National Museums Liverpool Blog - entomology

The museum before it was bombed in the Second World War.

I know I'm a day early, but 2010 will mean a pretty important anniversary for us here at National Museums Liverpool. It will be the 150th Anniversary of William Brown handing over the keys for what was then the Liverpool museum, which we now all know and love as the World Museum.

To mark this anniversary we’re going to be featuring a year-long series of World Museum-related stories on this blog. There'll be a story a week, with a mix of historical and contemporary pieces. We want to let you know all about the museum’s history but also give you a few behind the scenes peeks at the people, stories and events that make (and have made) this such a special museum.

To give you a taste of how the museum first came about, I can tell you that on 8 March 1853 the museum opened for the first time on Slater Street in Liverpool. It was then called the 'Derby Museum of the Borough of Liverpool' in honour of the Earl of Derby’s bequest of over 20,000 natural history specimens. We still have amazing specimens at the museum, ranging from an Arctic Fox to many beautiful butterflies.

We'd also like you to get involved by sending us your memories of the World Museum from both past and present. If you have a specific date that sticks in your mind, then all the better. You can submit your memories as a comment at the bottom of this post.

So all that remains is for me to wish you a Happy New Year and to invite you to come along and visit our fab, free museum in 2010!

Bug House Demonstrator, Rebekah Beresford, tells us about the latest addition to the Bug House...

The weird and wonderful Wandering Violin Mantis

So, may I present to you the Wandering Violin Mantis or Gongylus gonglodes. This awesome looking insect is our newest addition to the Bug House. We have eight of these funky little creatures and they’re one of the most bizarre looking out of all the mantids.

These insects are part of the order Mantodea and are characterized by their slender limbs and stocky upper body. As suggested by the name, this mantis looks somewhat like a violin with leaf like appendages protruding from the legs to aid camouflage and a leaf like head. They’re from Southern India and Sri Lanka and come in a variety of different shades of brown.

The wandering violin mantis is more of a ‘sit and wait’ species rather than a hunter but that’s not to say that they’re picky. These mantids are confident, ravenous feeders and will snatch a variety of flies and moths from the air, if the dare to fly close enough. Most mantids are solitary and have to be kept individually but these are unusually social. Given plenty of space they can be housed together in small groups of 8-10 and pose no threat to each other. 

So, keep your eyes peeled for them in the Bug House! I’ll be putting them out on display in the next few weeks in a mixed exhibit with the hermit crabs and fresh water shrimps. Also keep an eye on the blog for my next posts on how I set up their new vivarium.

Guy Knight shows us some bees

This week I got to look around the entomology lab at World Museum Liverpool, at one of the creepy crawly tours that are available to visitors during school holidays. Zoology curator, Guy Knight, took us around the lab so we could see some of the thousands of mounted specimens housed in the back of the museum.

He showed us a case full of crickets that were found in Liverpool after they hitch-hiked here on some bananas. Then there were questions from some of the eager smaller visitors on the tour – my favourite being; ‘What happens if they come back to life after you’ve killed them?’ Maybe they had been to the Ancient Egypt gallery beforehand and had learned about the afterlife! Bees were next on the agenda – we have around 10,000 bees in our collections apparently. We learned that there are 250 different kinds of bees, but wild bumblebees are getting rarer due to the countryside changing and there being less wild areas for bees to live in.

In other bug news, you can now come and see a new ‘living display’ in the bug house gallery featuring the Indian Ground Beetle (Anthia sexguttata). The beetles’ new home has been created using a special sand and cement mix, which will allow them to dig burrows to lay their eggs.  Indian Ground Beetles are a large predatory beetle, which actively hunt down their insect prey and this species has never been bred in captivity. They can also spray an acidic liquid accurately into the eyes of their enemies if they feel threatened. Unbee-lievable!

Many moons ago, when there was still the promise of a summer featuring the sun, Guy Knight in Entomology told us about the fieldwork the team was undertaking in Smardale, Cumbria. Well, the 'field' bit of the work has concluded and now they're spending the winter grubbing through their finds. More from Guy.

The Northern Brown Argus

It was good to see large numbers of Scotch Argus and Northern Brown Argus butterfly during the summer. They are the only insects which have been studied in detail at Smardale in the past, where they occur towards the southern limit of their British distribution. Several other significant species have been recorded during the survey so far and we were especially pleased to find the Wall Mason Bee Osmia parietina, a Biodiversity Action Plan Priority Species which is restricted in Britain to a handful of sites in north-west England and North Wales.

The team will be returning to Smardale next year when I hope to give more updates on how the work is progressing.  

Hello, I'd like to introduce myself! I'm Lisa Jones and I'm filling in for Dawn Carroll as E-PR Officer for National Museums Liverpool, while she is away on leave. This is my first blog post and I am bringing you an update about the entomology fieldwork at Smardale Gill, from Curator of Entomology, Guy Knight. There are lots of great photos of the team at work on Flickr and you can read on to find out more about his team's latest findings...

The team at work in Smardale Gill

Because of the awful weather during the past month, the visit to Smardale Gill NNR we had scheduled for June threatened to be a fairly miserable affair. Luckily the rain did hold off for most of the time and we even got a few sunny spells! This time we were accompanied by Tom Mawdsley, retired Curator of Diptera (flies) at National Museums Liverpool and Dr Jennifer Newton the county spider recorder for Cumbria. Much of the day was spent servicing and repairing traps which had been damaged by the weather and livestock but it was also a good opportunity to see some of the rare plants and butterflies already known from the reserve. Meanwhile, some specimens from the samples are being prepared for our collections, allowing us to make accurate identifications and providing a lasting record of the presence of these insects at the site for future researchers.