Friday 20 March 2015

Slow progress

 

I have been doing lots of little bits on the weevil guide, but nothing yet amounts to a sizeable chunk that deals with a single group of species.  It feels like I have little to show for my efforts, but it is useful to know how I am doing.  So I have put two accounts, one to Polydrusus and one to the wetland Gymnetron, and a guide to Sitona here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B008cp9g-Pm8fmx2aE5JUXpkX0czQ2F1bWtJZWZJb1JxM2JLM0djMi1Ea2RWUzluMHNGVGc&authuser=0



I am afraid the Polydrusus is incomplete because I have photos only of those species I have found, so it cannot yet be used as proper guide, although it does have all the metallic green ones.  If you want to take a look at the sample accounts, please download them and leave comments on this post to tell me whether you can happily and successfully identify weevils using them.  It is very useful to know how well they work for other people.  Since I started this, I have become much more forgiving of those who write identification guides.  One of the problems is that those who already know how to identify things often forget what it was like before they had twenty years of experience with the species they are trying to help others to name.  I do not have that problem so much because I have taught myself how to identify weevils by writing a guide, so I am much closer to the state when I knew very little about them.  Nevertheless, I still fear that I do things that work for me and not for other people, so your responses will be useful.  I am still not sure how to lay it out.  I have prepared species accounts in a field guide manner but I also have character tables, which are a bit more structured.  I will try to get some of those up soon.





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