Firefly Watch combines an annual summer evening ritual with scientific research. Join a network of volunteers. Observe your own backyard. Track your progress online and interact with fellow Citizen Scientists. Help scientists map fireflies found in New England and beyond. No specific scientific training required. Participating in Firefly Watch requires just a fraction of your time. The Museum has teamed up with researchers from Tufts University and Fitchburg State College to track the fate of these amazing insects. With your help, we hope to learn about the geographic distribution of fireflies and their activity during the summer season. Fireflies also may be affected by human-made light and pesticides in lawns, so we hope to also learn more about those effects. ... [Information of the supplier]
This web site is based largely on the book The Ground Beetles of Northern Ireland, Anderson, R., McFerran, D., & Cameron, A., 2000. This site is another step along the way to encouraging interest in Irish ground beetles. It extends the book by including more illustrations of the species and providing a means to produce updated distribution maps. Where photographs were not available we have used scans of set specimens or paintings from Fowler (1887). It is intended to act as a stimulus to further recording of ground beetles in Ireland by providing a resource which makes these little-studied animals more accessible to interested amateurs, biological recorders, school biology classes and the general public. There are very many gaps in information which can be seen clearly in the maps. The amateur recorder can help to plug these effectively. Accurate identification of beetles is always a difficulty, but the web site has an online multimedia key to Irish Carabidae which should help in this regard. The Carabidae or ground beetles are a world-wide assemblage of upwards of 30,000 species. These are often referred to colloquially as black beetles or clocks. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
