Martha’s Vineyard Atlas of Life

There is virtually no end to the list of strange life histories insects have evolved. I came across a good example as I tended a moth sheet (a white sheet […]

To be successful at hunting or fishing, the saying goes, you need to learn to think like your prey. The same is true of insect study: by learning to imagine […]

Flies – the order Diptera – are an incredibly diverse group, and they’ve evolved an astonishing array of bizarre life histories. I recently encountered an example of one of the [...]

Friday, May 20, is both Endangered Species Day and World Bee Day. What could be a more appropriate topic for that dual celebration than  an endangered bee? Walsh’s Anthophora (Anthophora [...]

Perhaps because of their elongated shape, members of the fly family Therevidae have acquired the common name “stiletto flies.” This is a smallish fly family, widespread but said to be [...]

Human travel and commerce have completely rewritten the book on wildlife distribution. Deliberately or by accident, humans have transported many thousands of species from their native ranges to [...]

With 4 million contributors, more than 67 million records, and a third of a million species documented, iNaturalist might seem like a complete archive of biodiversity. But with an estimated […]

An interesting species was added to the BWorks Martha’s Vineyard Atlas of Life project on iNaturalist last weekend: Vespula vidua, sometimes known as the widow yellowjacket. A queen or [...]

Flies — the order Diptera — tend to be either ignored or reviled by humans. But this diverse group of insects, with about 17,000 known species in North America, is […]

An alert observer and the power of iNaturalist (iNaturalist.org) recently combined to add a regionally important insect record on Martha’s Vineyard! iNaturalist observer abgeorge found the [...]