The last blog post here was in Nov 2015, which was just before my trip to French Guiana to look for the white witch. Truth is, that trip was an excuse to capture the attention of my students, who followed my investigation from our school in Hartford CT (blog here). I collected 2 white witch specimens after 10 nights of light sheets and bait trapping, and learned nothing new about white witch. It had been a long shot: previous trips by others had encountered dozens of moths, which would have been a data bonanza.
I'm ready to re-engage. I've documented here the effort to accumulate records from museum collections. It is a lot of work to find <200 data points from a dozen collections. Only a few of these have associated photos. Many are incomplete, without accurate localities or collector identification. And follow-up is problematic, as most records are decades old.
Recently I have become a huge fan of Inaturalist, a citizen science project that shares user observations of organisms. It is a deep dataset (<10,000,000 records). This includes some 70 observations of white witch, all of which include photos, precise locality and date info, and a user that I can email. So my next effort will be to add these to my white witch spreadsheet, and to contact contributors for more detail.
I'm ready to re-engage. I've documented here the effort to accumulate records from museum collections. It is a lot of work to find <200 data points from a dozen collections. Only a few of these have associated photos. Many are incomplete, without accurate localities or collector identification. And follow-up is problematic, as most records are decades old.
Recently I have become a huge fan of Inaturalist, a citizen science project that shares user observations of organisms. It is a deep dataset (<10,000,000 records). This includes some 70 observations of white witch, all of which include photos, precise locality and date info, and a user that I can email. So my next effort will be to add these to my white witch spreadsheet, and to contact contributors for more detail.