Three new reports from Les Finch and Martin Finch are now available from the Berkshire Moth Group website, adding to the long-running and absolutely fascinating series that they have been producing since 2005. The overall summary for their home trapping is that there were fewer individuals in 2024 compared to 2023, but more species, and both individual and species totals in 2024 were higher than the longer-term average for 2014-2023:
The trend for early emergences of some of the spring species has continued:
Les and Martin provide lots more additional information and analysis in their full reports, and I recommend exploring them in detail!
I read this report each year and it just gets more and more interesting. Congratulations to Les and Martin!
ReplyDeleteI struggled to get much trapping done in 2024 due to considerable absences abroad, other commitments, and bad weather on the few nights I was at home with time. I was barely managing two nights a month in the summer.
So it is interesting to read the evidence that trapping seven nights a week rather than just once a week seems to increase the number of macro species caught by about 50% (from roughly 200 to 300). The implication is that infrequent trapping might make it hard to draw year-on-year conclusions about how well many species are doing.
Perhaps it is a stochastic effect, but it seems that Saturday nights are a bad night for species with about 8% fewer species seen if one only traps on a Saturday night each week than compared to any other single night, whereas the number of moths seen is about the same. Maybe someone should run traps at a local beer garden every night, just to see if there is the reverse phenomenon and some species like to go down the pub on Saturdays to watch the match! After all, some species come to wine ropes. A potential Ig Nobel Prize winner?