Sunday, June 3, 2012

Mating hints

Roy Pennock has some freshly emerged ires
which he is hoping to mate. Can anyone share their experiences/advice?

1 comment:

irisscientist said...

Are you talking about natural pairings, or hand parings? If the latter (hand pairings) then there are others who read here that can certainly help (you know who you are!). If you are talking about the former, then you are looking for the holy grail, the answer to which I personally have been working on solving for a number of years, whilst many others have consistently failed for almost 150 years before that! The same situation applies not only for iris, but also for many other members of the Apaturinae, of which many are under increasing conservational threat. At present my research has provided a good quantity of evidence (SEM and GC-MS data) which is now being backed by a number of world renowned scientists who are extremely keen to test and further explore the results that I have obtained to date. I am happy to discuss this further (via email), but time would be of the essence, as males must be fully fed on a specific cocktail of essential components before females start to eclose! Even when fully fed however, flight space and important colour signals will still play essential roles in order for natural mating to occur!