Black-tailed skimmer / Större sjötrollslända / Orthetrum cancellatum Loe bar, Cornwall #dragonfly #trollslända

Around 40 Red Admirals per hr migrating south this morning at Studland Beach #migration BC Dorset 🦋 Butterfly Conservation 🦋

Led by new PhD Matt DeSaix, our latest paper uses advanced low-coverage whole genome sequencing (lcWGS) to uncover the intricate migratory connectivity patterns of American Redstarts 📷 This helps us craft conservation strategies to preserve both numbers and genetic #Diversity

If you are interested in migration, read this fascinating thread linking birds, insects & weather!

After charging into one of the very few freshwater lakes on the Maldives, we found what we were looking for! A globe skimmer dragonfly, Pantala flavescens! Look at her huge wide back wings, perfect for soaring from India to Africa like a small Albatross.

Gorgeous Maldivian sunsets at our moth trapping site for migrating insects! Johanna.SU.Hedlund @zanderhayward University of Exeter, Cornwall

The most beautiful bee I have ever seen in real life!

This is Xylocopa tenuiscapa, narrow-scaped carpenter bee. He has big blue eyes and sits atop a perch surveying his territory, which can be handed down through generations of bees! His big front legs are for covering the female's eyes while mating so she doesn't get distracted!

Fishing the sky! Back from a thrilling 3-week journey aboard #NationalGeographicExplorer in #SouthAmerica studying insects dispersing over the sea and the #AmazonRiver Lindblad Expeditions National Geographic National Geographic Society Institut Botànic de Barcelona CSIC #InsectMigration #Biodiversity #Research

This little lion carpenter bee from the Maldives is a Xylocopa pubescens ( I think). He has amazing green eyes! These bees have special pheromones to mark which flowers they have just visited - ensuring their foraging is as efficient as possible.

We have seen just a few globe skimmers, so no massive migratory influx yet... BUT they have been seen north of us 2 days ago, so they should be here soon! 🤞🤞🤞 #insectmigration #Pantala Dr Will Leo Hawkes @zanderhayward

This is a gorgeous female Xylocopa pubescens (I believe) from the Maldives. Look at that beautiful yellow thorax! These are social creatures with 1 reproductively active female per nest. The other females are all either foragers or guard bees! This one is a forager.

A giant has fallen. Sea levels has risen about 30 m in the last 20 years in the Maldives, a country where most land is just barely above water. When land is lost here, the palm trees that tower the beaches, fall. It makes climate change very apparent #Maldives

Some of the potential butterfly migrants of the Indian Ocean? #InsectMigration #Maldives EcosystemsInTheSky Dr Will Leo Hawkes @zanderhayward

Absolutely fascinating new paper from Richard Massy and Karl Wotton on research into how flies orientate and complete their huge migratory journeys! #insectmigration Dr Erica McAlister Buglife Dipterists Forum

It's 60 years since Sir Peter Scott began one of the longest single-species studies in the world. Since then, 10,000 individual swans - and family dynasties - have been recorded at Slimbridge. A thread on the iconic Bewick's swan bill pattern study 🧵

Scattered across the coastal desert at Banc d'Arguin in Mauritania we find dried bodies of the migrants that perished as they tried to cross the Sahara from north to south this past autumn, in this case a beautiful male Common Redstart.

Some of the more flamboyant possible Indian Ocean Flyway migrants

NEW POEM POST Some wise words from the past About migration Or just, the journey in general ecosystemsinthesky.com/blog/hard-is-t…

A surprising bird-bird co-migratory interaction