The last two weeks, Jan spent at the W. Szafer Institute of Botany in Krakow, Poland, where he worked on the continuation of his metabarcoding of pollen grains sampled from Mount Cameroonian butterflies. Extracted pollen samples, collected from 250 individual…
Jan’s visit of the Natural History Museum in Budapest
Last week, Jan spent at the Natural History Museum in Budapest where a small part of our Cameroonian Lepidoptera material is stored under the watchful eye of Dr. László Ronkay. The museum has an impressive collection of Noctuidae of which…
New publication on entomological collections digitization
Jan co-authored a paper in collaboration with BINCO (NGO focusing on biodiversity conservation) where they evaluate the use of relatively inexpensive compact cameras to digitize entomological collections. Museums often lack the means and manpower to push their massive collections towards the…
Flower visitors of Impatiens burtonii
We have released a video presenting the recent study on the role of long nectar spurs in pollination of Impatiens burtonii (Vlašánková et al. 2017, New Phytologist). You can directly see how the individual common visitors reach the flower spur and how efficient…
Afrotropical Lepidoptera meeting in Krakow
Last weekend, Robert, Vincent, Sylvain, Jan and Mercy attended the Afrotropical Lepidoptera Network meeting organised by Lukasz Przybylowicz at the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals in Krakow, Poland. Together, we presented our work on butterfly and moth diversity along…
New publication: flower visitors of Uvariopsis dioica
Part of our data collected during the early 2016 expedition to Mt. Cameroon has been published in the African Journal of Ecology. It concerns a case study on Uvariopsis dioica (Annonaceae), a smaller tree flowering at its base, where we…
Video Abstract of the BMC Biology paper
BMC Biology journal has released a short video propagation on a recent paper co-authored by Yannick:
(Partly) back from Africa
The majority of us are back from Africa. Yannick, Jan, Vincent and Michael Bartoš have returned, mostly unscathed, from their expedition to Mt. Cameroon on Friday. They continued with our research on pollination systems, as well as lepidopteran diversity in the…
Our research eaten by a porcupine!
As a part of our last fieldwork in Cameroon we surveyed a pollination system of Uvariopsis dioica (Annonaceae). One morning we realised all the filmed flowers had disappeared. The Brush-tailed porcupine (Atherurus africanus) visited it and skilfully selected all open flowers and…
Robert, Jan and Pavel are also leaving to Cameroon
Today, the second half of the group are joining Vincent and Stepan in Cameroon. For five weeks, we will sample moths and butterflies along the altitudinal gradient on Mount Cameroon, collect data on pollination networks and study flowering plants up…