We had a great evening of mothing last night, with plenty of species coming in to the many lights – both actinic and mercury vapour. I will post a few photos and a list later.<\/p>\n
However, for me, the big find of the night was a rare tachinid called Eriothrix prolixa<\/em>, which I noticed in Ian’s Skinner trap early in the evening. It is not uncommon to find tachinids at moth lights – they tend to get flushed out of the surrounding grass and then get attracted to the lights with the moths. But it was the only tachinid I saw that evening but it was definitely something unusual because it stood and behaved quite like the much commoner Eriothrix rufomaculata<\/em> but was much smaller and didn’t have any red side patches. You occasionally find completely black rufomaculata <\/em>but under the microscope it was clearly different – having the hairy eyes, projecting moth edge, long spine on r4+5 and long costal spine – but with no petiole on the median vein.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We had a great evening of mothing last night, with plenty of species coming in to the many lights – both actinic and mercury vapour.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartslock.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartslock.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartslock.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartslock.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartslock.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/hartslock.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313,"href":"https:\/\/hartslock.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions\/313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartslock.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartslock.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartslock.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}