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Post by nomihoudai on Sept 28, 2015 5:47:40 GMT
The guy on the pic is a dealer, probably is going to resell things.
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Post by nomihoudai on Sept 21, 2015 7:34:41 GMT
Nice shots Wollastoni ! Many thanks for sharing them. Did the pricing of specimens generally fall within the parameters of what you are used to seeing ? Or, was the pricing a little down or up due to economics ? Was their any particular group(s) that were priced rather stiffly ? Idle curiosity on my part as to your observations. Nice question, let me answer this for you. I am a seller at Frankfurt insect fair since 2009, since a few years I take pictures of Lycaenidae to check for prices on "the market". I can't find my 2014 pics right now (because I have photographed the 2 drawers that Olivier shows too), but on pictures from 2012 from the same seller I can for example see that nothing changed in the price of Polyommatus juno juno. While it would seem logical to adjust prices and react to demand or anything, it will not happen. Especially not if the price tags have been printed out on your PC. The time that has to be spend rewriting and doing everything is just lost and wasted time that nobody will pay you. In any case I guess you are downgrading your specimens anyway because it rarely happens that a species demand and price explodes. So nobody is going to do it, they have time, they don't have to sell right away, they have to sell for the price they initially wanted and this might happen with patience at some point. So most people drag the same stuff for several years to the fair. I did the same once, a handful of my butterflies has seen the fair since 2010 until I got fed up by them and sold them elsewhere. The only difference to this rule are the guys that write their prices with pen on top of the glass lid. You can take the pen and window cleaner with you, check prices at the start of the fair, and quickly outperform your "opponents" if you really want to get rid of your stuff and you have the means to do so. But most people will not do it, they have a job, stuff to do, the least they want to do is to spend 3 days adjusting their prices. Each year I had a different approach with different stocks. I have seen it all, from barely getting back your table fee, towards people starting to insult each other in front of your table to claim who was there first and selling all of your stuff within half an hour. This year I do not have much time, and not a big car to carry most things, I will just bring 3 drawers with pretty nice Lycaenidae species that demand a certain price.
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Post by nomihoudai on Aug 31, 2015 16:46:15 GMT
Lol, while I have many Indian friends, sentences like this “We got electricity connection in our house recently and I think the butterflies were probably attracted by the lights”, gives me the urge to slap them all with a shovel.
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Post by nomihoudai on Aug 31, 2015 14:30:04 GMT
Due to copyright reasons I cannot reproduce the maps for South Western Germany, but you can see that the distribution of both species are excluding each other. Lycaena dispar rutilus is a species of the "wet" lands of the plains, while Lycaena virgaureae is confined to the hilly areas, in my case the black forest.
Speaking about the occurrence of both in Great Britain is probably a prime example for people unfamiliar with the species. They will see a smaller Lycaena dispar (which is very variable in wing span) and conclude that this must be Lycaena virgaureae, a species which they probably never saw, or they saw them in books that confused both species themselves.
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Post by nomihoudai on Aug 31, 2015 8:49:42 GMT
Having L. dispar flying together WITH L. virgaureae makes no sense at all to me. I am interested if anybody (alive) has ever witnessed such, but I doubt it. I don't have much time to comment, but the Solidgo virgaurea is just copying Linné's text which doesn't make sense either. Just like the name of Thecla betulae.
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Post by nomihoudai on Aug 28, 2015 15:25:37 GMT
Probably, I would not know why a bee would be hanging like this. There is solitary bees that sleep by holding a twig between their mandibles, but I don't know why these would do this pose and stay on this twig like that. It's unlikely he came across it in a natural setting.
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Post by nomihoudai on Aug 28, 2015 13:44:00 GMT
He is posting there regularly. As most Indonesian photographers he will probably employ some tricks. While nature photographers try to capture natural scenes, Indonesian photographers very often try to produce something they want to see. Like freezing specimen and putting them together on a pic. Other than that he is great.
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Post by nomihoudai on Aug 28, 2015 13:00:07 GMT
Why unknown? They are from Eko Adiyanto from Indonesia. He is posting macro pics like this all the time. So why unknown photographer?
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Post by nomihoudai on Aug 28, 2015 7:35:09 GMT
It makes no sense at all for it to be a tiny localised species, in a country bursting of collectors. Even in that case more would have been found. Also in subsequent years, and not single times.
The most likely scenario is the introduction by a person. There is three possibilities I can think of:
- to fool somebody saying "give me some money and I show you where this species flies" - breeding some stock from mainland Europe as a personal amusement and releasing some without malicious intend. - breeding some stock from mainland Europe with the intend of establishing the species, but failing.
The two later cases have happened often enough in Europe. Even the recently found Graellsia isabellae popularions in Italy are not considered to be new, or been overseen, or being a relict, but everybody is confident that somebody was breeding them and releasing them there.
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Post by nomihoudai on Aug 27, 2015 20:21:33 GMT
If it was a relict species it would have been found in greater numbers at different times.
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Post by nomihoudai on Aug 27, 2015 7:31:59 GMT
-> It is still present in Luxembourg. It seems to be matched to the same habitats as L. helle. I am sorry but I think this information is not correct or true. Lycaena virgaureae only occured in some small places in the West of the country, whereas Lycaena helle occurs in wetlands in the North East of the country. I can say that L. virgaureae is gone from Luxembourg as it has not been seen since 20 years anymore. Furthermore the construction of the pumped storage power station in Vianden destroyed its main habitat. Calling the Eiffel NW Europe is also a bit over exaggerated The Eiffel is located pretty much in the centre of West Europe. It is a nice article, I enjoyed reading it, but it only discusses people and events, and not biology or range maps. Only in the case of fraud people and events become important Looking at the biology of it,... Lycaena virgaureae occurs until central Germany in good numbers where the habitat allows to. In the Benelux countries and everything surrounding it only occurs as strays. It does not occur in the Northern half of France. In Scandinavia it does indeed occur, but do you know how far this is from the UK? Maybe some Vikings have brought them over to the UK, but as far as I remember they didn't do that in a 1000 years . To me these specimens are all fake, and even when collected in the UK they probably have been set out prior in these fields by somebody else, fooling some people in thinking they found L. virgaureae. Why did this practice stop after the 19th century? This has probably to do with entomologists dying out, and not with the butterfly dying out.
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Post by nomihoudai on Aug 6, 2015 7:44:44 GMT
I am currently working on a complete website of Lycaenidae with illustrations for each species. There is 500 pages of names and references, of these 500 pages there is roughly 5 pages (116 names) of misspellings produced by d'Abrera, roughly 1,5 pages of synonyms (31 names) and roughly 1 page of available names (23 names). These are the numbers, my opinion is based on these and you can go figure out what I think about it. A whole percent, 1% of this work is just misspellings by d'Abrera, let that sink in for a moment. I am sorry to say that I do not accept the card index story. If you find out that the cards you are working with are not that great, stop using them.
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Post by nomihoudai on Jul 29, 2015 7:25:10 GMT
I was talking about kg of water per kg of air, I was probably unclear on that.
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Post by nomihoudai on Jul 28, 2015 8:09:42 GMT
...and now look at the temperature in these parts, and then look at how much water air can suck up in function of the temperature. Also look at the night day cycle of the drop in temperature. You will see that Europe will have less amount of water in the air and that during the night a lot of it will be gone due to colder air. I have been in Houston for over 3 months this year (subtropical), I have very sensitive lungs, in the beginning it felt like my lungs are rotting from the inside due to all the humidity there. I became used to it, and now that I am back my mouth is always dry and breathing feels like rubbing sand paper through you... Sry for the rant
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Post by nomihoudai on Jul 5, 2015 13:40:54 GMT
Cydalima perspectalis, a Crambidae, not Geometridae. They have unfortunately been introduced to Europe from Asia recently.
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