Over 400 moth species recorded at the Wallagoot Catchment BioBlitz!

Many congratulations to Glenn Cocking(ANIC) who undertook moth surveys at our last BioBlitz in December. This is an amazing total and a really good species list for this area.

Glenn's comments:

"I have now sent the final moth report from the Wallagoot bioblitz. I think it gives a good account of the adult moths active on the nights of the Bioblitz, and a few of the Lepidoptera flying in the daytime (some moths aren’t attracted to light, and the daytime observation effort wasn’t extensive).

There was a total of 401 species observed, with 321 of them at Bournda field hut, 128 at Turingal LALC, 82 at Wallagoot West LALC, and 176 at either of the Aboriginal Land sites.

Please note the final line “Unidentified Oecophorinae” with a total of 21 species spread across the three sites. I’ve kept this line separate at the bottom so it shows these species in the site totals, but I don’t think it would be helpful to add a further 30 odd “Oecophorinae unidentified” sighting records to ALA (other opinions are possible). The Oecophorinae are a particular challenge to identify because there are many thousands of species, many are superficially similar, and a significant number have not yet been assembled into species groups at ANIC, let alone described. They are particularly important here in Australia where many of them feed on leaf litter and help decompose it before it burns, and the Australian species are the majority of the world fauna for this family. "

Everyone at the Atlas of Life would like to thank Glenn

for his great contributions - I would like to say a personal thank you for being allowed to be part of the surveys - they were spectacularly interesting. Glen also attracted much interest from school students and other BioBlitz participants as in the mornings of the BioBlitz he prepared the specimens he needed to take back to his lab for identification.