Topic: The ‘Browse Species’ page again
I heard an item on the radio this morning about Segestria spiders. Araneae is not my group, so I called up Segestria and discovered that it may refer either to a lichen or a spider. Always good to start the day learning something new. Then I found the first positive advance I have seen in the new site over the old - I can filter out the lichens and leave the spiders. Brilliant!
But before I could do that, I had to find the correct group name, which is ordered on the English names. For Araneae, I happen to know the English name that is used. However, if I wanted to filter on insect orders I would need to forget that I have have always regarded dragonflies as ‘Odonata’ and find in the list ‘insect - dragonfly (Odonata)’. And I can’t even type the ‘O’ to get closer more quickly. I might have guessed that one, but I would not have known that to see Sipuncula (a name I have known for nearly half a century) I would need to know that they are under ‘peanut worms’ (a name I would never have guessed). On the other hand, a non-zoologist looking for earthworms would have problems unless they knew that these were ‘annelids’. Who is this list designed for - Joe Public or specialists? At the moment, it is neither, a mish-mash with no consistency. (In passing, there is also a group ‘parasitic roundworms (Nematoda)’ which - quite correctly in taxonomic terms - has no member. And also on the matter of pseudotaxa, in ‘marine mammals’, a meaningless concoction of cetaceans and seals, there is the South American marine otter, Lontra felina, which I think would be a surprise to see in or out of the sea in UK.)
The point of this rant? Please at least give us the option of filtering on this page by Latin names, and have that as the default. I suspect that most people using this site will be far more familiar with the formal taxon names than the artificial (and as I have pointed out, not always accurate) taxon group names that appear here. Also, please allow us to free-type into the box so that if I enter ‘odo’ it shows only taxon groups containing that string. It is not difficult to code, and the advantages to users would be huge.
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Then when I got the list of spiders (thankfully rather limited), because I wanted to see whether Segestria spp. are found in the N of Scotland, I began to go through the list of hyperlinks in col. 1:
Segestria bavarica Segestria bavarica C.L. Koch, 1843, SPIDER (ARANEAE) 61
Segestria perfida Segestria florentina (Rossi, 1790), SPIDER (ARANEAE) 79
Segestria senoculata Segestria senoculata (Linnaeus, 1758), SPIDER (ARANEAE) 2404
Segestria florentina Segestria florentina (Rossi, 1790), SPIDER (ARANEAE) 79
only to find that perfida is the same as florentina. I perhaps would have noticed that were the species listed in order of preferred name, but had this been a larger taxon with more complex synonymies I would probably not have noticed that I was calling the same map several times.
In the old Gateway (the loss of which I am mourning, as is everyone else who has offered me an unsolicited opinion on the matter), I would have had to put up with visually identifying the spiders in the list, (yes, the filter is a great innovation) but the spider S. perfida would have appeared in its proper place as an invalid (!) synonym of florentina and I would not have clicked on two links to see identical maps.
So the point of rant #2 is to ask that in the taxon lists we have junior synonyms grouped with their preferred names, and preferably distinguished from them by font, style or colour. Again not a problem to code - if the feature was included in the specification at the start. It may be more difficult to edit the code in retrospect, but there is a lesson there, perhaps.
Murdo