I'm moving house. Over the past few years, Blogger has become somewhat less user-friendly behind the scenes. Nothing major, and certainly nothing I'm going to bore you with here, but enough that I've finally decided to take the step of breaking out and moving to my own site: varietyoflife.com.au. This site will incorporate material from both Catalogue of Organisms and Variety of Life, progressively merging them into a single guide to global biodiversity. Posts from both blogs have already been migrated over, though now I have the long task of editing and updating them to match the new format ..read more

Here in the Antipodes, we have a long history of environmental upheaval from exotic taxa unwisely released. As a result, one can't help but feel an odd twinge of perverse patriotism when hearing of the inverse, some native of the Antipodes causing grief elsewhere. In South Africa, Australian acacias have become something of an issue, inciting a search for potential control agents. Among the candidates selected are weevils of the genus Melanterius. Melanterius servulus, copyright Sally Adam. Melanterius is a diverse genus of small black or brown weevils (ranging from about three to seven mil ..read more

A quote I have often had cause to refer to—I believe it originally came from Toby White of Palaeos.com—is that "organisms are under no obligation to speciate with regard to the convenience of taxonomists". For birdwatchers in North America, perhaps no group more embodies this principle than the flycatchers of the genus Empidonax. These small members of the hyperdiverse New World family Tyrannidae comprise fifteen recognised species that have become notorious for the difficulty in telling them apart. Immature alder flycatcher Empidonax alnorum, copyright Cephas. The species of Empidonax are ..read more

A while back, I discussed the group of fish known as the Holostei, the gars and bowfin. The Holostei constitute one branch of the clade Neopterygii which includes the majority of living ray-finned fishes. However, their success in the modern environment pales in comparison to that of their sister group, the Teleostei. Siemensichthys macrocephalus, an early teleost of uncertain affinities, copyright Ghedoghedo. Teleosts are such a major component of ray-finned fishes that it is simpler to list those members of the modern fauna that do not belong to this clade: the aforementioned gars and bow ..read more

My current dayjob mostly revolves around identifying and counting dung beetles. When Europeans settled Australia, they brought their farm animals with them. Unfortunately, the large piles of dung produced by cattle and horses proved rather daunting to native scavengers used to the more compact droppings of kangaroos and possums. And if you've ever experienced an Australian summer, you'll know that flies are definitely a thing. To help with this situation, Australia has had a long-running programme introducing exotic dung beetles that are better able to clean up after livestock. Most of these a ..read more

The western Palaearctic region (that is, Europe and the immediately adjacent parts of Asia and northern Africa) is home to a diverse and distinctive fauna of harvestmen. Among the various genera unique to this part of the world are the forest- and mountain-dwellers of the genus Platybunus. Platybunus pinetorum, copyright Donald Hobern. Platybunus species are moderate-sized long-legged harvestmen of the family Phalangiidae, the central body in larger individuals being about eight millimetres long (Martens 1978). Their most characteristic feature is a relatively large eye-mound, distinctly wi ..read more

With over 1200 known species found in Asia and Australasia, Dendrobium is one of the largest currently recognised genera of orchids. As with other examples of such 'super-genera', the question of how to best handle such a monster has been fiercely debated. In 2003, Australian botanist M. Clements proposed dividing Dendrobium between numerous segregate genera, noting (among other reasons) that the genus as previously recognised was not monophyletic. However, Clements' system does not seem to have garnered widespread usage with other orchid systematists preferring to retain a broad concept of De ..read more

Researchers who deal with the modern marine fauna are used to thinking of brachiopods as a marginal group, their diversity greatly overshadowed on a global scale by the superficially similar bivalves. However, modern brachiopods are but a shadow of their former selves; for much of the Palaeozoic era, their relationship with the bivalves was the inverse of today. Many are the brachiopod lineages that came and went over this time. External views of ventral (left) and dorsal valves of Huenella triplicata, from Walcott (1924). The Huenellidae were an assemblage of brachiopods that lived during ..read more

For years, the higher taxonomy of cephalopods was expressed as a division between three subclasses: the Nautiloidea, the Ammonoidea and the Coleoidea. Coleoids were the clade of cephalopods that had lost the external shell, ammonoids were a Mesozoic lineage with complex septa dividing the chambers of the shell, and nautiloids were... the rest. From the tiny, possibly benthic, curved cones of the Cambrian where the class began, to gigantic straight-shelled monsters of the later Palaeozoic, to the modern chambered nautilus, all were lumped together as 'nautiloids'. The nautiloid subclass was exp ..read more

At this point in time, the Phytoseiidae are one of the most intensely studied families of mites. They are the only group of mesostigmatan mites to have significantly diversified among the foliar environment (on and around plant leaves) where they are mostly predators on other small invertebrates. The taxonomic history of phytoseiids is storied and complex but one taxon that has been consistently recognised as a major part of the family is the genus Amblyseius. Swirski mite Amblyseius swirskii, from here. When reviewed by Chant & McMurtry in 2004, Amblyseius was a sizeable assemblage of ..read more