Luna moth, Actias luna
Fifth annual Long point bioblitz and “moth ball”
On June 26-27, 2026, BiodiversityWorks and The Trustees of Reservations hosted our fifth annual Long Point Bioblitz and first-ever Moth Ball at Long Point Wildlife Refuge, on the south shore of Martha’s Vineyard. This 632-acre conserved property ranks high among the gems of Martha’s Vineyard, with brackish ponds, ocean beach, oak woodland, pitch pine barrens, and coastal sandplain grassland. Actively managed by The Trustees, Long Point is a hotspot for rarities and overall diversity.
To celebrate the fifth iteration of this bioblitz, we expanded our list of activities to include a “moth ball” as the bioblitz kicked off, on the evening of June 26. A large and diverse crowed attended, many of them in moth costumes, enjoying a cake adorned with moth images, crafts for kids, live moth larvae brought by entomologist Teá Montagna, and, as it grew dark, blacklighting for moths at two arrays set up by Teá and BiodiversityWorks. Teá and her husband Dan kept the lights on until well after midnight, tallying a number of moth species that are active mainly late at night and hence were missed on previous events.
On Saturday, naturalists fanned out to survey the property, photographing plants and animals and entering their observations into the bioblitz’s iNaturalist project. Hot and dry conditions, while better than the rain that had been forecast just a few days before, challenged the endurance of observers and may have suppressed insect activity, as well. But by the time the event ended at 5:00 p.m. on the evening of June 27, results for this event had blown handily past what previous Long Point biobliztes had yielded.
As of this writing, a remarkable 869 observations had been entered, not far off results from the 2025 (1,050 observations) and 2023 (942 observations) biolitzes in Correllus State Forest. So far, 384 species have been proposed for the 2026 Long Point bioblitz; not all of them have been confirmed, but the figure is an impressive one that attests to both the efforts of observers and the underlying diversity of this incredible property.
In aggregation, the five Long Point bioblitzes have generated just over 3,000 observations and documented 782 species. Of course all of these observations also appear in the Martha’s Vineyard Atlas of Life project, which currently holds 74,508 observations representing 5,471 species. Our Long Point events, in other words, have not only helped document the diversity of this single property but have added substantially to the MVAL’s larger goal of documenting the entire island’s diversity.
Matt Pelikan is the community naturalist at BiodiversityWorks. A year-round resident of Oak Bluffs for almost 30 years, he is an enthusiatic wildlife photographer and an ardent student of the biodiversity of Martha’s Vineyard.