It Has Been Seven Weeks since the last update and a lot has been happening. More than 2,000 new photographs have been added throughout the website. The Living Moths Plates Series now holds a bit more than 1,200 species represented by almost 3,000 of your photos (including many of larvae).

Many of the new photos of living moths and larvae have emanated from Troy Bartlett's fine website BugGuide.Net. This is a fun place to visit and an excellent repository for all your insect photos. Troy is not only a marvelous web designer, but he also takes great photos of moths and sequences of larvae in his area of Georgia. Most of the new contributors listed below were discovered at BugGuide.Net.

Without the willingness of many people to share their photographs here this website cannot fulfill its proposed function. Thus, our thanks go to the many new contributors who include David Bree (ON), Alan Chin-Lee (FL), Patrick Coin (NC), Tony DeTerlizzi (MA), Bob Duncan (NY), Rick Gillmore (FL), Richard Leunge (VA), Charles Lewallen (OK), Robin McLeod (ON), Hannah Nedrick-Mason (FL), Lynette Schimming (NC), Stuart Schwartz (WI) and David Silsbee (CT). Single photographs were received from several others. It doesn't matter whether you have just one, a few, or many moth photos. It is the collective contributions from many that will build a significant photo library here.

Bob Belmont's Geometrid Collection:  Bob Belmont is a life-long collector of geometrid moths. He is also a professional entomologist, an executive in a pest control business, and this year's chairman of the Southern Lepidopterist's Society. He offered to fill in some blank spaces reserved for Geometrids in the pinned specimen plates (done for the east) and with his contributions we will be able, later this year, to create similar plates for the Geometrids of Western North America. In addition to showing his left-side photos on the pinned specimen plates, a separate plate series will show complete specimens and there will be special pages showing the extensive variation within certain species. There is a prototype page for Hypagyrtis Variants.


Gary Anweiler has been finding the MPG website a useful resource in his work as a lepidopterist curator at The Strickland Entomological Museum in Edmonton, Alberta. He has donated several hundred pinned specimen photographs which now appear on plates for western Noctuoidea. Many of these will eventually show up on the eastern plates. I asked Gary for his secret in consistently producing what I consider to be the finest photographs of pinned specimens that I have encountered. "I shoot them in a shoebox in the kitchen sink, on overcast days when the light coming in the window is just right....."  Now you know.

Stuart Schwartz sent in a one-line email. "Here's my contribution." Few words, but fine photographs......of caterpillars! Photos labeled 1st, 2nd.....Final instars. And very nice sequences they are -- see the Saturnids Page. Stuart is in Wisconsin.

Then I started poking around at BugGuide.Net, which is kind of the LarvaLand of the Internet. Hundreds of creepy-crawlies to be found there. Troy Bartlett, Hannah Nedrick-Mason and Alan Chin-Lee have some real beauties now on the Sphingids Page and elsewhere. I hope to meet Hannah and Alan when we visit the new McGuire Center for Arthropods in Gainesville, Florida. I'm hoping to escape the last few weeks of Maryland winter with a vacation trip to sunny Florida, where the moth season ought to be starting.

Patrick Coin and Lynette Schimming have both contributed dozens of beautiful photographs from North Carolina. This is helping to fill out the species list, as the contributor pool was originally from the mid-Atlantic states and southern Canada.

Robin McLeod has weighed in with a quantity of new species from southwestern Ontario, and even a few from the outdoor walls of restaurants in New Brunswick. There's an important message here for moth-ers -- don't leave home without your digital camera!

Unid. Page 1, has been recycled and includes photos from a variety of sources, and Hugh McGuinness continues to contribute identifications.

Tom Murray had almost all his moths from Massachusetts identified in January, but another batch of photos arrived to take their place. These are on Unid. Page 10. Tom still has another page or two for us to work through. See also Unid. Page 8.

Dean Edwards sent in some photos of really small micros from east Tennessee. And, by golly, at least a few of these will be identified on Unid. Page 5. David Bree also has some micros from southern Ontario on Unid. Page 7. And David Silsbee has a number of moths to be seen at Unid. Page 9.

Your Unidentified Moths: Send them in. Any number, 1 to 100 or more, just pick the best photo of each species that you can't identify. Once a photo has been identified it will move to the live moth archives where it can help others to identify their moths. See the Submit a Photo page.