Blogs

Many apologies for the errors you've been experiencing with the autopopulated drop down menus. This was due to a conflict with a new module we were experimenting with. The module has now been removed and the menus should be fixed.

If you experience problems like this in the future please do let us know as soon as possible.

Thanks

Matt

Hello,
I am pleased to announce the launch of a new carabid journal, the “journal for international carabid research”:
http://www.jicr.carabusonline.co.uk/index.php/jirc/

As you may have seen we've recently added a lot of short clips to the knowledge base. These are all courtesy of Reinhard Weidlich at http://www.feuersalamander-dvd.de/ and show a range of interesting life history behviours in Carabus such as mating and hunting as well as showing their prefered habitats, mating behaviour and feeding habits. If you like the clips you can buy his full length 62min DVD (PAL DVD 16:9) for €18.90 here.

Reinhard has also helped in the protection of a population of fire salamanders, and you can read more about that on his website.

His latest film, Carabus, took 2 years to make and used over 200 hours of footage of captive and live beetles. A large amount of the funding for this project came from his prize money for the 1999 nature protection price for his work protecting and documenting the habitat of the fire salamander in Weissbach, western Saxonia.

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We have updated our mapping software. You can now view the distribution of all Carabus species with distribution data across the world here. This map is also accessible through the Browse (Distribution) screen. You can submit your own locations by emailing them to us, posting on the forum or going to the relevant species, clicking on the edit tab and expanding the "locations" group. If you have more than 5 locations to enter you need to save after entering the first 5, then click on the edit tab again and more boxes will be provided. Locations can be entered by clicking and dragging on the map or entering decimal lat/lon coordinates. You can only add one location per map in the edit screen, but all locations are displayed on one map when viewing the species.

User profiles are also now back online. Simply go to your account and click on "User Profile" and fill in as much or as little as you like. You can add a profile picture by clicking on the "Edit" tab where most of your important account information is.

New users will automatically be presented with these field to fill in, but for existing users you will have to click on the "User profile" tab and enter the information yourselves. Users with profiles can be seen here

After a long absence the site forums are now back online. I apologise for their absence, there were conflicts with some of the core modules that meant they were unusable. The issue has now been fixed and so they're back! Let me know if you want any new sub-forums added.

You need to be a registered user to post on the forum so join up now

Merry Christmas to all our guests and users. We hope you have a fantastic Christmas, don't forget to go out and about checking the logs and stones for hibernating Carabus!!!

See you all again in the new year

Many thanks for pushing us into the top 10 on insect rank! I hope you continue to use this site and help us to grow by submitting your own information and helping us to keep our data up to date.

As some of you will have noticed Carabusonline was down for about 4 hours today. This was due to a server problem with our hosting company. I apologise for any inconvenience.

Matt

I have reintroduced a google ads block to the front page again in an effort to recoup some of the hosting costs for this site. These ads will only appear on the front page and so should not affect your browsing too much.

Thank you for your understanding
Matt