From June 20-26 it’s national insect week! This happens every two years and encourages us to learn more about insects and to get involved. So recently I’ve been swotting (not swatting!) up on my insects.
Insects are animals and there about 1 million different kinds of insect. Though this is thought to be only a fraction of the actual number of insects, the actual number may be ten times that! That means there could be another nine million insects just waiting to be discovered. They are called invertebrates because they don’t have a backbone. Instead they have an exoskeleton, which means their skeleton is on the outside. This works to give the insect a hard layer of protection on the outside. This is very necessary when you’re so small. And clearly this is a system that works; insects have been around since before the dinosaurs! You may have seen mosquitoes trapped in amber, these are about 40 – 60 million years old! They are also very important to us, as food for other animals, to pollinate flowers and fruits and to break down dead material. They have many different jobs, which we rarely notice but without which we would be in trouble.
From June 9-11 was National moth nights, so we set up moth traps outside the office to have a look see what’s awake when we go to sleep.
Evidence of extra terrestrials? Nope, just moth traps. The lights draw the moths in and they settle in the balled up newspaper or egg boxes underneath. One theory is that moths use the light of the moon to find their way around, so when they see an artificial light, they get confused and get drawn to that too.
In the morning we opened the moth trap at the visitor centre to see what we had caught. We found a snowy white ermine moth and the beautiful pink and green elephant hawk-moth among many others. Pictured below are Chris and the Trevor the poplar hawk moth, Chris is the one in blue.
Though it’s not all about the moths, there are hundreds of interesting insects wandering round our reserve including this fancy beetle. This is a photo of a golden-bloomed grey longhorn beetle, taken by a visitor last weekend.
So if you’re visiting Frampton Marsh or just in your garden, have a little look around and see what you can find. We will be doing more moth traps and opening them in the mornings outside the visitor centre this weekend, so come and get up close to these fantastic creatures.