About Us – Field Guide to the Insects of Tasmania

Field Guide to the Insects of Tasmania

Awarded the Entomological Society of Victoria’s Le Souef Memorial Award, 2021

The original site was made public on September 1, 2012 at https://sites.google.com/site/insectsoftasmania/about , and ported to the current web address in April 2021. It contains thousands of pages and photographs organised to help you identify and appreciate the myriad six-legged animals of Tasmania.

The majority of the photos in this site are taken by Tony Daley or Kristi Ellingsen. All of the photographs are copyright to Tony Daley, Kristi Ellingsen or the other owners stated at the photo. The photos are not to be reproduced or reused on any other sites or media without granted permission from the respective owners. If you are interested in accessing higher resolution images, please contact us insectstasmania@gmail.com

About Us:

Through Flickr, Tony Daley and Kristi Ellingsen became friends with a shared interest in observing and photographing different insects and their myriads of behaviour.

Kristi Ellingsen is a secondary school science teacher, specialising in biology. She has become concerned with students’ decreasing awareness of wildlife in their own backyard (and the decreasing numbers who have actually explored it!). Northern Hemisphere resources seemed to be in abundance, but there was little available about specifically Tasmanian invertebrates.

Wildlife has always been a passion, and this interest has been honed with the power of using a macro lens to see detail that is hidden to the human eye. Using increasingly cumbersome cameras Kristi has gradually accumulated a collection of photos representing a glimpse of the biodiversity of insects in Tasmania. There is rarely a trip where she doesn’t find something exciting. Helping to generate a website was the next natural step. A website can allow most people access to a resource and the more people understand about wildlife, the more respect they will have.

Tony Daley‘s passion for chasing and photographing insects began with the purchase of a digital camera with decent macro capabilities in 2002. His subsequent interest in their taxonomy was strongly fuelled by entomological studies undertaken at UTAS as part of an agricultural science course. This obsession has culminated in a large reference collection of mostly Australian insect literature that continues to grow.

Yoav Bar-Ness is the founder of the Tasmanian Geographic. He very generously stepped in to save the Insects of Tasmania website when Google forewarned the closure of its classic sites. His technical expertise, web knowledge and problem solving facilitated the move of the thousands of photos and accompanying text to the current open source platform. Without his help, the material would have disappeared in January 2022. Tony and Kristi are completely indebted to his generosity in this move.

All the Identifiers.

Neither Kristi nor Tony are experts nor specialists. In presenting the insects on this site we have tried to scour the available literature and online resources to provide accurate information. This is an ongoing process that continues to stretch our capabilities, not to mention our limited free-time. We thus concede there will be many mistakes.

For this we are indebted to all the entomological experts and enthusiasts that have, or continue to, help in the identifications and share their knowledge about the habits of the organisms. We hope that the Field Guide to the Insects of Tasmania provides the basis for a useful website where the community can enhance its understanding and appreciation of Tasmanian insects.

Your feedback would be very warmly appreciated.