The Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC) is the pre-eminent collection of Australian insects, maintained by CSIRO for researchers, industry and government agencies.

ANIC was established in 1928, and is now the world’s largest collection of Australian insects and related groups such as mites, spiders, earthworms, nematodes and centipedes.

More than 12 million specimens are housed in the Collection, which is based at CSIRO Entomology in Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory. The collection grows by more than 100 000 specimens each year.

ANIC comprises specimens collected by CSIRO staff, as well as donations and bequests from individuals and other institutions. It is an important research resource used by CSIRO researchers, university staff and students, and scientists from Australian and international research organisations.

ANIC also produces relevant papers and books in conjunction with CSIRO Publishing and other publishers.

See: www.csiro.au/places/anic

‘Moth man’ entomologist Andy Young’s diary provides a fun insight into his adventures and work as an insect taxonomist in the field, hunting for undiscovered species as part of Bush Blitz. His five daily entries are published below.

Join Andy Young, field scientist and moth expert, as he studies and searches for insects in the arid lands of South Australia, on a Bush Blitz expedition to Bush Heritage Australia’s Bon Bon Station Reserve.

As we headed east off the Stuart Highway and turned onto the dirt road out to Bon Bon homestead, blue bush-covered gibber plains on either side of the road dominated the landscape, broken by acacias growing in the drainage lines.

Arriving, I was immediately distracted by bright blue Amaryllis Azure butterflies flying around. Their caterpillars hide during the day under bark, and then emerge at night to feed on mistletoe, guarded by ants that ‘milk’ the caterpillars’ nectar glands in return.

After putting up my tent, we had to unload and sort all the gear from the trailers, and find homes for it. Over twenty people are here at the height of this Bush Blitz program, so it’s very important to respect everybody’s collecting and personal materials.

The rest of the afternoon and early evening was taken up with introductions, briefings on the rules of the station, safety and basic housekeeping. But I was eager to run my mercury vapour light trap, as a cloud ceiling was forming and the wind was non-existent – perfect weather for attracting insects to lights! After some minor dramas setting up, I turned on the light at around 8.30 p.m. After another briefing meeting that saw me straining at the bit to get out and check what was coming into my light sheet, finally, I was off!

The 250-W mercury vapour lamp is suspended in front of a hanging sheet. These lamps have a UV component in their emitted spectrum that most night-flying insects find very attractive. They settle on the sheet, where they can be selectively collected.

The light sheet wasn’t as active as I have seen in the past, but over the night several thousand insects, mainly moths, came to it. I was certainly busy collecting my various groups, which are mainly tiny moths. I was also informing volunteers from Earthwatch about the creatures we were seeing. Over the evening I collected around 250 moths and other insects, and was looking forward to bed at my knock-off time of around 3.30 a.m.

I woke with a headache and wishing that I could just lie in for a while. Too many days with too little sleep had taken their toll, with the stress of trying to break camp previously at Witchelina Station as potentially flooding rains came in. The sound of light rain on the tent’s roof didn’t help either, but there were things to do, so I staggered out of bed like a bear with a sore head.

As the day wore on, I realised that any fine motor skill activities were definitely out. I didn’t have enough patience and presence of mind to do the pinning of insects I had previously collected. This is one of the considerations when bulk handling a delicate, easily damaged specimen base.

I am capturing all the specimens live, and not killing them straight away, as would normally be the practice. This means that I can kill them at the time I want to pin them, which stops them becoming dry and brittle, but also allows worthwhile DNA samples to be collected from the fresh specimens as a side benefit. It allows me a period of grace in dealing with the specimens that I wouldn’t otherwise have, but the other consideration is that the longer you leave the pinning, the greater the amount of material you have to process at the one time! In the first two weeks of the Bush Blitz at Witchelina Station, I had a dedicated offsider, Rowan, to help me with pinning and DNA sampling – now it’s just me!

The work of DNA sampling is menial and time consuming. It is essential that every part of the process can be documented to the specimen the sample was obtained from, to preserve continuity. This is time I now do not have with the workload I’m undertaking.

Two of the other Bush Blitz entomologists here, Sarah and Rebecca, based at Adelaide University, asked if we could run a light trap in a nearby soak swale we had seen on the way in to Bon Bon. The girls were collecting Hymenoptera, the order encompassing wasps, bees and ants. At around 8.00 p.m. we headed off to the spot, about six kilometres back down the track. The first insects to show were mosquitoes! Once the mercury vapour light was up and running, it took a little while for the insects to start appearing; however, we were all soon catching various types of interest, many of which hadn’t appeared on the first night. This is one of the interesting things about a light trap: in a given locality, over several consecutive days, you may only get a standard range of insects appearing. Quite often, however, you get different suites of insects every night; some common ones that are there the whole time, but others that appear, sometimes in quite large numbers, on only one night.

After an hour, Gary, who also hails from Adelaide University, and Remko, from the South Australian Museum, also came down. Gary was collecting various bugs at the light, some of which are very small. While Australians have adopted the American slang term ‘bug’ to include all insects, it specifically refers to the order Hemiptera: all of which have modified tubular mouthparts, with which they suck animal or plant juice as a food source.

I had filled my own jars by around 11.15 p.m. and we headed back to camp. I worked until around 1.00 a.m. pre-pinning out some of the catch from the night before, then hit the hay at ~1.30 a.m.

When I rose at 7.30 a.m., I knew that a huge, tedious day awaited me. I had tea, and then pinned over one hundred and eighty specimens, which took until around 2.30 a.m. the following morning. I only had half an hour off for dinner, around the same amount of time as I had actually spent at the light sheet I had going.

While it is good to see the diurnal (both day and night time) fauna of these areas – and I have certainly contributed to other scientists’ collection bases when I have managed to get into the field during the daytime – most interesting species I am likely to encounter come to the mercury light at night. This allows me to devote the evening to collection and the days to curation.

That said, during a daytime toilet break today, I observed what appeared to be a Hypertrophid moth flying around mistletoe on a mulga bush. This is the second observation of a day-flying Hypertrophid I’ve made during the trip, and confirms an observation made by a worker called Meyrick in 1880.

Among today’s pinnings are several specimens that may well be new species, including one that looks very different from anything I’ve seen before. I’ll now have to go back and check Australia’s institutional collections before I can say definitively that it hasn’t been caught and described before. One of the disadvantages of working on an insect group with possibly 30 000 species in Australia is that it’s hard to recognise everything at a glance.

I pinned out more of the collection base from the night before, did some DNA sampling of Geometrids, and then this evening ran the light in the same spot again, close by – where we were pleased by the material collected on the first night.

One of the issues in running a light in the same spot over several days is that the predators get to know where it is. Tonight, we have had swarms of tiny Iridomyrmex ants and Caribid beetles around the light sheet, grabbing and devouring prey.

The other story of the day has been the arrival of a team of journalists to cover the Bush Blitz. As a consequence, the work of the day was altered and several people were frustrated, as some glitches in the schedule meant they were waiting around when they could have been working. We all know the value of positive publicity, both for the organisations involved and for conservation more generally: so, in the end, we concede it’s a necessary thing. I ended up being photographed at the light sheet and doing an interview at around 12.30 a.m., then got back to the pinning work.

Yet another day of pinning: a point of interest was when Cory, a photographer, brought in an image of some Buprestid beetles on eucalypt blossom from the far side of the property. Buprestids are also known as ‘jewel beetles’ and are typically brightly coloured, and sometimes iridescent. I would have loved to have got some samples of the beetles, as there are few records of them from South Australia’s arid areas – they may have been of interest to others.

During the evening, the wind sprang up. Glen Norris, the reserve manager for Bush Heritage Australia, let me set up my light in an open shed, sheltered from the wind. This allowed me to collect in the evening, until the wind changed direction and started blowing into the shed. It was a slow night, however, but of the insects that did come in, several were different from what I had seen during the rest of the trip.

Cory photographed us collecting at the light. Then, at around 12.30 a.m., he set his camera up next to my work bench and photographed me working there, fascinated by the whole process.

I finished up at around 1.30 a.m. again. With rain threatening, I headed off to the abandoned concrete shed where I had moved my tent to stop it getting wet. A medium-sized reptile of some description was under my tent floor, but I couldn’t have cared if it was a mulga snake; nothing was going to stop me sleeping! I just pushed it away with a book and when I couldn’t feel the squirming bump anymore, went to sleep.

Having spent a claustrophobic night in the shed, I woke to the final day of this short but intense trip. Inside the shelter was a piece of corrugated iron, which looked interesting. If there was a snake in the shelter, this was the most likely place for it to be. I gingerly flipped it up – only to see a gecko staring at me. I caught the little reptile and showed it to the team’s herpetologist, Steve. He identified it as a Bynoe’s gecko and said that it could be released; they had already caught a mob of them.

Later, I went back to get some things from my tent. While there, I decided to flip the iron again. This time I saw a sinuous shape darting for the wall in the half-light of the shelter. I chased it and caught a smooth, banded lizard ~20 cm long, with large, gecko-like eyes. I put it in a sock I had for Steve.

‘What’s that shiny lizard with bands like a blue-tongue, but a longer tail?’ I asked, not wanting to be told I had just caught the other most common lizard found on the trip.

‘That would be a Centralian blue-tongue,’ said Steve.

‘No, this one’s got a longer tail and googly eyes,’ I replied.

Steve, somewhat exasperated by now, said ‘I don’t know then, did you catch it?’

I then drew the somewhat reluctant lizard from my sock, and Steve’s irritation turned to surprise. I had found the second broad-banded sand-swimmer for the trip. What made this specimen more interesting was that it was intermediate between a western form and an eastern form. This shows that the two populations are likely to interbreed in the Bon Bon area, and that their status as separate biological entities is open to doubt.

Later, I needed to get something else from my tent and asked Steve if he wanted me to see if I could find any other reptiles in the sand of the shelter.

‘Another sand-swimmer would be great,’ he replied, so I started off towards the shelter, butterfly net in hand. After a little poking around in the shelter, a head stuck out of the floor and I bagged a second sand-swimmer specimen. At a post-dinner debrief, Steve mentioned that he’d never seen the butterfly net technique used to catch reptiles before.

The rest of the day was like all the days during the Bon Bon trip: long and tedious, filled with pinning and de-pinning material.

After dinner, it was too windy to light-trap a final time, so I busied myself with starting to break down and pack the equipment. I also had to store some pinning boards of drying specimens safely for the trip back. As any one of the specimens I’d collected during the trip could end up being a ‘type’ – the important specimens on which a new species description is based – it was important to make sure all the material travelled safely.

We had a final meeting as a group, at which the various workers gave a brief summary of what they had achieved. I couldn’t say much at that stage; it will be a quite sustained piece of work in itself to get the identifications necessary to quantify the trip’s success in terms of the new species that may have been found.