30 June 2008
Dear Butterfly Net:
The last three months have been very busy for SABCA...
SABCA was represented at three exhibitions during the past few months...
Sustainable Living Festival, Hoedspruit, May 2008
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The SABCA exhibit at this festival proved to be very popular, so much so that it won the first prize for best exhibit at the festival! A BIG thank you to Ian and Allison Sharp and family (regular contributors to the virtual museum), for making SABCA proud! They put together an excellent display: "We carried the SABCA message to a number of interested people and possibly convinced a good few skeptics that photographing butterflies, though sometimes frustrating, can be quite easy and very rewarding.The live display really drew the kids as they could see what butterfly eggs look like, different larvae and chrysalis. Though the main focus was SABCA, additional information on butterflies was a hit as well. We had photos of butterflies showing seasonal forms, sex dimorphism and plant selection for egg laying. Attention was also drawn to the importance of butterfly gardening and something on legal and protection issues pertaining to butterflies. Different life cycles were included to illustrate how different the stages are from one butterfly to the next." Thank you to the festival organisers for sponsoring SABCA's stand.
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Biodiversity Expo, Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens, Cape Town, May 2008
To celebrate International Day of Biologival Diversity (22 May), Kirstenbosch NBG for the first time hosted its Biodversity Expo to showcase the various biodiversity conservation projects which are running in the Cape Floristic region. Guest speakers also gave exciting presentations on topics such as climate change and atlassing projects (Marius Burger, from the reptile atlas SARCA, spoke a bit about SABCA too). The Expo was attended by about 800 visitors, mainly from schools in the region. The children thoroughly enjoyed SABCA's exhibit which included live displays of various caterpillars, some reacted as though they were big snakes like the ones SARCA staff at the reptile stand had draped round their necks - thank you to Andrew Morton (LepSoc) for doing a grand search for the caterpillars for the display. SABCA also had two beautiful display draws of butterflies in the Western Cape and of butterflies in South Africa, which also proved to be a big hit - thank you to Harald Selb (LepSoc) for loaning us his draws for the day. Thanks to Andrew, and my assistants Laurenda and Lungelo, for helping out with the stand!
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Seeding Sustainable Living: The Power of Conservancies, National Association of Conservancies of SA Annual Conference, Bronkhorstspruit, June 2008
SABCA was invited by NACSA to give a presentation and put up a display at its annual conference. A big thank you to Jeremy Dobson (LepSoc) giving a presentation on SABCA, and for putting together the display. Jeremy made some useful contacts with local conservancies, which should help with future SABCA work.
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Upcoming event: Kwa Nunu exhibition, Durban Natural Science Museum, 11-15 July 2008
This interactive exhibition of live animal and plant displays will feature SABCA. Steve Woodhall's new book "What's that butterfly" will also be launched there.
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ABCA's new data technicians based at UCT, Laurenda van Breda and Lungelo Ndaba, have settled in nicely and are working very hard at getting data digitised and georeferenced, as well as capturing information on specimen labels. John White's collection has now been completed.
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The number of records uploaded into the SABCA database now stands at 22521. Latest records uploaded into the database include Jenny Norman's observations, and a beginning of records from the Transvaal Museum. Much of the already digitised and georeferened data has yet to be checked before it can be uploaded.
***Steve Woodhall, a LepSoc member with a large butterfly collection, requires the assistance of an ad-hoc data-capturer to digitise the remaining half of his collection. He resides in Gillits (very close to Durban). If there is anyone who would be interested in taking on this job, please contact me as soon as possible to discuss this further. If there are any lepidopterists out there who require assistance with the digitisation of your collections, please contact me so that we can organise assistance for you as soon as possible.
We are still urgently looking for financial sponsors for the digitisation of the South African butterfly collection at the Natural History Museum in London (UK). This is a very large and important collection (80 000 records = about 20% of all records for SABCA) and this data would contribute greatly towards SABCA reaching its objectives. Please could any potential sponsors contact me for further details.
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An interesting bit of news: Last week the Linnean Society of London launched online digitised images of butterflies and moths from the insect collection of the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), for National Insect Week. To access the system, click here http://www.linnean.org/ and then follow the link to "Linnaean Collections Online". After browsing the site, I found six South African specimen records from the Cape of Good Hope region!
Since March, photos for the Virtual Museum have still been coming in at a high rate. Thank you to those of you who have made so many contributions! To date, since the virtual museum was launched last year, SABCA has received an incredible 2977 photographic submissions - just under 3000!! THANK YOU!
SABCA would like to thank the following people for their contributions during the past three months:
As determined by our ID expert panel, here follow some of the most interesting records that have been recently received ... :
 Nice female form. Common diadem Hypolimnas misippus FG Visser |
 New locality record, or else possible new species. Orachrysops sp. C McMaster |
 Good record and photo. Southern short-tailed admiral Antanartia hippomene hippomene J Gosnell |
 Good locality record. Eyed pansy Junonia orithya madagascariensis K Webster |
 Rare sighting. Silver arrowhead Phasis thero cedarbergae H de Klerk |
 Rare male form. Forest-king charaxes Charaxes xiphares penningtoni D Maphisa |
... and here are some of the best quality photos recently received:
 Dry-leaf commodore Precis tugela tugela G Diedericks |
 Common fig tree blue Myrina silenus ficedula P Webb |
 African grass blue Zizeeria knysna P Webb |
 Difficult to photograph in wild. Paradise skipper Abantis paradisea IC & A Sharp |
 Orange banded protea Capys alphaeus alphaeus C McMaster |
 Pearl Charaxes Charaxes varanes varanes CK Willis |
Remember the competition for the Virtual Museum! There are three categories:
A BIG thank you to the following sponsors for kindly sponsoring the prizes:
Africa Geographic, Struik Publishers, Lepidopterists' Society of Africa and JAH & Associates.
For more details on the competition, please click here.
Please click on the Public participation link to obtain easy-to-follow instructions on how photos should be submitted.
The first season of SABCA's field surveys has come to an end - please click here to read more on this in Field Trip Newsletter No 2. Some additional field survey news from the southern Cape region:
By Dave Edge: In the southern Cape 18 new localities were visited by field workers Dave Edge, Ray Jones and Graham Wyatt-Goodall. Ray and Graham discovered new localities in the Calitzdorp area for some rare endemics like Thestor braunsi, Chrysoritis pan henningi, C. swanepoeli and Lepidochrysops swartbergensis. Dave travelled as far as the Karoo National Park where he recorded 18 species including Aloeides macmasteri and Chrysoritis pan lysander. Other significant records by Dave were Lepidochrysops asteris from Herold's Bay – its southernmost locality – and at Kranshoek near Plettenberg Bay overlooking the sea Aeropetes tulbaghia and Myrina silenus ficedula.
These records bring the total new species records this season to 366, raising the southern Cape total to 891, or 46% of the target.
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...and some pictures from recent Western Cape expeditions (from Andrew Morton)...
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Thank you all for your interest and participation!
Silvia Mecenero
SABCA Project Coordinator
Email:
Tel: 021 650 3426
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Last updated: June 2008.
Page served: February 4, 2012, 06:47 +0200]
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