most well-known temperature. Fortunately, one does not need species of tree cricket is the Snowy tree sophisticated audio recording equipment to cricket ( Oecanthus faltoni). The musical determine the pulse rate of a male tree chirping of the Snowy is the most popular cricket's song. sound effect in movies and television shows I first make a digital video recording when the scene is a warm summer evening. of a singing tree cricket. Then, I convert it to There is even a formula that one can use to a WAV file and open it using AVS Audio calculate the outdoor temperature. In the Editor software (see references below). This eastern U.S., Fahrenheit temperature can be produces a visual image (or sonogram) of estimated by counting the number of chirps the recorded waveform. I select a portion in 13 seconds and adding 40. with minimal background noise and trim it Seven species of tree crickets have to a 1.00-second long strip (Fig. 1). The been confirmed in Wisconsin: Snowy, example shown is a recording of a Forbes' Narrow-winged, Davis', Pine, Two-spotted, tree cricket singing when the temperature Four-spotted, and Forbes ' . Some chirp and was 78 °F (25.5 °C). Then I count the some trill. The two species that consistently number of pulses ( or individual spikes) that sing day and night in Wisconsin are Forbes' occur in 1.00 seconds. In this case, the and Four-spotted. Both are trillers and prefer measured rate was 70 pulses per second. ground vegetation. Forbes' tends to be found on woody stemmed plants, and Four-spotted 3 tree crickets." To get to the graphs of ~ttttt~tt~~t™tt~t~ttt~tttt~l~t~~tmttt~~ttttttf fti~ various species, select one of the papers by T. J. Walker (1962, 1963) entitled, "The Fig. 1. 1.00-second recording of Forbes' . taxonomy and calling songs of United States tree crickets." You can access these articles Finally, using a graph like that directly on the SINA website. shown in Fig. 2 (containing the pulse rates References: as a function of temperature for various species of tree crickets), I plot the measured SINA website: pulse rate on the vertical axis and the http:! /entomology. ifas. ufl.edu/walker/buzz/ ambient temperature on the horizontal axis. The curve that most nearly matches your Doremi Soft A VI to WA V Converter measurements should tell you what species website: MP4kits.com of tree cricket you have been listening to. A VS Audio Editor website: Comparison of Song Pulse Rates of M ale Tree Crickets www.avs4vou.com ' .. M O c.tr,tnlaut 0 ar 1t"n tlrn.,J O pin, V O. wallrtn WES Membership Dues: i ., ----.+- O . ou•dripunctJ1u, § II Individual or family: SIO per year z ~ "~ Sustaining: SIS per year ~ .."... Patron: S25 per year .., 0 '"',o ..-.., .,,...o ..,.,o .,.Jo ~.,.o ~.,o ..-,o ..,Jlo "'oo 0 0 Tem~ t~ture (C) Please make checks payable to WES and send to: Les Ferge, Treasurer, 7119 Hubbard A venue, Fig. 2. Graph of pulse rates for eight species Middleton, WI 53562-3231 . [email protected] of tree crickets at given temperatures. Please report any address changes to the Treasurer. Graphs depicting wider ranges of Junior Entomologists' Corner pulse rates may be found on the Singing By Sabrina Stewart Insects of North America (SINA) website [email protected] (below). You will first need to select "North American Crickets" and then "Oecanthinae 4 [Editor's Note - I am happy to launch what My Mom said it looked like a is hoped to become a regular column Tomato Homworm Sphinx Moth and then devoted to the interests of younger my heart sank just a bit. We'd been feeding entomologists. Sabrina Stewart, age 11 , homworm caterpillars from our tomato plans to write on some of her favorite insects plants to our chickens! in future issues. We thank her for her first "WHAT??!! This is what they contribution!] become?? Why have we been feeding them to the chickens?" As I stepped up to the mercury vapor Then I realized it's because the insect light, I saw it! In the grass, at the base homworms eat all of the tomatoes and their of the sheet, I first saw its giant head. I leaves. Over the past week, we'd fed nearly gasped! a dozen, almost the size of hot dogs, to the I yelled, "Get the net, get the net!" I chickens. They went crazy for them!!! had spotted my first ever, at home, at the So, into the collection it goes! A light, most impressive sphinx moth of my giant (by my standards) tomato hornworm bug-collecting career! Its body was as big as sphinx moth, beautiful in its own way. my thumb! It was hairy and had yellow­ orange spots. I was so excited! Books and Websites By Andrew Khitsun [email protected] There is a publishing company called Forgotten Books: www.forgottenbooks.com. They specialize in reprinting books of yesteryear. There are a whole slew of books (most available either from the company directly or Amazon) on insects in general and Lepidoptera in particular. You can find books like the multi-volume Lepidoptera Indica and The Lepidoptera of the British Isles, Lepidoptera of the Congo, and The 5 Lepidoptera of Ceylon.