News

Notes on Insects Recently Introduced to Metro Vancouver

Through fieldwork and examination of older museum specimens sixteen species of insects are recorded for the first time from British Columbia, including seven new to Canada. Nine species are introduced including the crabronid wasp Rhopalum gracile Wesmael and the ladybird beetle Brumus quadripustulatus Linnaeus (pictured left [b.]). The remaining seven species are native to North America and have only now been recorded from British Columbia. These include the net-winged midge Philorus californicus (Hogue), the caddisfly Desmona mono (Denning), and the plant bug Orectoderus montanus Knight.

The full article is published in Vol. 113 of the Journal of the Entomological Society of British Columbia and is available here.

Insects of the Vancouver Convention Centre Green Roof

For the past several months researchers from the Spencer Collection have been taking an inventory of the insect species found on the green roof of the Vancouver Convention Centre. Over 150 species of insects, as well as several species of spiders, have already been found up on the roof including seven species of native ladybird beetles, at least six species of native bees, and a number of uncommon wasps. Identification of specimens is still ongoing and the total number of species is expected to increase.

Visit our Green Roof page to find out more.

To learn a little more about the Vancouver Convention Centre's Green Roof visit their webpage here.

The Checklist of Spheciform Wasps of BC

An annotated checklist of wasps in the families Crabronidae and Sphecidae was compiled for British Columbia by C.G. Ratzlaff in 2015. As a result of the research 280 species, including 70 that had not been seen before, are now recorded from the province. In addition, 42 of the species reported were new records for Canada, two species which may be potentially new to science were mentioned, and the European species Ectemnius cephalotes (Olivier) is recorded for the first time from western Canada. This study was done primarily through examination of museum holdings of the Spencer Entomological Collection, Royal British Columbia Museum, and Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids, and Nematodes as well as a thorough review of existing literature. All available resources necessary for the identification of British Columbian taxa are cited. Intraprovincial distributions by ecoprovinces are presented for each species.

The checklist is published in Vol. 112 of the Journal of the Entomological Society of British Columbia and is available here.

The Checklist of the Lepidoptera of BC

The first comprehensive checklist of BC Lepidoptera since 1951 was recently published as an Entomological Society of British Columbia Occasional Paper #3 by Gregory R. Pohl, Robert A. Cannings, Jean-Francois Landry, David G. Holden, and Geoffrey G.E. Scudder. The list was compiled from a survey of the literature from the past 65 years as well as examination of holdings from the Spencer Entomological Collection, the Royal British Columbia Museum, the Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids, and Nematodes, and the Canadian Forest Service. A total of 2,832 species in 70 families were recorded, representing 52.9% of all known Canadian species (the most of any province). Of these species 134 are known to be introduced. Another 27 species are likely present in the province and 322 species previously recorded from BC were removed from the list.

More information on how this checklist came to be can be found here.

The checklist itself can be found here.

Aedes japonicus in Western Canada

The asian mosquito species Aedes japonicus japonicus (Theobald) was recently found in Maple Ridge, marking the first time that this species has been recorded in Western Canada. Larvae of A. japonicus were found in pools of water on a tarp in a backyard. This species has shown the ability to be a vector for illnesses such as dengue and West Nile virus. Several specimens were deposited in the Spencer Entomological Collection and photos of both a male and female specimen can be viewed here in our Culicidae gallery.

More information can be found in this article from Entomology Today.

The full 2015 journal article by Jackson et al. is available here.

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