I’m curious. I’ve recently joined a project called Bird Food and was posting a detail from an observation as likely being some sort of insect larva (hard to say more than that).
https://www.inaturalist.ca/observations/368675085
When I went to annotate the life stage (expecting to find larva), I found only adult, egg, and juvenile (?) as options. Shouldn’t larva be the correct designation rather than juvenile?
Cheers,
Warren
I think possibly this was chosen for simplicity, because juvenile covers larvae and instars and a host of descriptors between egg and adult.
Some insects possess direct development with no larval stage, so the annotation makes sense.
If you managed to narrow-down the ID, the larval stage annotation should appear.
Yes, where appropriate, depending on how a particular insect identification progressed.
In other cases you could see nymph, etc.
Juvenile is just the catchall at Insecta, I was thinking.
Welcome to the forum @Arnovdvyver :)
You have to identify it to order, as Holometabola is not an available taxon. If it’s a bug, it can be an egg, nymph, or adult. If it’s a beetle, it can be an egg, larva, pupa, or adult. If you know it’s a larva, guess whether it’s a grub, maggot, schadon, or caterpillar, and note that you’re guessing an order so that you can annotate as larva. Be ready to change the order in case someone says it’s in a different order; sawfly schadons, in particular, are hard to tell from caterpillars with only a dorsal view.
Hmm - schadon? It’s curious that some allegedly “common” words are far more obscure than the technical terms they relate to.
After consulting the OED, I discovered that schadon derives from the ancient greek word σχαδών - the earliest reference for which comes from Aristotle, no less (although its original semantics are unknown). A better english transliteration is skaddon, since the ancient greek chi was pronounced like the ch in loch.
The earliest more modern usage of schadon / skaddon is from The Feminine Monarchy (Charles Butler, 1609), which is one of the first english-language books about bee-keeping. This pre-dates the technical definition of larva given by Linnaeus more than a century later. Presumably, if larva had been available to earlier authors, skaddon might never have gained any currency. As it is, the current wiktionary entry considers skaddon to be an obsolete dialect word, which doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Wiktionary also has “shadden” in a quote. This form looks like it was borrowed into Old English or Proto-West-Germanic and followed the sound changes, like how we have “skirt” (from Norse) and “shirt” (native).
If I enjoy seeing others confuse Lepidoptera and Hymenoptera larvae, does that mean I’m experiencing schadonfreude?
Bravo !! Fascinated by these deviations into ‘where does THAT word come from ?’
Nice 