Next Meetings

Saturday, March 22, 2025. 1 pm - 4 pm. By Zoom.
STUDENT SYMPOSIUM

Undergraduate and graduate students at Ontario universities make presentations about their work. See this list of titles, authors and abstracts of the work to be presented. And here's the agenda.

Saturday, April 26, 2025. 1:15 pm. In-person only.
TEA BUG REARING DAY

This event will be in the atrium of the Toronto Zoo Administration Building (361A Old Finch Ave in Scarborough). Members will share their experiences with rearing insects and other arthropods. There will be lots of show and tell.

Recent Meetings

Saturday, March 22, 2025.
STUDENT SYMPOSIUM
See videos: Sulphur butterflies' hybridization in Toronto (Amanda Sabatino); dragonfly nymphs and road salt (Hannah Bodmer); overcoming challenges in insect research (Emma Dickson); new Hymenoptera taxa (Nora Romero); do observers on iNaturalist over-sample the most showy species (Spencer Kielar); hoverfly migration (Tessa Kathleen Fortnum); and mayfly populations in St. Catharines (Wynne Reichheld).

Saturday, February 22, 2025.
PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH / CROWDSOURCING / CITZEN SCIENCE
Brad Hubley (Royal Ontario Museum) and Michelle Locke (Canadian National Collection of Insects, Ottawa)
See video of the meeting.

Saturday, January 25, 2025
WHAT CAN MONITORING TELL US ABOUT BUTTERFLY RESPONSES TO CLIMATE CHANGE?
Michelle DiLeo, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources / Trent University
See video of the meeting. References from her talk (of which all but the last are open access): (1) Hällfors, Maria H., et al., (2) Van Bergen, Erik, et al., (3) Salgado, Ana L., Michelle F. DiLeo, and Marjo Saastamoinen., and (4) Crossley, Michael S., et al.

Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024
EXPLORING THE DIVERSITY OF INSECTS: SO MANY SPECIES, SO LITTLE TIME!
Stephen Marshall, University of Guelph
See video of the meeting.

News

Volunteers needed for a new Butterfly Monitoring Scheme: Our goal is to determine long-term trends in butterfly populations to understand the impact of environmental stressors and identify vulnerable species. Monitoring is done through transect counts, where volunteers count butterfly species along fixed routes. Volunteers are asked to: Attend a 1-hour virtual training session in early spring Count butterflies along the same 1-1.5km route once a week from April-September Submit butterfly counts online to a coordinator Trends in butterfly populations can only be estimated when we have counts along the same route for multiple years. Thus, this project is best suited to volunteers that are eager to return to their transect in subsequent years. (Source: Michelle DiLeo, Research Scientist, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, michelle.dileo@ontario.ca)

Volunteers are also needed to type in the information from specimen labels and thereby digitize museum collections (see the link above to the video of the February talk on this topic). These projects are something that people can help with from their homes/computers whenever they have some time. See the Canadian National Collection's Notes from Nature projects: Damselflies 1 and Fruit Flies. The ROM projects are not yet up on the zooniverse site but should be in the next couple of months.

The 2022 & 2023 issue of "Ontario Lepidoptera", our regular seasonal summary publication, was published in the fall. Most of the content is about butterflies, including both accounts for individual species and a report on butterfly counts across Ontario. The 2024 seasonal summary will be out in the spring.

List of butterfly species: the new checklist by Pohl and Nanz (2023) is expected to be the standard list of species and their scientific names for years to come. Accordingly, the Ontario Butterfly Atlas has updated its list of common names and scientific names. The new list (in the new taxonomic order) is avaiable in Excel or as a pdf.

Invasive species of insects to watch for in Ontario: Canadian Food Inspetion Agency poster, July 2024.

The "Butterflies of Canada" web pages (aussi en français) are now available on the TEA website. This is the whole 280-page book from 1998, broken down into more than 300 individual web pages, one for each species or butterfly topic. The TEA thanks the authors (Ross Layberry, Peter Hall and Don Lafontaine) and the University of Toronto Press for providing this content. Thanks are also due to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada for providing the web files.

Deadline for submission to our newsletter: April issue -- March 15.

Alan Macnaughton gave a talk on moths and moth-attracting equipment in Owen Sound last year. See video of this meeting.

Videos of past TEA meetings are included in our meetings page.

Royce Bitzer of Iowa State University is seeking sightings of Red Admirals, Painted Ladies, and American Ladies. If you are an iNaturalist user, join his iNaturalist project and your iNaturalist observations of these species will be included in the project. Otherwise, report observations to his Vanessa migration website (photos are not required).

A new membership year started on January 1, 2025) - renew here.

"Controlling the DD Moth [Lymantria dispar dispar]" by Clement Kent. A 5-page article from the December 2021 issue of the TEA's newsletter, Ontario Insects.

The latest newsletter of the Alberta Lepidopterists' Guild was published in January 2025.

Latest Bulletin (December 2024) of the Entomological Society of Canada. Amateurs can join the ESC (and have access to the Society's scientific journal The Canadian Entomologist) under the"entomology enthusiast" category (as of 2022, $56.25 per year).

Latest Newsletter of the Entomological Society of Ontario (December 2024). Amateurs can join the ESO for free.

Biological Survey of Canada: the winter 2023 issue is about entomology subjects, including a butterfly "big year" in Western Canada

A group including former TEA president Jessica Linton is working at re-introducing the Mottled Duskywing butterfly to its former habitat in the Pinery Provincial Park and in the Manestar Track in Norfolk County. This is part of an $825,000, 5-year project to reintroduce this endangered species. Until this re-introduction, the mottled duskywing lived in only a few pockets in the province, including populations near Peterborough and around Oakville. See the University of Guelph announcement and the June 2021 issue of the TEA's newsletter Ontario Insects for details.

See the article Tiger Swallowtails: Making Observations in 2020 for tips on recording tiger swallowtail observations this spring and summer. In short, anyone making observations south of the Sudbury area should take pictures -- especially of the underside -- and not rely on sight observation.

Monarch rearing/rescue article. This is from the January 2020 OI.

Spiders of Toronto. This is a revised version (2018) and is part of the City of Toronto's Biodiversity Series.

When Alan Wormington passed away, he left behind a mostly-completed 130-page manuscript on the butterflies of Point Pelee National Park. Ross Layberry has filled in many of the gaps, and here is the modified manuscript. We hope that in the future, it will be possible to fully complete the manuscript and publish it under TEA auspices. Contact Alan Macnaughton or Bill Lamond for more details.

Annotated checklist of the moths and butterflies (Lepidoptera) of Canada and Alaska. January 2018. 580-page PDF is free - buy hardcover at Pensoft

An article on the Azure blues of Ontario has been published by Chris Schmidt and Ross Layberry. This article proposes big changes for the classifications of this genus. See this page for a summary of the article.

The publications "Butterflies of Toronto" and "Spiders of Toronto" have been posted online. Copies are also available in Toronto public libraries.

Contact us

For inquiries about insects or our organization, please contact our general mailbox info@ontarioinsects.org and we will find the right person to answer your question.

The TEA is an affiliated group of ProtectNatureTO, a new group which is working towards preserving Toronto's natural heritage. Karen Yukich of the TEA is an active member of this group.

 
Try out www.e-butterfly.org, a website for entering and displaying butterfly records put together by Maxim Larrivée of the Montreal Insectarium. The TEA is one of the sponsoring organizations. All Ontario data is provided to the TEA seasonal summaries and butterfly atlas project, so “eButterfly” provides an alternative way to store and submit your data. The hope is that this will be easier than entering the data yourself on a spreadsheet, as his site saves each person’s own past butterfly monitoring sites and allows the species observed to be checked off from a provincial species list. eButterfly now accepts records from all across Canada and the US. The TEA has received about 123,00 records records from eButterfly, which is about 20% of all data used in the TEA's butterfly atlas.

Keep in mind that all records submitted to eButterfly are plotted as exact points on the publicly-accessible eButterfly maps, unless you specifically ask for the data to be recorded as “sensitive” or “confidential.” This may be important if you are submitting records of endangered species or you are reporting data from areas for which there is no public access.

Records needed

Do you have Ontario butterfly records that you could make available to the TEA? Over 400 people now contribute records to us annually, which we use to produce the Ontario Butterfly Atlas and an annual seasonal summary (Ontario Lepidoptera ) of records for each species for the just-completed year. The seasonal summary also serves as a forum for notes and articles on aspects of biology, distribution, behaviour, survey work, etc. Photographs are also welcome, especially of significant records. We encourage people to submit records by December 31, but records for inclusion in the atlas database are welcome at any time -- data from years ago is valuable as well. More information on the summary, how to submit records, and a downloadable records template can be found at this link.

Ontario records of odonata are also welcomed. We do not have an odonata atlas or a seasonal summary at the moment, but we like to get there. More information on how to submit records, and a downloadable records template, can be obtained from Colin Jones (colin.jones@ontario.ca).

MNR Permit

Raise or collect monarch butterflies or swallowtails? Anyone who is involved in these activities needs a permit. Contact us if you are a TEA member and want to be covered by the club's permit.

Our Publications

Many older TEA publications are now available for free download on our publications page. This includes all back issues of our annual seasonal summary (Ontario Lepidoptera), other than the two most recent issues -- over 2,000 pages of observations spanning more than 35 years. Copies of our newsletter (Ontario Insects) from 1994 to 2020 are also available.

Our Association

The Toronto Entomologists' Association (TEA) welcomes everyone who is interested in the insects of Ontario. We are an association of mostly amateur entomologists. Although our meetings are held in Toronto, we extend far beyond that in our field trips, our membership, and our seasonal summaries. Come to our meetings, join us on our field trips, purchase our publications, apply for the research grant, join us! The TEA is a registered charity and a non-profit educational and scientific organization formed to promote interest in insects, to encourage co-operation among amateur and professional entomologists, to educate and inform non-entomologists about insects, entomology and related fields, to aid in the preservation of insects and their habitats and to issue publications in support of these objectives.

Membership in the TEA

Anyone with an interest in insects is encouraged to join the Toronto Entomologists' Association. Please see our Membership Page for more details.

Did You Know?

TEA member Don Davis holds the Guiness Record for documenting the "longest migration of a butterfly." A monarch he tagged and released at Presqu'ile Provincial Park near Brighton, Ontario in September 1986 was recovered alive the following April at Austin, Texas, having spent the winter in Mexico at the overwintering sites.

Stay in Touch!

We can send you regular emails about coming activities -- join the list. You will be informed of meetings, insect counts, and field trips.