It's Pinning Time

When I say pinning, insects is not the first thing that probably comes to mind. As a member of greek life at BSC, the first thing that comes to my mind is "getting pinned" by a fraternity boy. This means he gives you his fraternity pin, which is a really big deal. We even have a candlelight ceremony for it and everything! Anyways, back to the point..


pinning....insects??


It sounds pretty simple right? Well, actually it's not. One day during our class, Dr. Van Zandt took us down to the lab to learn how to pin moths.  He proceeded to show us how to properly pin a moth to keep its wings from tearing and losing to many of their scales. For me, one of the hardest part of pinning a moth is getting them onto the pinning board. you can't really hold onto their bodies or wings or either you will risk removing their scales. Their scales are the things that look like hair all over their bodies. You hold them into your hand with a "V" formation on your fingers. You then try to stick a pin as straight as possible through the thorax of the moth. This can be kinda tricky, because the pin needs to be perpendicular.Once you have tried to get them onto the pinning board properly, it is time to spread their wings open so that they can dry. The moths had their wings in a relaxed position, so we had to open them in  curved motion with one of our pins. You have to be very careful during this part to not tear the wing and make big, gaping holes. To keep the wings flattened, we put down wax paper after pinning the wings into place. You then should make an arrangement around the wing to hold the wax paper down. You then want to remove the pins that are actually inside the wing, so they will not show huge holes once dried. Overall, I thought learning how to pins moths was a very fun project. We even got to keep the moths that we had learned to pin. Sure, they weren't perfect. Mine are missing most of their antennae, but it was a learning process. It is something that takes practice, and cannot be learned by only doing it once or twice.

I think Rachel and I had way to much fun trying to figure out how to pin moths over two days. Here are a few photos from the experience. It was truly pretty fun.