Hi everyone!
My brother @edanko and I are interested in hosting some sort of gathering on Zoom or another meeting program that intrigued users can join and:
Please leave your ideas, thoughts, and opinions on this design in the comments. Thank you!
I would certainly be interested in this. I’ve certainly benefited from you and your brother’s IDs on my flies, and would be happy to learn more so I can be better at doing the ID myself, hopefully at least to a genus level as you suggest.
To clarify, my original thought was that the identifying would be focused on the species within a genus, not just on identifying down to the genus level. The second option is a good idea though, especially since some genera tend to be misidentified frequently.
I would definitely be interested. I have been trying to learn some of the flies in my yard, but with so many species a lot of it is just relying on fly experts on inat so it would be great to learn some myself.
I made the title a bit more specific - feel free to revise!
Added a phrase; we might be adding a new page on the site for assorted arthropods, so you never know!
This is awesome! I wish you all luck. I look forward to hearing back from you about what worked and what didn’t. I have been wanting to start doing this for fungi as well!
I would be interested! Someone showed your guide to me and I started trying to learn more about Syrphidae. But a gathering would be even better.
I would be interested.
You guys have helped me out a lot and your guides are great. Plus it just sounds like fun. Following this thread for any update on scheduling.
I don’t think I’d be much help but I totally think it’s worth perusing and hope to see more similar events in the future.
I agree, sounds like a great idea. Sadly you’re way out of my zone (Italy), so for me genus level would perhaps be more interesting than species as I’m pretty sure the genera would be comparable.
Definitely interested- would love to know the differentiating characteristics between genera, as well as species within one. Thanks for offering!
Try getting hold of @tony_d in Australia as he has ben identifyng a lot of Diptera here.
We focus on the Nearctic side of things.
What time zones are you all in? I’m thinking maybe 5 pm EST? Or should it be later?
I love the guides/keys and I use them often. Definitely I am interested in your meeting project.
4:00 pm CST works for me.
Here in Italy, we’re CEST, so 5 pm EST would be midnight, not good for us :-( . I’m not sure it’s going to be possible to find a time that would be good for everyone, so I’m wondering… would it be possible to record the session for subsequent viewing at whatever time suits us best? Not ideal, but it could be the only solution without going crazy!
Would be cool to have something about Old World Nematocera, but I’d be happy to hear about North American Tipulinae identification!
Yes, of course. This also isn’t just a one time thing, so we could do it later/earlier some times to accomodate different groups of people.
I’ll note that a) Tipulidae isn’t very easy, b) we don’t have guides for Tipulids, and c) we don’t have guides for anything outside of the US and Canada.
Having one meeting about families of Nematocera might be interesting, but I’d have to re-research, since I don’t look at those often.
EST time zone for me. Thanks!
Definitely interested. I’m both interested in refining my very basic skills (I consider it a success if I can ID a fly in the right family :) and to see how this would work and maybe do something similar for bees. I’m on PST.