Earlier this week I finished organising my insect records from last year in Excel. I was thinking about putting them into Access because it’s much better suited for such data and I may start building an Access database over the weekend. Another thought occurred to me, which was that there must be some freely available programs, perhaps some which can make use of Google Maps/Earth and Flickr. Do you know of any?

Finally, a little bit of eye candy:

Red and Black Shield Bug - This pentatomid caught my eye amongst unidentified material collected in Ecuador. © The Natural History Museum

A Cybertaxonomy Discussion: Vince Smith has posted a blog response to concerns a fellow taxonomy blogger (Roderic Page) has with Scratchpads, the online taxonomy database used by Vince & the NHM, and the potential for redundant data and time wasting when trying to gather information from multiple Scrathpads. Instead, Page sugguests using Semantic MediaWikis which would be able to deal with human-language queries on bulk taxonomic/entomological information, such as “Which Hemiptera might I find in Essex during July?” or “How many beetles are there excluding weevils?”.

Whilst I don’t want to reiterate the posts, I am inclined to agree with Vince’s view from my experience with taxonomists/entomologists at museums and people who are happier working with paper rather than computers. With so much taxonomic information not readily accessible in any form I think Scratchpads & similar more traditionally organised databases will become more commonly used before the more (conceptually) advanced Semantic MediaWikis.

Scanning Moths: There are some excellent scanned images of moths over at cicindela,  which have even managed to capture individual scales at a reasonable resolution!

I’d recommend visiting cicindela as the author as plenty of other good photographs.

Cincindela and iPhylo have been added to the blogroll.

I had been meaning to read his final book on Dragonflies, co-authored with Stephen Brooks, since it was published in 2008 but have only recently aquired it.

I have yet to complete reading it, but have enjoyed what I’ve read so far. One thing that struck me was the recommendation for the adoption of a new English name for the suborder Anisoptera; whilst the members of suborder Zygoptera are collectively known as the damselflies, the Anisoptera are generally known as dragonflies, which is the same English name we use for the entire order. Whilst there have been other proposed solutions for exclusively referring to the Anisoptera (such as using a lowercase ‘d’, hyphenating the name ‘dragon-flies’ or leaving a space ‘dragon flies’) none have been universally adopted in English nomenclature. To remedy this Corbet and Brooks (2008, p.7) suggest the following:

Odonata: dragonflies
Zygoptera: damselflies
Anisoptera: warriorflies

Aeshna mixta - a warriorfly

Ischnura elegans - a damselfly

I like the term warriorflies and its use makes sense, so I shall be using it for now on.

Reference:
Corbet, P. and Brooks S. (2008) Dragonflies. London, Collins.