Wednesday 2 July 11:00

Sir Neil Chalmers seminar room, Darwin Centre LG16 (below Attenborough studio)

Insects of Porton Down

Duncan Sivell, Curator of Diptera, NHM

Porton Down, in Wiltshire, is a wildlife-rich site that is, unsurprisingly, poorly collected.  We have been on several collecting trips to Porton Down and involved in training staff there in collecting and sorting insects. Here I present some preliminary results from the first two years of this collaboration.

Sampling insects from wild potatoes and tomatoes in Peru

Daniel Whitmore, Curator of Diptera, NHM

One of the goals of the NHM’s Crops Wild Relatives Initiative is to map and model the distributions of plant wild relatives and their potential insect pests, based on the digitisation of museum collections and on the collection of new data from the wild. In late February-early March 2014 I participated in one of the CWR field trips in Peru. We explored four valleys in the Lima and Ancash departments from sea level up to 4700 m, sampling from ca. 30 sites and 130 plants. In this talk I will present an overview of the habitats we visited, the plants we sampled from, the collecting methods used and some (very) preliminary results, as well as a few entomological highlights from the trip.

More information on attending seminars at http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/news-events/seminars/