Now that it's turned cold, it seems a good time to look back at last year...
This is the
summary from my garden for 2007 to 2012:
Year
|
Species
|
New
species
|
Trap
nights
|
Total
moths
|
Moths per
night
|
2007
|
188
|
188
|
62
|
1824
|
29.4
|
2008
|
198
|
67
|
60
|
1983
|
33.1
|
2009
|
225
|
59
|
78
|
2130
|
27.3
|
2010
|
257
|
52
|
63
|
2821
|
44.8
|
2011
|
302
|
68
|
108
|
4336
|
40.1
|
2012
|
260
|
25
|
100
|
3589
|
35.9
|
Unsurprisingly,
given the generally awful weather, 2012 wasn't a great year for moths, with the
number of species and total number of moths being down on 2011 despite similar
amounts of trapping. In fact, I only caught 3 more species than in 2010 when I
did a lot less trapping. 2012 appears less bad when compared with 2007-2009,
but I think this is partly due to switching from a Skinner to a Robinson trap
in 2010 (the Robinson does seem to hold more moths).
A few
species had a record year, including Garden Carpet, Common Marbled Carpet,
Common Emerald, Swallow-tailed, Cinnabar, Buff Ermine, Silver Y, Dot, Angle
Shades, and of course Light Brown Apple Moth. Far more species did poorly,
particularly badly hit were many of the noctuids, including Vine's Rustic,
Straw Dot, Setaceous Hebrew Character, Lesser BBYU, Flame Shoulder and
Shuttle-shaped Dart.
Despite all
the doom and gloom, 25 species were added to the garden list, 12 of them
macros.
I'd be interested to hear how others got on. I'm sure we're all hoping for better moth weather in 2013...
I don't know where you find the time to do this sort of thing, George. Anyway, your total for 2012 certainly makes my total of 679 look paltry.
ReplyDeleteHi Mark,
ReplyDeleteIt's quite quick really - most of the numbers come from standard MapMate queries. I might be sad, but not sad enough to spend hours on this kind of thing!
George
Not sad, George. When you've spent most of your spare time for the past three months, square bashing a fungus, you really know the meaning of sad!
DeleteDid you work out the new species numbers using MapMate queries too?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteYes there's a standard query for that. It's in the "Species 'new or absent'" menu and the query is "New species in year at site".
ReplyDeleteGeorge
Thanks, George. I've just tried that with 2012 and the results have highlighted a possible problem with the species list for my garden. I have, over the years, had Carcina quercana a few times in the garden, and the records have been submitted, but according to MapMate, it was new to my garden in 2012. I shall have to look into that.
ReplyDeleteWell what do you know? It's not a problem with the MapMate list after all, but a major malfunction of the user's brain. Trawling through my old paper records, it seems that the first time Carcina quercana was recorded in my garden was indeed in 2012. Amazing!
ReplyDeleteThat must be a relief Mark. I've had that sinking feeling before, when records I thought were on MapMate have gone missing.
ReplyDeleteKnow the feeling. Back in November, a conversation with Mike Hogan brought to light the fact that my birds checklist was out of date, despite me having all the patches replicated. It turned out that when replicating patches and syncs, it was going through the motions but not actually replicating the data into my system. A whole year's worth of other peoples data was missing and a mass of patches hadn't been replicated.
ReplyDeleteIn early December, I took my PC (a desktop!) down to Cardiff, for Dave to sort things out, which he did and everything now seems to be working fine, but in the back of the mind there is still that nagging doubt the results, when running queries.