Newsletter No. 3

20 December 2007
 
Dear Butterfly Net:
 
It's been busy the last three months, and things are winding down now for the holiday season.
 

Data Capture

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Data capture is still going strong and we will be uploading quite a bit more data into the SABCA database in January (about another 10 000 records, with about another 100 000 pending). Currently, the number of records in the database still stands at 3 333. Once data is digitised, geo-referenced and formatted, it needs to be given a final once-over and the taxonomy needs to checked so that it is valid. This all takes time. We will be appointing an assistant for our main data capturer early next year.
 
We have almost completed digitising Jonathan Ball's collection, and have just begun with the data capture of John White's collection, a keen lepidopterist living in Camps Bay. Thanks John for contributing your data! If there are any other lepidopterists out there who require assistance with the digitisation of your collections, please urgently contact me in January so that we can organise assistance for you as soon as possible.

daindree  

To help with the digitisation of museum records, we have now employed three ad-hoc data capturers:
 
     Durban Natural Science Museum: Daindree Naidoo
     Natal Museum: Albert Larkeson
     East London Museum: Mary Bursey
 
They have been very busy digitising the butterfly records in the respective museums, and have all nearly completed the process. Guin Zambatis, curator of the Skukuza Biological Reference Collection (Kruger National Park), is assisting us in digitising their butterfly collection. Thank you all for your hard work! And thank you to these museums for contributing their data. Data has also been received from the South African Museum, which is much appreciated.
 
We are still looking for sponsors for the digitisation of the South African butterfly collection in the Natural History Museum in the UK. This is a very large and important collection (80 000 records) and this data would contribute greatly towards SABCA reaching its objectives. Could any potential sponsors please contact me to receive further details.
 
We will be advertising some full-time and ad-hoc data capture posts early next year. If you are interested, keep a look out for the advertisements that I will be sending out in due course.

Virtual Museum

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The Virtual Museum is running a competition!

SABCA is running a competition for the Virtual Museum, for the following three categories:

  1. Person who submits the most geographically diverse number of butterfly records
  2. Person who submits the most species rich number of butterfly records
  3. Person who submits the most biologically interesting/unusual butterfly record

Each category will have a 1st and 2nd prize, and some run up prizes. There are fantastic prizes to be won, which will be one the following:

A BIG thank you to the following sponsors for kindly sponsoring the prizes:

Lepidopterists' Society of Africa Author Steve Woodhall
Struik Publishers
Africa Geographic JAH & Associates, Environmental Consultancy
JAH & Associates,
Environmental Consultancy

Conditions:

Please click on the Public participation link to obtain instructions on how photos should be submitted.
 
To see what the Virtual Museum is all about, please click on the Virtual Museum link.
 
Anyone from the public can participate, and contribute towards helping us understand the distribution of our butterflies. To participate, submit your photographic records of butterflies (or any life stage, e.g. caterpillars, pupae) to SABCA by email, together with some information (e.g. date, locality description, etc.). Easy-to-follow instructions are on the website, click here to see them. Please read these instructions before submitting your photos. Please try send us photos of good quality, i.e. not too pixelated and close enough to see the animal properly - this helps with the ID.
 
Please note: The information that must be submitted by email with your photos must be in the format as presented in the example below! Use the template exactly as it is (copy and pasted into your email), including everything from [begin] .... to ....[end], and only replace the information that is outside of the square brackets. By keeping to this format, a lot of time is saved by us not having to reformat submissions:
 
Example:
 
[begin]
[SABCA]
[observer name] Botha W.
[coordinates latitude] 24 34 13 S
[coordinates longitude] 27 23 42 E
[locality] farm Doornhoek; Thabazimbi district.
[closest town] Thabazimbi
[province] Limpopo
[country] South Africa
[year] 2005
[month] 08
[day] 27
[number of photos] 2
[notes] There were many butterflies of this type flying about, and they were feeding on honeysuckle. It was overcast.
[end]
 
 Submitted photographic records are placed online, where a panel of expert lepidopterists will identify the records. Records and their identification can be viewed online by anyone. In the next few newsletters I hope to introduce you to our expert ID panel. Here are two panel members:
 


Steve Woodhall
 
Steve Woodhall

I am 50 years old and have been living in SA for 27 of them. Originally mainly into collecting and breeding, I have become more and more keen on photography and have now written more than one pictorial book - Field Guide to Butterflies of SA, and the upcoming 'What's That Butterfly?'.
 
Since I got my Nikon D80 my photography has gone from strength to strength, and I'm now trying to repeat everything I once did on film, on silicon!
 
Ultimately any butterfly collector or photographer has to admit that collecting pretty insects or challenging photos, although great fun, is not enough. If our hobby is to be available to future generations there have to be butterflies around and this won't be the case unless we start doing something about it. Before we know what to do we have to find out what we don't know, and that is where the SABCA project comes in and why I support it totally.
 
As there are very few lepidopterists around compared to, say, birders, we have a far more difficult task ahead of us to produce an atlas than the birders did. In fact, even if we spent all our time in the field we would not make much of a scratch on what needs to be done. Although field work is (a) rewarding and (b) vital, we still need to do it, but we should also be leveraging our skills. I am fortunate enough to have a high profile and am able to reach large numbers of people, so I am trying to use this to encourage as many members of the public to contribute to the Virtual Museum as possible. I am working on visual presentations for my own use and for the use of other lepidopterists, to this end. And of course, if anyone wants me to come along and give an illustrated talk on butterfly recognition, I'm only too happy to do so.


Jeremy Dobson
 
Jeremy Dobson

My interest in butterflies was sparked by my grandfather, who had a small collection of British butterflies. In my early teens I spent a couple of summer holidays in England collecting butterflies and moths, however other distractions intervened and my career as a lepidopterist lapsed for the next 30 years! Now in South Africa, my interest was resuscitated when my wife gave me Ivor Migdol's "Field Guide to SA Butterflies" as a present. I soon started catching a few butterfly specimens with my son Christopher and we are both now suitably fanatical butterfly enthusiasts. I was appointed chairman of the Gauteng Butterfly and Moth Club (the Gauteng branch of LepSoc) three years ago. When not out chasing after butterflies I am a director of a firm of Civil Engineering consultants.

Make sure to visit the VM site to find out what butterfly species you photographed, or what butterflies have been spotted around the country by our contributors! There is a special request to everyone living in big towns/cities, especially to those of you living in Gauteng: due to the difficulty of our field survey teams to survey butterflies in residential areas, please can you all make an effort to photograph the butterflies in your garden and to submit these to the virtual museum. Knowing what flies around in our urban areas helps us understand the impact of development on our butterfly biodiversity. Also, if you find caterpillars in your garden, try and maintain them until they change into a pupa. When the adult emerges, take a picture of it, and send us the photos of the caterpillar, pupa and adult - this helps us ID the caterpillars more easily. However, please remember: do not remove any animals from the wild.
 
Currently, SABCA has received a total of 605 photographic records. SABCA would like to thank the following people for their exciting contributions, continuing from record number 162 (see previous newsletters for previous contributions):

butterfly
 
butterfly
 
butterfly
 
butterfly

THANK YOU! There are 671 known butterfly species in South Africa, so please keep the photos coming in for as many species as possible and from as many different locations as possible!

Field Surveys

You will have received SABCA's first field trip newsletter a few weeks ago. If you missed it, you can go to this link to find out what all has been happening around the country: fieldletter-01.php
 
Thanks to the LepSoc members for coordinating the trips and for conducting the surveys.
 
I had failed to mention that a permit was also received from the iSimangaliso Wetland Park Authority (formerly the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park Authority)
- thank you very much for your support.

Meetings and Public Outreach

SABCA had its second steering committee meeting in November, where progress was discussed. Some major deadlines have been set for 2008, so that SABCA can deliver all its products on time in March 2011. SABCA's priority next year will be to digitise and geo-reference at least 75% of all existing data in museum and private collections. The data will be necessary for the Conservation Assessments which are aimed to begin in the latter half of 2008.
 
Steve Woodhall has given some SABCA presentations at various places, including the Confederation of Hunters Associations of SA (CHASA). I gave a SABCA presentation to the Pinelands Study and Cultural Group.

ADU undergoes metamorphosis

From 1 January 2008, the Avian Demography Unit (or the ADU for short) will become the Animal Demography Unit (still the ADU). What prompted this? Ever since the ADU initiated the frog atlas project a decade ago in 1998, there have been issues with the name Avian Demography Unit - "Why is the Avian Demography Unit doing the frog atlas?" This inconsistency has recently been heightened by our involvement with projects on reptiles (Southern African Reptile Conservation Assessment, effectively the reptile atlas), and with butterflies (Southern African Butterfly Conservation Assessment, the butterfly atlas), and with five postgraduate students doing PhD and MSc projects on seals, one on rare mammals in Namibia and even one on dwarf chameleons.
 
Although the academic world thrives on these kinds of delightful contradictions, there is no need to perpetuate them for ever. So we will change our name, so it better describes what we do. We also change our host department at the University of Cape Town, resolving another anachronism, moving from the Department of Statistical Sciences to the Department of Zoology.
 
The new ADU website address will be http://www.adu.org.za. We remain in the same offices, and all our contact details are unchanged.

Les Underhill (ADU director)

Thank you all for your interest and participation!
 
Wishing you all a blessed Christmas and all the very best for 2008. Safe holidays, and SABCA looks forward to receiving all your holiday butterfly photos in the new year.
 
Silvia Mecenero
SABCA Project Coordinator
Email:
Tel: 021 650 3426