Autore Discussione: Ewoud
Oggetto: Photographic Guide to Exuviae of European Dragonflies
Inserito il: 11 novembre 2010 15:23:32
Messaggio:

Excuse me for writing in English. My Italian is… not available. I hope you understand. I will introduce you to a project me and a friend of me are working on.

Some years ago I got in touch with exuviae after studying adult dragonflies for some time. I got interested in exuviae after finding a spectacular larval skin of Epitheca bimaculata in Poland during research. Shortly after this finding, I saw the importance of exuviae in studying dragonflies, because they tell much more about the presence of populations rather than a sighting of a flying adult. I started to create a collection and got Christophe Brochard interested as well. He, being a great nature photographer, suggested to make some pictures of the exuviae we found. The result of even the first trial was stunning and things got even better after improving the technique and getting a new camera. The results brought us to the idea of being the first to create a photographic guide to the exuviae of European dragonflies. We made a few previews and got in contact with a publisher. He got interested directly and now we got permission to go on with our work. Some of the previews can be found on the website of Christophe: Link

At this moment only a very few photographic guides are available and none of them gives a complete overview of all species with populations or incidental reproduction in Europe. Some identification works have been published to this subject, but they all make use of drawings rather than pictures. Because we are able to picture even the finest details (for instance the small spine at the base of the distal setae on the labial palp of Enallagma cyathigerum that can be seen on Link --> "Enallagma cyathigerum right page") we are sure to be able to picture all identification marks needed in getting a name to all exuviae found in Europe.

At Christophe his website a list of species is given (click "Species list described in this book"), so you can see if you can help us getting our collection complete. At this moment we still need exuviae of quite a large selection of species. As you might understand it is nearly impossible for us to collect all European species on our own. Therefore we would like to ask as much European dragonfly-enthusiast as possible to support us in collecting exuviae. If you know people collecting exuviae, please forward this message to them, so we enlarge our network as much as possible. Please feel free to ask questions and let us know what species you are able to collect. Some species from Italy are of major interest at this moment, like Cordulegaster trinacriae. We are really thankful to anyone helping us in getting this job done. I really look forward to your messages and hope that you are just as enthusiast to this subject as we are. If you have any exuviae available (also not identified ones) we might be interested in your help. Eventually we have a lot of material in exchange.
Best regards,
Ewoud van der Ploeg, The Netherlands
Link
agrius_convolvuli@hotmail.com