A description and diagnosis is given for the female and male of Karnyothrips nevadensis sp. nov. collected in the Mojave Desert of southern Nevada. The thrips lives in small aggregations between young, tightly-clustered leaves on Yucca schidigera, a large and long-lived monocot shrub. The species is unusual for the genus by producing males that are only brachypterous and females that are only macropterous, including dealates. Co-occurrence with mites suggests the thrips is predaceous. I compare the structure of K. nevadensis with other North American Karnyothrips.

A case is presented for the revival of an old, but very productive, insect collecting method. Seines made from readily-available and inexpensive materials were used to skim insect-bearing plant debris from the water surface of the El Dorado Canal near Pacific House in the Sierra Nevada of California. Fifty-six collecting events over a period of 26 years resulted in the accumulation of a large number of insects, especially beetles. Of the nearly 5000 specimens collected and prepared, about 3000 of them were beetles representing 72 families. Identifications of nearly 70% of the insect specimens by specialists revealed surprising taxonomic diversity and many uncommon species.

The genus Fleuria Kieffer, 1924 is recorded from China for the first time. The male and female of F. lacustris Kieffer, 1924 are redescribed and illustrated, and the sexes are associated by standard DNA barcodes.

Conducting a population estimate of overwintering monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus Linnaeus, 1758, at California winter sites traditionally involves many early morning hours of using binoculars to count the insects as they cluster in tight aggregations among the high foliage of trees. This study investigates the effectiveness of counting the butterflies by using photographs of specifically selected clusters. Counts based on photographs of ten clusters from each of three overwintering sites were compared to counts of the same clusters using binoculars. The data were analyzed using mixed model analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results show that the photograph-based counts were equivalent to the binocular counts within ±10%.