Magnificent moths and Herping adventures!

Techniques for observing reptiles and amphibians (herps) in the wild. Fossorial herps are those that primarily live underground. Credit: Brittany Mason, UF/IFAS

Our good friends in the Global Ecology Research Group at the University of Florida have just written some truly wonderful guides to deepening your interest in moths and “herps” (amphibians and reptiles). These two groups are readily accessible to the naturalist who wants to dig a bit deeper and search out critters that are abundant but need particular techniques to find and identify them.

One of the great things about these guides is that Corey Callaghan and co-authors Brittany Mason, Joe Montes de Oca and Ty Smith show how to use iNaturalist to deepen knowledge but also to record the sightings in a format where identification experts can help ensure you are on the right track when it comes to sorting out one species from another.

The guides provide excellent advice on how to find moths and herps, and what sort of photos to take that will really aid the identification process. All the methods are minimally invasive, i.e. don’t involve taking specimens. Although many of the smaller moths do need dissection to identify to species level, most of the bigger ones don’t, and many thousands of species can be confidently identified from the external characteristics of live animals.

So, check out the guides and maybe start out on a new direction with your natural history today!

We have very much enjoyed collaborating with the Global Ecology Research Group over the years, and have published a number of cool papers together. We are most proud of a piece in PLoS Biology on the importance of contributing to iNaturalist as an identifier, and a paper in Biological Conservation on targeting your natural history observations towards places where data are lacking and conservation need is the greatest.

Here’s to many more fruitful collaborations between our labs!