Hello, I’m looking for a portable set up to bring for outreach/monitoring events.
I have a LepiLED and a 15w blacklight that run off a AC power bank.
I’m looking for an easy to assemble, pop-up white sheet for the moths to land on. Can you recommend an online vendor that sells something like this? I know a bed sheet works fine, but I want something a little easier to assemble and more professional looking. Thanks!
@dlnarango - I designed an extremely portable, cheap, easy-to-build and easy to assemble/tear down moth sheet kit using 17" x 1/2" PVC pipe, a $40 Neonic USB-rechargeable, adjustable blacklight (available on Amazon), and a cheap white pillow case for the “sheet”. The pillow case becomes the bag, you can leave one connector on each piece of pipe, and the kit easily fits into a small rollerboard suitcase (wrapped with 2 small bungee cords). It often needs a weight when it’s windy, usually just a rock on a bottom pipe. My son, @nealkelso, is a Fellow in The Explorers Club, and he has used his copy very successfully on field research trips in Vietnam and Vanuatu. Hopefully the pix come through okay…this is my first Forum post.
If you have an Ikea store available or shipment available from that company, try looking at their new Vuku portable free-standing wardrobe. A fellow moth-er just set one up at a recent event and it worked very well with a LepLite or other light source hung inside of it on the crossbar! See the attached field photo. It’s about 60" tall, 20x30" rectangular crossection. (I’m not going to include a link to the commercial page for the item at Ikea. No endorsement is intended.)
I have only one minor issue with this rig: I find that my small point-and-hope Canon cameras have a hard time focusing on a moth properly when they are perched on a shiny polyester surface like the material of this wardrobe (rather than a cotton sheet, etc.). (That’s more of a “me” problem than a critique of the wardrobe as a moth set-up.)
I use an old pop-up diffuser I got from a photographer I know and it works great!
Wow, this is a great idea! And might work for my immediate purposes if I can scale it a little bigger.
That is an excellent idea. thanks for sharing!
I would recommend looking through previous forum posts. There are lots about mothing setups including specifically about sheets, some examples:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/moth-sheet-what-about-the-sheet/32031
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/cotton-vs-polyester-sheets-which-is-better-for-mothing/23617
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/amateur-moth-trapping-in-the-big-city/53621
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/moth-trap-tripod/52460
Thanks, my initial search only revealed general set ups and I was looking for something different then a white sheet.
I ended up getting a pop up 8 x10’ photography background with tripod from amazon and it worked great!
I used one of these for the first time recently too! It was hard to set up (I would not have been able to do it alone) and take down, and I doubt I’ll ever fly with it since it’s so much bulkier than my shower curtain or sheet plus p-cord setup. But I’ll definitely use it again. I also ran it through the washer on gentle to rid any hitchhikers which seemed to work ok.
As a general question, because each of the suggested setups vary in this aspect a little - is there an idealised size for a moth sheet? Or is it that more bigger is more better, and area should only be limited by practicalities?
Is there a minimum useful size for a moth sheet? Presumably they are attracted to the light that is shone on it, and the sheet is just a useful way of ‘holding’ subjects until photography or collection?
Some interesting questions. My personal take is this: The bigger, the better, because it does allow more landing space for creatures. You may have seen images of extremely good mothing nights in the tropics where a large sheet is completely covered with moths.
While it’s a rare night that brings in such numbers and diversity, it’s useful to have the space for a good number of insects at any season. If a lot of bugs are crowding on a small landing zone, they can interfere with one another constantly, frequently disrupting photographic efforts.
One constraint: If you hang a sheet, don’t have the top of the sheet so high (e.g. 2 m or more) that you can’t handily photograph the moths. I am “elevationally-challenged” so I will often just hang a sheet on a rope strung up between trees at about 1.8 m (6 ft) high. On occasion, I’ve taped a white sheet to the side of my car (in which I’m camping), and even folded a standard queen-sized sheet into quarters for a smaller photography zone.
Agree that bigger is better, but if you are not monitoring the sheet at all times, you need to elevate it enough to keep it out of reach of predators. I had problems with raccoons raiding my moth sheets. They did it every night for a week (captured on Ring camera videos!), until I changed my setup to get the sheets out of their reach. Haven’t had any problems since.
If you are physically present at the moth sheet the entire time, this probably won’t be an issue.
