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Reuben O'Connell-Booth

@rocb-ento.bsky.social

239 followers 259 following 31 posts

PhDing insect conservation at Darwin College Cambridge. reo29@cam.ac.uk

Posts Replies Media

Reuben O'Connell-Booth @rocb-ento.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Lovely site on Orthosia identification www.eakringbirds.com/eakringbirds...

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Reuben O'Connell-Booth @rocb-ento.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Hi Simon. We were not able to directly compare the attraction range of different bulb types, only the catch size here. But we do think attraction radius is likely to affect the species the trap collects, based on species' mobility, fig below shows how we think that might work

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Reuben O'Connell-Booth @rocb-ento.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Heath's moth trap design, from the original publication. Heath, J., 1965. A genuinely portable M.V. Light Trap. Ent. Rec., 77: 236-238. www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/39266893

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Reuben O'Connell-Booth @rocb-ento.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

Its true! I quite like this staircase. faster, too - 0.63 iters/sec versus 0.45 for the base pipe. but anything not in square brackets causes a blockage!

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Reuben O'Connell-Booth @rocb-ento.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

Piped data.table... a beautiful thing (just me?) #rstats

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Reuben O'Connell-Booth @rocb-ento.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Interesting paper, worth a read. Another complicating factor in untangling moth declines! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Reuben O'Connell-Booth @rocb-ento.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Just came across this interesting 1968 paper from Herman Daly which recasts economics as a sub-discipline of ecology. A must-read if interested in ecological economics or degrowth!

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Reuben O'Connell-Booth @rocb-ento.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

The rub? That larger moths may be especially threatened given the expansion of artificial light at night globally. Which is precisely what Coulthard and colleagues found in this 2019 paper www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Reuben O'Connell-Booth @rocb-ento.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Proximity to street light also affects the species you find. Building on work which has suggested that moths may evolve smaller wings in response to light pollution, we find that traps placed in gardens near street lighting tend to collect fewer large-winged species.

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Reuben O'Connell-Booth @rocb-ento.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

We also find that the bulb you use strongly affects which species you tend to catch. The take away is that MV traps produce very different samples to Actinic ones. And brighter Actinic traps tended to collect more large species than dimmer ones.

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Reuben O'Connell-Booth @rocb-ento.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Here's the key plot - we modeled how bulb type affects the total number of moths caught, while accounting for season, weather and moon phase. As one would expect, 125W Mercury Vapor bulbs collected the largest samples. But much less powerful 15W Actinic traps performed surprisingly well.

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Reuben O'Connell-Booth @rocb-ento.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Interested in #moth trapping? Ever wondered why different bulbs collect different species? Or why some species are particularly threatened by light pollution? Using 100,000+ samples from the GMS (@gardenmothscheme.bsky.social), our new pre-print addresses these questions and more (thread)

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