Hey everyone! My mum and sister recently found a large harvestman on the wall of their house down in Nottingham, and from the photos on instagram I reckon it could be Leiobunum sp. A (more info here and here). The green sheen and general patterns on the body, as well as the size (legspan about as wide as the length of her phone) and the location (Nottingham, where there have been sightings before) all suggest this could be the undescribed Leiobunum sp. A.
What is the protocol in this situation for uploading an observation? Obviously it doesn’t have a species yet, so do you leave it at genus level until a species is identified? Or is there a ‘sp. A’ sort of placeholder that could be used?
Mum will upload it on her iNaturalist pretty soon I think, so I’ll update this post with a link when it becomes available, but I thought I would get ahead of the post and try and help out a bit. Also, I think I’m falling in love with harvestmen a bit. Incredible animals!
Thanks for your help :)
EDIT: here’s a photo of it in case you can’t see intagram:
Nice one, that sounds like a plan. Is there anywhere where you can be alerted to new species and stuff? I imagine there’s a way to follow a taxon in iNaturalist, but is there a way to follow what’s going on in the wider world? A google alert or something? I’m pretty new to taxonomy and how it works on a global scale!
There is nothing in iNaturalist that would provide any kind of alert about new species or species changes in the iNat taxonomy database.
It may get a little technical, but one thing you can do is to create an alert on Google Scholar to get emailed links when that site discovers a new article about a specific keyword (note many of the articles may be locked behind paywalls, many will be open access).
There are also several open access journals dedicated to the discovery of new species, new species range discoveries that you can read.
That’s cool, thanks. Any idea of the names of some of the journals that keep track of new species off the top of your head? If not I’m sure a quick google on my part would suffice. They might be quite interesting just in general!
