I identified a Lemon antlion (Tomateres citrinus) for a person at another platform. Someone responded by asking if it belongs to the taxonomic Family of Myrmeleontidae or Liontidae. I’ve then checked in which Family iNaturalist categorized it in, which was Myrmeleontidae, to which I’ve responded back to the initial request. The person then replied with the following: “Maybe You could be right, but <Oxford…Zoology, 2014 as well as 2009> writes …liontidae. It wasn’t my invention.Thanks,nevertheless.” So, my questions to iNaturalist is a)Which one is right, and b) Which Dictionary is iNaturalist using?
iNat taxonomy can be corrected if you have the appropriate references to literature, just raise a flag on the taxon at question and copy in those references.
https://inaturalist.org/taxa/693669-Tomatares-citrinus for anyone looking into this.
originally picked up from GBIF:
Tomatares citrinus (Hagen, 1853)
https://www.gbif.org/species/2097287
CoL 2020 (Feb) also has it in the same family that iNat has it:
http://www.catalogueoflife.org/col/details/species/id/166abde2b6a078375d2ff54bb4055ff5
and the Hagen paper (as Palpares citrinus, from Ian’s post below):
2 Likes
welcome to the forum!
just so you know, the Forum Feedback category is for feedback about the Forum itself.
this conversation would fit better in General, where you can talk about iNaturalist-related topics such as iNaturalist’s taxonomic references.
3 Likes
This is about the spelling of the family name. The …lion… must be a mistake. The family is named after the genus Myrmeleon.
4 Likes
A list of the taxonomic authorities the site tries to follow can be found here : https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#authorities
In many cases, including yours, the answer is none due to either lack of, or lack of awareness of a viable reference.
One consistent feature across all families of life is the site does not attempt to follow primary literature, but rather reviewed databases/references.
2 Likes
Myrmeleontidae is the only family name that I’ve ever known for antlions.
Beautiful insect BTW.
1 Like
I did a quick Google scholar search for the genus and species, and found nothing. I did find a German paper from 1853 - https://lacewing.tamu.edu/neuropterida/neur_bibliography/edoc12/hagen1853ref444s-8200.pdf
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.