A gallery of positively identified insects

I've been out collecting more images...will be happy to help with this..

Thanks, Melody! I kept running into a praying mantid last night while I was tidying my daylilies. I probably should have run in for my camera, but it was getting dark and I'm not the best shot anyway ;o)

Terry, should we continue to add insects to garden terms? Or should we wait until Dave puts something else together? Will it make things more complicated for him if he has to transfer our entries?

Yesterday Katydid did not allow me to add a definition. After I hit preview there was no add button. I haven't tried it again yet.

Hmmm. Let's hold off a day. I'm not sure what Dave's timeframe is (and I know he really tries to focus on his family on the weekends, so I won't bug him today), but we can hit him up tomorrow, bright and early ;o)

The lengths I'll go to get a BugFiles here....

That's MY leg!

Good grief Mel! You swatted it after taking it's photo, right? LOL

Funny, I took some of a bug I got on my dress today. I was stood (as usual) amongst the Buddleja taking pics of all the butterflies there, I have hundreds.

I took it off and got more pics while it crawled up my arm. I think it's a sort of shield bug, I came across a good site with hundreds of beetles on it but haven't checked it yet.

The camera picks up all the texture we don't see in the skin! My dress looked like a coarse weave but is very smooth like Percale cotton.

And I just noticed that I needed to shave my legs! LOL!

I'm beginning work on it. Depending on interruptions, I may get it finished today.

dave

Awesome!!! Woohoo! Yippee!!!

Terry, your post above (post id 2531573) laid out the entries you desire. I need some clarification from somebody, if I may.

Common name - easy enough.
Generic name - what's this?
Specific epithet - is this the latin name? Genus and species?

And other than comments, photos and zipcode reports, are there anything else needed in the foreseeable future?

dave

Do we want to be able to check off different characteristics? Such as number of legs, whether it has wings, color, size, etc?

Dave, sorry....

Generic = genus
specific epithet = species.

Now you know why we don't call 'em that in PlantFiles - only a few would know what we're talking about!

Joan, I don't know - I kind of have mixed feelings about starting down that path. Unless Dave has a different notion (as the programmer, he IS the bus driver!), I'dm leaning toward just a "gallery" of photos, a section for comments/ratings, and ZIPs and leave it at that.

Sounds good to me Terry. Just thought I'd throw that out there to see what you thought.

Thanks for the help. I'm about 1/4 of the way finished. We may have a very bare-bones launch today.

dave

Maybe something to denote whether it's a good guy or bad guy. A button to contact admin if there's an error...or you need to add a common name that isn't listed.

I agree with Terry about only using Genus and species at this point...I fear that insect families can get more involved than plants ever could.

Basic photos, zip codes, comments, and a rating table....but more than just positive, neutral and negative..add 'beneficial, by preying on destructive insects' and 'highly destructive to plants', 'posionous if bitten or stung', ' carries disease'(this last one may or may not be necessary...just thinking about my mosquito....)There may be more...but those are the most important I think.

Folks may give the poor old Paper Wasp a negative rating just because it stings...but in reality, it's a wonderful predator. There needs to be other options, because folks may not use the comment section to explain themselves.

Thinking aloud here (always dangerous, especially after being out in the heat trying to tend the veggie garden!), if we require a comment with each rating, people have to give *some* justification for their rating. Maybe instead of positive/neutral/negative we could label them as:

Postive = "Good bug"
Negative = "Bad bug"

And don't have a neutral - even if a comment is information-only, it can still be characterized as "good bug" or "bad bug."

I like no neutral....makes folks explain themselves...

Wow! I never imagined that something so nice would be created. I envisioned a simple bug gallery with a common name lol! And for selfish purposes so I could have a place to publicly post my oodles of bug pictures. ...ha!
Thank you Dave for taking the time to do this for all of us.

Lovely leg Melody. Poor little skeeter got lost in the forest never to be heard from again. :)

This message was edited Jul 24, 2006 2:08 PM

Vee8ch, give us an inch of an idea, we might just run a marathon with it ....especially when it's too hot to be outside for long ;o)

I think the neutral is still a good idea because it gives a chance to give general information about the bug that is maybe neither positive nor negative...

Anyway, the feature is ready for us. There are a lot of rough edges but ya'll take a look and start adding away!

http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/630068/

dave

Never mind the concern. I just did a plume moth search by common name. Not a problem.

As one who knows almost nothing about bugs, may I ask if this will be searchable like the PlantFiles? For instance if I find a 1 inch brown bug with 6 legs and two wings, will I be able to plug those traits in a search form and find what my bug is? That would be very helpful to all of us "bug newbies" trying to ID a certain friend/foe. You may already be working on that Dave, but I wanted to throw the idea out there.
I did read most of this thread, so if I missed a conversation about that, please forgive me. :o)
Thanks for creating this! It will be a wonderful research tool!

I really like the idea of Bugfiles being searchable by traits. There are so many bugs out there. If you are trying to figure out what a bug you saw was, being able to search by traits is the only reasonable way to figure it out. One is not going to post to the Forum "I saw a 1 inch brown bug with 6 legs and two wings, can you tell me what it was?" and expect it to be answered. At best they are going to carry their camera around and hope it shows back up so they can get a picture, or at least that's what I do, though they rarely do show up again. But, if someone is looking for the bug and is willing to go though the hundred photos that would pop up with that search, they have a good chance of recognizing the bug they saw.