Favoritos de zoology123

Set up a single sheet at a little green patch I like to visit for birding. I have looked for bugs here before too but this was the first time I set up a sheet. I used several blacklights: one bioquip powered by a battery with 12v outlet made for jumping car/inflating tires, three DJ blacklights connected to USB powerpacks. Most of the sheet visitors were small but there was a good amount of diversity. Without my macro lens it wouldn't have felt as fruitful.

I set the sheet up around 11:20PM, left and then came back to photograph everything around 2AM (I live nearby). Moon rose around 11PM and was around 95% illuminated, so I had a lot of light competition. Wind was weak when I set the sheet up but was non-existent by the time I came back.

All observations from this sheet: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?d1=2022-06-16&d2=2022-06-17&place_id=any&project_id=blacklighting-florida&user_id=joemdo

Blacklighting at AD Barnes Park. I had permission to spend the night here to keep an eye on tents set up for Native Plant Day. This is an annual event organized by the Dade Chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society. You can read more about it here: https://dade.fnpschapters.org/data/uploads/documents/npd2024program.pdf
& here is the Dade Chapter's website:
https://dade.fnpschapters.org/
Please consider becoming a member!

I was a bit unprepared for blacklighting as I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to. I only had 3 UV blacklights powered by USB battery packs and moved them around between midnight and around 5:30AM when I left. At first I had two lights up on the side of the portable building and one down a trail in the hardwood hammock area. Later I took down one of the lights from the building and moved it to the hardwood hammock sheet. Finally, I moved all the lights to a more open area with more pines and pine rockland species. This observation is from the last spot.

You can learn more about the lights I used and my typical, simple & affordable setups here: https://youtu.be/tavmTa7WoPk

Conditions: Negligible wind, moon illumination 37%, set around 1:30AM, temp around 70

Video showing all of the areas I set up lights throughout the night: https://youtu.be/Pp0-zd3oTjg

All of my blacklighting observations from Barnes:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=25.741335270684708&nelng=-80.30756776028727&on=2024-03-16&order=asc&order_by=observed_on&place_id=any&project_id=blacklighting-florida&swlat=25.7360198701269&swlng=-80.31159107380961&user_id=joemdo

Non-blacklighting observations:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=25.741335270684708&nelng=-80.30756776028727&on=2024-03-16&order=asc&order_by=observed_on&place_id=any&swlat=25.7360198701269&swlng=-80.31159107380961&user_id=joemdo&not_in_project=blacklighting-florida

Blacklighting project for Florida on iNaturalist: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/blacklighting-florida