jhyatt
Aurelian
Posts: 224
Country: U.S.A.
|
Post by jhyatt on Feb 4, 2016 23:21:09 GMT
Thanks - I'll look into using photobucket sometime. None of my photos have an url at the moment.
Will using photobucket solve the problem of my photos usually being larger then 1 meg? I haven't figured out how to reduce their digital size, save by cropping them.
Does anyone have a New Guinea example of B. meeki? I've never seen one...
|
|
wolf
Aurelian
Posts: 132
Country: Norway
|
Post by wolf on Feb 5, 2016 8:03:36 GMT
Your pictures are over 1mb because they are huge. I bet your pictures are something like 4000x2000px big. If you resize the pictures it will drop in mb. U can use something as simple as paint to resize your pics. Theres a button on the top menu in paint that says "resize". A popup box will appear, choose pixels and resize it. Very nice lycaenids btw  |
|
|
|
Post by nomihoudai on Feb 5, 2016 9:24:23 GMT
One of my Arhopala drawers. Now there's a genus in need of revision! Haha, yes, I mentioned that to Andy Warren, and then he told me about the DNA based "Revision" they put out. I kept my mouth shut on that, but I'm not the guy that considers trees in a paper where more than half of species are missing as a sound revision. Great collection. |
|
|
|
Post by cabintom on Feb 5, 2016 9:47:51 GMT
Will using photobucket solve the problem of my photos usually being larger then 1 meg? In terms of posting on this website, yes it will solve the problem. The images are stored with photobucket when you upload them there, so this forum is no longer concerned about the size of the image because you'd be linking to something that is hosted elsewhere. |
|
jhyatt
Aurelian
Posts: 224
Country: U.S.A.
|
Post by jhyatt on Feb 5, 2016 15:19:11 GMT
One of my Arhopala drawers. Now there's a genus in need of revision! Haha, yes, I mentioned that to Andy Warren, and then he told me about the DNA based "Revision" they put out. I kept my mouth shut on that, but I'm not the guy that considers trees in a paper where more than half of species are missing as a sound revision. Great collection. Yes, a complete Arhopala revision would be a daunting task. The problem is worse with the neotropical Lycaenids. There's not really enough material available to do a good job. Lots and lots of males whose corresponding females are unknown, and vice versa. Many species seem to be known from only a very few specimens from only one location. I once asked Phil DeVries if he was going to follow his Costa Rica Riodinid volume with one on the Lycaenids, and his answer was something like "Not a chance - they just haven't been collected enough, distributions aren't understood, and too many are unnamed or questionable." |
|
|
|
Post by Paul K on Feb 5, 2016 15:26:55 GMT
Haha, yes, I mentioned that to Andy Warren, and then he told me about the DNA based "Revision" they put out. I kept my mouth shut on that, but I'm not the guy that considers trees in a paper where more than half of species are missing as a sound revision. Great collection. Yes, a complete Arhopala revision would be a daunting task. The problem is worse with the neotropical Lycaenids. There's not really enough material available to do a good job. Lots and lots of males whose corresponding females are unknown, and vice versa. Many species seem to be known from only a very few specimens from only one location. I once asked Phil DeVries if he was going to follow his Costa Rica Riodinid volume with one on the Lycaenids, and his answer was something like "Not a chance - they just haven't been collected enough, distributions aren't understood, and too many are unnamed or questionable." And why is that ?... Because South American countries not allowed to collect ! |
|
|
|
Post by nomihoudai on Feb 5, 2016 16:04:31 GMT
Gainesville has a good amount of neotropical Lycaenidae (about 1500 drawers) and somebody is working through them, I just forgot who it was. Arhopala is more problematic as I am not really aware of any museum that has a more or less complete set of them. They also have very minor differences in the adults, at least I have big problems to identify some of their subgenera (genera?).
|
|
cormion
New Aurelian
Posts: 6 
Country: France
|
Post by cormion on Feb 5, 2016 16:27:03 GMT
Yes, a complete Arhopala revision would be a daunting task. The problem is worse with the neotropical Lycaenids. There's not really enough material available to do a good job. Lots and lots of males whose corresponding females are unknown, and vice versa. Many species seem to be known from only a very few specimens from only one location. I once asked Phil DeVries if he was going to follow his Costa Rica Riodinid volume with one on the Lycaenids, and his answer was something like "Not a chance - they just haven't been collected enough, distributions aren't understood, and too many are unnamed or questionable." And why is that ?... Because South American countries not allowed to collect ! taxonomy of Neotropical Lycenids remain surrely a brain teaser for years... Nevertheless, during past years a very great job was done especially by Bob Robbins and Christophe Faynel. they altogether produced very interesting revisions of complex genus. |
|
jhyatt
Aurelian
Posts: 224
Country: U.S.A.
|
Post by jhyatt on Feb 5, 2016 21:15:59 GMT
Bob Robbins and his co-workers have indeed done first-rate work on some of the neotropical genera, and he's always been very generous with his time in identifying some of my mystery bugs. The late Stan Nicolay did some good work too, and Zsolt Balint is good with the high-altitude things from down there. But Cormion is right, there's never been enough collecting done in this group.
Something that's always puzzled me - Why do the Asian commercial collectors generally have Lycaenids available for purchase, but the neotropical sellers never do? I suspect it's because Lycaenids are too hard to catch, very time-consuming compared to, say, Nymphalids. Or maybe it's because there's very little market for Lycaenids? Bob Robbins tells me you can get some really neat Lycaenids with fish bait in canopy bait traps...
|
|
|
|
Post by nomihoudai on Feb 5, 2016 22:21:13 GMT
Something that's always puzzled me - Why do the Asian commercial collectors generally have Lycaenids available for purchase, but the neotropical sellers never do? I suspect it's because Lycaenids are too hard to catch, very time-consuming In the neotropics you almost exclusively have Eumaeini from the subfamily Theclinae. Their behaviour, encoded in their genes, is to rest high up and only come down seldom, whereas in Asia you mostly have other tribes and subfamilies that either like biotops close to the ground or are associated with ants. In Asia I could find many Lycaenidae a day, while it was a pain in the ass in Costa Rica. |
|
jhyatt
Aurelian
Posts: 224
Country: U.S.A.
|
Post by jhyatt on Feb 5, 2016 23:30:42 GMT
Something that's always puzzled me - Why do the Asian commercial collectors generally have Lycaenids available for purchase, but the neotropical sellers never do? I suspect it's because Lycaenids are too hard to catch, very time-consuming In the neotropics you almost exclusively have Eumaeini from the subfamily Theclinae. Their behaviour, encoded in their genes, is to rest high up and only come down seldom, whereas in Asia you mostly have other tribes and subfamilies that either like biotops close to the ground or are associated with ants. In Asia I could find many Lycaenidae a day, while it was a pain in the ass in Costa Rica. That's an interesting point I hadn't considered - all my tropical experience has been in South and Central America. I knew Arhopalas flew low and fairly slowly, but hadn't thought about the behavior of all the others.... In the neotropics, one seldom sees a "Thecla", but once in a great while your run across just the right small white-flowered tree in bloom, and it'll be full of hairstreaks. But, for me at least, that's a once or twice in a lifetime experience! (Interestingly, the genus Eumaeus is the exception to the neotropical rule - they always seem to be low and slow, as expected for chemically protected species.) |
|
jhyatt
Aurelian
Posts: 224
Country: U.S.A.
|
Post by jhyatt on Feb 21, 2016 17:01:05 GMT
Thanks indeed jhyatt for showing us a glimpse of your marvelous Lycaenid holdings. Looks as though you've got quite an extensive collection of that family. Bravo ! I have to say that building up a collection like that in Europe is not so hard to believe. However, pulling togather a collection like that here in the U.S. is almost unheard of. Simply stunning for these parts. Out of sheer curiosity did you self collect (percentage-wise) much of your Lycaenid holdings or have you spent many years scouring the 4 corners of the earth to come up with your specimens? Trehopr, I just ran across your Feb. 4 posting and realized I never replied. My apologies. To answer your question, I'd guess that I've collected maybe 25-30% of my 60-odd drawers of Lycaenids personally. That includes a higher percentage of the north american and neotropical stuff, and none of the asian and eastern palearctic material. I've collected Lycaenids (and skippers) for at least 45 years, mainly because so few people seemed to be interested in them in this country. Guess I'm a bit of a contrarian! Also, Lycaenids, if you could find sources, were historically cheap to buy (but not any more, sad to say!). But most of my non-personally collected material has come through trades. I've even been given accumulations of papered Lycaenids by folks who decided that they couldn't manage to spread them. |
|
|
|
Post by trehopr1 on Feb 21, 2016 20:15:32 GMT
Jhyatt, nice to hear from you and thank you for your reply. Just idle curiosity on my part. I could tell by your pictures that you were probably a specialist on the lycaenids and likewise probably had extensive holdings of them. Sixty odd drawers of them is truely impressive ! !
It is certainly admirable that you can work with papered stock of these little guys. I can only work with them immediately after euthanizing them. They are still fresh and limp then. I have over the years seen various collections with small numbers of them. However, as always they are somewhat shabby looking as it seems few people develope a good enough skill set to work with (and not damage or wing-mar) them.
|
|
jhyatt
Aurelian
Posts: 224
Country: U.S.A.
|
Post by jhyatt on Feb 21, 2016 21:01:57 GMT
Trehopr 1, I have to admit to mixed results with old papered Lycaenids. I probably inadvertently destroy about 3% of the ones I spread, and another 10-20% don't come out looking the way I'd prefer! And now I find that my eyesight is starting to degrade to the point where I find myself breaking antennae on specimens when I remove the antenna cross-pins from the board. Not enough depth perception to tell whether the pin goes over or under the antenna, I guess. Of course, probably 50% of the ones I've spread in the past year (from the '70's mostly) already had broken antennae. Decades of knocking around in people's boxes does that, I guess.
On the plus side, I'm not a perfectionist to start with. And Lycaenids relax and dry fast!
|
|
|
|
Post by hewi on Feb 22, 2016 13:33:54 GMT
For me one of the most beautiful Lycaenidae: Theorema sapho, male & female
|
|
