Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Home
News
Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
User Stories
Campaigns
    Fossil Stories
    Garden Stories
    Monsters Are Real
    Page Frights
    Her Natural History
    Earth Optimism 2020
Tech Blog
Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with entomology

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Farewell to Brood X (2021) — See You in 2038!

Read the full blog post

By the time this post publishes, the vast majority of Brood X (2021) will have completed their above ground lifecycle. The vast numbers of adult Magicicada who first emerged in late April and early May will have disappeared, leaving behind their adult bodies as well as still massive numbers of exuviae (cast-off outer skins) from when they emerged as nymphs.

Continue reading
July 13, 2021byMartin R. Kalfatovic
Blog Reel, User Stories

Backswimmers vs. Mosquitos: BHL Informs Research on Controlling Yellow Fever Mosquito Populations

Read the full blog post

Aedes aegypti, dubbed the yellow fever mosquito, is a globally invasive, pervasive threat to human health. As the common name suggests, the species can carry a range of diseases, including not only yellow fever but also dengue, the Zika virus, and the chikungunya virus. It is responsible for an estimated 400 million infections each year.

Continue reading
July 8, 2021byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Her Natural History

Museum für Naturkunde Explores Maria Sibylla Merian’s Legacy and Editions of Her Metamorphosis

Read the full blog post

Three hundred and seventy-four years ago on 2 April 1647, a remarkable woman was born: the artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian. In the 17th and 18th century world of male-dominated science, Merian had to fight for her place in the natural sciences. Against all odds, she became a trailblazer, especially in developmental biology.

Merian’s legacy was recently explored during a 4-week student-project at the library of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. The project was part of a master’s program for the University of Applied Science in Leipzig to enlarge the student’s experience in the historical holding field and give a glimpse into the planning and conducting of a project. The aim of the project itself was and is the digitization of two different editions of Merian’s work Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium as well as a restorative and provenance research summary about the volumes. Both editions show Merian’s talent in painting and observing insects and plants.

Continue reading
June 3, 2021byAntonia Trojok
Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Magic of the Magicicada: Exploring Brood X Through Books in BHL

Read the full blog post

On 10 May, I had my first sighting of this year’s periodical cicada in Northern Virginia. For seventeen years, three species of Magicicada, the periodical cicada (M. septendecim, M. cassinii, M. septendecula)[1] have been living about 61 cm (2 feet) underground beneath trees across portions of eastern North America. In May 2021, individuals in Brood X (sometimes known as the Great Eastern Brood) began to emerge in the trillions from their long sojourn when soil temperature reached a consistent temperature of 18 degrees C (64 degrees F) or higher.

The last time Brood X emerged was in 2004. For those who witnessed that appearance, or previous ones, Brood X at times feels like a science fiction movie with the creatures swarming and the loud (up to 90 decibel) mating song of the males drowning out conversations (I wonder how the rest of the world will react to our Zoom call being joined by singing cicadas!).

Magicicada are mostly harmless, neither biting nor stinging. Members of the order Hemiptera, the nymphs spend their underground life harmlessly consuming xylem fluids from the roots of deciduous forest trees; the adult female, which deposits its eggs in small slits cut into the ends of branches, rarely causes damage to mature trees and there is speculation that the cicada pruning leads to more abundant leafing and fruiting the following year.

Continue reading
May 20, 2021byMartin R. Kalfatovic
Blog Reel, User Stories

Hidden Biodiversity: Exploring Neotropical Fungus Weevils With the Help of BHL

Read the full blog post

In the last decades of the 19th century, a monumental publication on the biodiversity of Mexico and Central America began publication—Biologia Centrali-Americana. Published in 215 parts from 1879 to 1915 by the editors Frederick DuCane Godman and Osbert Salvin, the work describes over 50,000 species and is illustrated with over 1,600 lithographic plates depicting over 18,000 species. Remarkable for its time, the title is still vitally important for the study of Neotropical biodiversity today, as it contained virtually all known information at the time about Mexican and Central American flora and fauna.

Biologia Centrali-Americana is a particularly important resource for entomologist Samanta Orellana, a PhD student in evolutionary biology at the Dr. Nico Franz Lab of Arizona State University (ASU) and a research assistant in the ASU Biocollections of the Biodiversity Knowledge Integration Center. Orellana began studying insects and working with entomological collections more than a decade ago, during her undergraduate studies in her home country of Guatemala.

“For many insect groups in Guatemala and the rest of Central America, Biologia Centrali-Americana still represents the only source of information available for the region,” states Orellana.

Continue reading
April 6, 2021byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Her Natural History

Margaret S. Collins: A Legend in Termite Field Biology

Read the full blog post

Dr. Margaret S. Collins (1922-1996), a renowned expert on termite ecology and distribution, taught as a professor and administrator at Howard University, Florida A&M University, and Federal City College (now University of The District of Columbia) for over 35 years. Upon her retirement from teaching, Collins continued her work on termites at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as a research associate from 1983 to 1996.

Over the course of her career, Collins published more than forty articles spanning the biogeography, physiology, chemical defenses, and taxonomy of termites. Collins also collected specimens in the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Barbados, Belize, Suriname, the Cayman Islands, Guyana, Guatemala, and Panama. When she contracted dengue fever on an expedition in Guyana in 1983-1984 and was forced into a long hiatus from field work, she turned her focus to updating and preserving the termite specimens at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Eventually Collins returned to field research in 1994 when she once again traveled to Guyana to collect termites. In April 1996, Collins died while conducting field work in the Cayman Islands.

Continue reading
March 22, 2021byDr. Elizabeth Harmon
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Two Hand-Painted Volumes of Coleoptera Illustrated by Francis du Boulay

Read the full blog post

Earlier this year Dr. Simon Leslie, Francis Houssemayne du Boulay’s great-grandson, contacted Melbourne Museum about accessing du Boulay’s hand-painted Coleoptera volumes, held in the Museums Victoria Archives. Dr. Leslie and family accessed the physical volumes in February 2020. While I carefully supervised flipping through the pages of these volumes, I was intrigued by their aesthetic, and scientific and historic, value. Since then, the volumes have been digitised by Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Australia.

Continue reading
September 24, 2020byNik McGrath
Page 1 of 3123»

Help Support BHL

BHL’s existence depends on the financial support of its patrons. Help us keep this free resource alive!

Donate Now

search

About BHL

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

Follow BHL

Join Our Mailing List

Sign up to receive the latest news, content highlights, and promotions.

Subscribe Now

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Subscribe to Blog Via RSS

Subscribe to the blog RSS feed to stay up-to-date on all the latest BHL posts.

Access RSS Feed

BHL on Twitter

Tweets by @BioDivLibrary

Inspiring Discovery through Free Access to Biodiversity Knowledge.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library makes it easier than ever for you to access the information you need to study and explore life on Earth…for free, anytime, anywhere.

60+ Million Pages of
Biodiversity Literature Online.

EXPLORE

Tools and Services
to Transform Research.

EXPLORE

300,000+
Illustrations on Flickr.

EXPLORE

 

ABOUT | BLOG AUTHORS | HARMFUL CONTENT | PRIVACY | SITE MAP | TERMS OF USE

Download Adobe Acrobat Reader