Learn to ID Bees-20241204_130254-Meeting Recording

December 4, 2024, 6:02PM

1h 0m 58s

Maffei, Clare J 0:04
Announcement that you've heard, but now reporting no class next week. I am in a training.
And then we probably have one more class and then no class for two weeks because.
Holiday season.
Double checking that information.
Yeah. So we'll have a class on the 18th, but then not on the 25th or the 1st.
I think that's oh, you saw in the emails, our good friend David has made some additional updates to the Andrina Guide also going to be pushing a bunch of his pictures to the species pages coming up in the next week or so here.
OK.
I think I wrapped up my updates.
Now, Sam, your turn.

Droege, Sam 0:57
K.
Alright, so we'll talk more about the same group but different set of species that we were talking about last week. Last week we were looking at mail bees that in the Andrina subgenus Andrina.
So that would be called sensu strictu.
So in the strict sense, I'm not quite sure how that works, but.
It's basically got the same subgenus name as the genus and.
We're going to now go into the remaining few for the East, OK.
So we have clarkella, Frigidaire Carolina Fastpi, and I think that's it.
So these are Carolina.
I see regularly it's in Maryland.
The others are.
Not things we see regularly. So and we have to do some oh, OK straight my head out here.
Let's do some.
Online ID stuff too.
Start with Carolina and.

Maffei, Clare J 2:03
Can you repeat all of those again so I can put them in the chat?

Droege, Sam 2:07
Yeah. So we have andrina.
Fast Bi andrina Carolina, Andrina Clarkella and andrina frigida.
Mostly things with a northern distribution all within Andrina. Since you strict to, but the males don't have the big tooth.
And we looked at the big tooth ones last week and covered those.
So if we go to the female guide here and we open up, let's open up and take a look at Carolina. So Carolina is a.
Widely seen as a blueberry huckleberry, maybe a couple others of those ericas shrub specialist.
Very long face.
At least it's commonly associated with that group, and as we have, the general pattern is if something has a long face, it's going into something with a a deep Corolla.
That just helps it reach in further and has.
More capacity for a longer tongue.
Which of course folds out from underneath the bee's head.
So let me see if I can get the head in here and I've got an oblique view set up here because another thing that I notice when I'm looking at Carolina, it's got very long mandibles.
What the reason for that is I'm not 100% sure, but it does seem to be something that's noticeable when we it should help us key this out.
So this is here's one mandible that.
Is opened.
The other mandible is.
Off to the side and what we can see is here's the here's the clip is. Here's the head, and we're gonna look at this very long malar space, too.
But this corner of the clip is, which is defining the area in which the labrum is projecting from underneath. We use as a measuring thing.
So a lot of times when we define.
Long we're talking about.
How is it compared to the clippyel corner found here?

Maffei, Clare J 4:22
Sam, we're not seeing your screen.

Droege, Sam 4:22
And.
But you're not. Oh, great.
Well, I should share my screen that would help.
Which I have completely just. I just jumped right in. Thank you for.

Maffei, Clare J 4:31
Sorry, I didn't catch that right away.
Thanks everybody in the chat.

Droege, Sam 4:37
Mentioning that.
Alright, OK.
Now let me get this on big screen.
And.
Let's see.
There we go. OK.
So this is a bit blown up and as I mentioned before, let me scoot this little box away.
So here's A1 maniple's open other mandibles closed.
These would cross.
The tips would fall below each other.
In other words, they wouldn't laugh.
Like praying hands or something.
And you can see that in comparison to the corner of the clip is here that's defining where the labrum is.
Dropping out. It's well beyond it. That tip.
So that's sort of the measure of long.
And we have moderate and short specimens too.
But this is the species has noticeably long head, so we're looking at that head.
Obliquely, let's change it.
Take a look.
I think people heard me speak to the fact that it needs this long head likely, or the story is that it needs it to.
Come into and reach further into these.
Blueberry style or most blueberries.
Not all blueberries are like that.
The deep bell, like corolla's of blueberries, OK.
So it's got some **** on it, but.
You can.
Kind of.
See, this is a pretty long headed. The Clippiest is projecting way below the bottoms of the line of the bottoms of the two compound eyes.
And that's sort of another way to measure length is to look at that and additionally to extend the head even further, it's putting in a long for andrina Mailer space.
The species most likely to be confused, which is not in this group.
Who puts in not good on the subgenera level things.
They mostly just ignore that.
Learn more about the genus.
Is the malar space and so the the other species that often gets confused here has and, but has differences in terms of. The phobia would be Bradley and we'll see that when we do some keying out.
We could use a smidge more light here, so I'm gonna go do that.
Yes, I can get this to cooperate.
And there's other way.
Go to here.
And we'll bring this up to 300. Here we go.
Go here.
So now bring it into focus.
Base of mandible. OK.
There's the two conditions.
Those are the hooks that attach it, sort of like hinges.
And here's the muscle that flings the mandible.
Open and closed and I've got a box that I have to move away here.
There it is.
OK, oops. So most I would say this edge of this mandible and the edge of the eye.
So the eye has a compound eye, and there's a little rim to that.
That they touch or so close to touching that you can't quite tell, but this is so.
This is a huge gap for an andrina, and so that's a very distinctive part of identifying this species.
Long head also helps.
It's not alone, though. In terms of long Headedness, so it's just a hint that you should be thinking about it when you see it.
All right, I'm gonna bring.
The head back in.
We'll do some keying out here and see.
Where is dad? There we go.
And now I need to bring wish. I had a faster way of adjusting the light on this program.
Also note that the facial phobia are pretty dark, so the hairs in there are dark.
You can be tricked pretty easily because the reflections can be light.
And and also dark depending on the thing.
So you have to look closely to make sure you're looking at.
True color, but usually if it's dark, it shows and presents pretty darkly.
OK, I'm gonna drop the light again.
Back down to 100.
OK, more reasonable.
So just to tell you, Bradley I, which is also another vaccinium user, more of a southern species, but they overlap certainly and even broadly throughout the East this had it has a very, very narrow facial phobia. In fact, the facial phobia is about the same width all the.
Down to the top of the clippius in relationship and you can see here pretty clearly or fairly clearly.
That you have this.
I'm following the edge of the fovea up here and it broadens way out and comes over and is sort of like a drumstick in place.
Let's look in the ID guides and flip through that.
Very quickly.
So I'm in the female and Drina.
Allied and I'm gonna just restart it because I was goofing around in there.
And if we say I can't remember, this one was probably from Maryland, so we'll use Maryland as an example.
And we go down and just do Maryland and we'll click here. Bees east of the Mississippi just to clear out a couple things.
So we have quite a few.
From Maryland and I don't know what the date is.
I'm gonna ignore that.
For space of time and I'm gonna skip the measurement of the body length.
It's pretty big and let's go down.
To let's see where do we wanna start?
So it has a strong set of corners, as do all the species in this group, and that really knocks back the number of species right away.
The here is simple and the wings are three.
I'm doing this from memory, I'm just looking at the specimen. It'll take care of a few more if we go back now so.
Often. So what I'm trying to do is show you some like, often shortcuts.
So sometimes you kind of know what's going on, like, oh, these characters are important ones.
So I already hit simplify even though I had 24 kinds.
Listed up here and so I know that the Maler space when I saw.
I looked at it.
Was very long.
So extremely long.
More than 1/3 as long as broad I would say yes, but maybe I'll hedge my bets and say 1/5 to 1/3 in there.
And so I get. There's Carolina. But there's several of these others, several of which are in this group that we were gonna talk about.
Frigida, SBI. There's mandibularis Milwaukee, ANSYS Rufo, signada from.
Last.
Also in that group. So once you have that kind of combination of just those few characters, you're already down to a smaller group.
Hit simplify again because each time you do that, you're creating a new guide with just the remaining ones in there.
And we know we had a long head, but that's largely going to be.
Determined by the Mailer space too.
So we don't need to actually print out long head.
We notice that the mandible was.
Extra long that might be distinctive.
Let's take a look at.
So we would go head and we're looking for mandible label process.
It's self-employed medical formation at base.
Label process, head, mandible. Oh, maybe.
Maybe length is not important here.
What we have a pigment?
Yeah, I'm not seeing. So these all must have about the same length of heads.
These were the selected ones already, so I'm gonna say that's not different or very different within that group.
So it's not included because it doesn't help separate out anything.
So I guess we'll just take a look here and we'll look.
Quickly through here and see what we have so labral processes are often.
Very useful. So here we have seven kinds, and we can see by the green numbers how many, how many species are associated with these.
So it's spread out, but clicking any of these and eliminate a bunch.
So I'm going to look under my light here and just to save a little bit of time.
And.
Things going.
And I see.
Yeah, so here this is one of those interesting ones.
Where from the top it looks like. Oh, maybe I don't see.
A. But if I turn it a little bit, I think I'll show this too because this is an important kind of concept.
So it's bidentate and you can see 5.
I'm only gonna eliminate 2IN there and there's Carolina.
But if we had not looked closely.
And.
See where is that again? If instead we had said entire 'cause it kind of looks entire from the top.
Now maybe I have.
But see, it's gone.
So let me show you that because that's a little tricky.
It is by dentate, but you have to turn it to see which to look at.
So let's take a look here.
So if I'm looking, here's a specimen.
I don't know if the label process is visible all from here.
Well, OK, it is obed.
So if we're looking now.
A bit straight on.
We here's the edge of the clippius.
There's the label process looks entire right.
No question.
But now, if we what I'm going to do is sequentially.
Angle this.
Specimen so that we can look a bit around the corner.
Now we're basically dead on.
On so, we are looking almost at 90° to the face of the specimen, so you can see just pointing out 'cause. It's a good shot here.
Wide facial fovea up there. And if we look down here again, if we're just looking at the outline, that looks pretty much entire.
But now if we continue or look.
Over the edge.
What do people even identify these things right?
Take this down.
And may even have to turn it a bit more to see this.
But you can start to see what's going on here.
I'm gonna bring in the light.
OK.
Now, when we'd start looking here and we'll angle it even more, here's what we were seeing from the top.
Just that edge, but it's curling over and you can see something is going on here.
It's not the clearest view.
And when we turn it more, it'll be even clearer.
But there's some hairs in there, which is probably an indication that this is bidentate here rather than.
Some kind of completely smooth thing?
And a number in this group do this trick.
So you have to turn your specimen over a bit, OK?
Now we're really going to take the label off.
Spin this to get a good look at that linear process.
And this up.
In our specimen in here.
You can see the underside of the head here pretty well. Could have straighten it a little bit better, but this will be visible right?
So we're gonna go all the way up to the maximum.
And now?
You can see what formerly when we looked at it from straight down was.
No imagination, no cut in, no nothing.
It looked completely smooth, but here you can clearly see.
This great cut out in which makes this and these have like teeth.
So that would make it bentate.
In very, very dramatically. But you had to have moved things. So wonder what that is.
To see them, that's interesting.
I'm not sure, but there it is.
OK, the bidentate thing revealed.
So if we go back now and drop that out, put this in, we got rid of two.
Species. And now we're still back.
Here we do simplify again, and so the guide will tell us what's going to be useful.
See, these are all springs pieces.
I'm not even gonna bother.
Trying to work with these because all five are basically being scored for this part of the year.
Here and these can be useful, but again you got a couple fives that are the common thing which is about in the middle.
So we're looking for something that does a good job of splitting things.
So this is on the first page, pale apical hair bands.
I'll take a look here, but I don't think there's anything going on.
The other thing so I'm going to interrupt myself. And so sometimes when you're down to this, it's like, oh, are there any?
BC specific characters down here to separate things out.
And they're starting to be here's frigida versus Rufo signata.
Here's Mandibularis rufosignata, fastbi.
Matt Kuponensis Carolina is not in there, so it is.
Sorry. So let's look at.
At this. So this should separate out.
We have Rufo, Sigmata and tasbyi so so if we look here.
Facial quadratural distinctly longer than wide true malar area.
Relatively long.
True about 1/4 or more as long as broad true label processing margin aid to bidentate true mandibles.
Long Outers close, clearly exceed free apical margin of clipius unless really worn.
We saw that mandible without a basal tooth.
We also saw that facial phobia with hair usually pale yellow.
Throughout now, maybe we should revisit that because I was looking at them and said, oh, look, they're dark.
So let's take a more of a dime.
You need to get a different specimen just in case this one is goopy.
I feel confident that it is Carolina, but obviously.
I misrepresented.
The specimen by implying that the facial phobia were dark when either that or the guide is wrong.
But I think the guide is probably right.
So let's take a look at this specimen and see.
What's going on?
On that phobia again.
It might just have been a trick of the light. Don't forget the backside.
Of oh, these are too light now.
The backside of these specimens, in other words the integument is black, and the.
Lights, the lights, the hairs.
On the specimens are both translucent to some degree sometimes.
And also to transmitting light through so that looks black, right? But if we.
Change the. When I look at it in my regular.
Let me get this two bigger thing.
On the regular microscope, I can move the specimen back and forth.
And I see.
That color change O here now with a different look.
Boom white.
So OK.
So we're we're matching again.
Here's a pretty good, pretty good vertex shot.
So here's the asele there's at least one plus, so 1 1/2 to almost two, but probably 1 1/2 would be how I'd characterize that.
A pretty, pretty broad for the specimen, so we'll go back to here. We talked about facial fovea with.
Usually pale yellow throughout. So we're gonna say yes so.
To we can go and contrast all these, but we're just going to accept that and now we're down to our. We basically got rid of all the others and got to Carolina.
I should have said, sorry I didn't quite do that.
All the other andrina besides that, so that.
That includes the frigida Milwaukee, ANSYS.
In there.
So we didn't quite get rid of them.
They get tricked up sometimes on going too fast. These specimens. So now we have.
Set Carolina Frigida Milwaukee, ansys.
These look quite different.
In the amount of black hairs on the specimens with Carolina, I think having basically none.
And these other two frigida Milwaukee answers having black hairs on the face.
Let's see if.
I'm just gonna do a type in here.
And look for black again.
We would do.
Well, head facial phobia, color of hair all pale to white.
We just determine that and we might get rid of EM.
Yeah. So that gets rid of it that way.
Let's see if there's any other black things in here.
Abdomen trigger teeth are for color of hair including apical.
Hair bands and present.
All pale and, but that's not it's got three, so it would not get rid of any everything anything else.
And then here thorax color of hair. We have all pale. That's three again and that will keep it 'cause that's what it is.
And then these others have some different mixtures of pale and dark hairs.
So anyway, we can we can continue to do this, but that's the nice thing about these kinds of guides. You can try and answer a bunch of questions to more and more confirm the species. You then can go to the species page and say, oh, yeah, my spec.
Looks a lot like this.
And.
Have a better notion.
Oh, look at this.
It's on Willow and it's on a male Willow.
So the notion that it's only feeding on deep Corolla things is obviously incorrect.
For a female.
Willow. Then it might be nectarine.
OK.
So.
That's Carolina females and the males.
I have here.
Gonna swap this out.
To the mail.
Is also pretty distinctive.
We'll go to the mail guide over here.
And and look at that.
But let's take a look at this specimen.
So sadly this is my only specimen, so it's a little curled up, but I think it shows most of the and dirty the spider webs on it.
So I think we'll start maybe with the face also with.
Very.
On mandibles and a relatively long face for male too.
So there's a face distinctly longer than broad mandibles are closed, so we'll see what those looked like.
While I changing our perspective here.
You know A to make sure that the pin doesn't get in the way.
So maybe something like that?
Here we go.
So he these are dramatic, right?
So you can see how the mandibles, and I've forgotten that the length of the mandibles is really a male character used in the male guide and not in the females at all, although you could see that the mandible in that particular species was quite long, the males are.
The ones that really accentuate length of mandibles.
And here you can see how.
Large. They cross. If it was a short mandible species.
These two mandibles would overlap over each other, hands on top of each other, I guess.
Not like prayer, but like.
Overlapping instead of crossing.
So we have that we can take a look again at Mallard spaces here.
And.
We have.
Hey.
Again, forsake of time.
I'm not gonna drill completely in here, but I think you can see that there is a significant maler space going on there.
The other thing when we did our perusal of this specimen, we could see I'm trying to line this up.
Well.
At the cheek.
Very broad and had a odd little twist at the end or upturned area.
So here there's those long mandibles.
There's the base of the eye. You can see that comparison. The measuring tool is what's the width of the eye.
You can see it's much greater.
The cheek is much greater than the width of the eye by not quite 2, but at least a good time and 1/2.
And it's not quite visible here I think.
But I think you can.
Or at least not accentuated. You can see that something's going on in the edge.
So you have a relatively short sharp point, and if we looked at this from the top view, we're a little bit of an angle, you'll see that this whole edge is turned up.
So in other words, not a smooth transition running underneath the cheek.
But something quite sharp. Additionally, when we look at the length of the head.
We look at where is the greatest width you know we can see.
I guess you can make up your own angle, but if we're looking at right angles to here, it's somewhat behind the midpoint of the eye. If we're going at right angles down to that point.
So let's use start with those characters, and there's no tooth on this either, so we can't use the teeth.
We're a very quick way to shortcut shortcut a lot of these things.
So we're gonna click on east of the Mississippi and we will do Maryland again.
And we come up with a set of species.
Quite a few 102 and a month is gonna be spring.
We're gonna ignore these. Lengthen.
And time of year things for the moment. Unless it gives us clarity.
So here, head clipping. This is sort of super easy.
So you just do it right? 'cause you can tell if there's yellow on the clip is right away or not. And this is both are entirely dark, so it's gonna get rid of some things. Quite a #25 or so.
But still many remain vertex height.
We didn't see that.
That's useful.
We might go back to that, OK.
We were looking at cheek so we said that it was probably about 1.5, so we can bracket that right to be safe and conservative and we're eliminating really, really wide and we're eliminating really, really short. But we're not saying.
Choosing one because.
That's dangerous.
So let's see if Carolina is still in there.
And Oh my gosh, it's gone.
OK.
Let's see what happened.
Let's investigate.
Maybe I need to update the the guide so if I put do that?
Oh, Carolina is not in there at this point.
What else did we do? Both entirely dark. That should not be a problem.
Maryland, is it not scored for Maryland, OK?
Well, it's entirely dark.
Carolina is in.
Did I just miss this?
Maybe I just was not reading my alphabet correctly.
There's Carolina, both entirely dark, OK.
Let's go and do this again.
So if we do our three, perhaps I just missed this there of wits.
Carolina is gone, OK?
And we put this back.
What about about twice as broad?
Oh, it's in.
So my feeling is that I need to score these for these two things, which I'll do after.
We're done.
But that is about twice as broad.
I don't know if I agree or not.
That's that's why we'll change these to these lower categories.
OK.
That's the problem with having every species included.
Now, because we got it wrong.
Label process will come back to that.
I have a feeling it's probably bidentate since the females were. We have these really long mandibles that takes it down to 30.
We didn't see this, but we know I didn't show you, but we know that the the humeral angle. So the pronodal collar, if you will, has very squared off.
Edges.
To it, instead of just being like a big horse collar, smooth rounded tire like in a way.
There's a sharp angle off of making a Ridge between the. This is would be the thorax and this would be the head.
You can, if you look, you'll see it present different ways.
Sometimes it it looks like a corner, sometimes it looks like one side of it is just simply flattened.
Anyway, this has that in there.
And if people are interested, we can speak up and we can show that.
And then I'm not sure we looked at anything else.
Oh, we looked at.
Oh, this is the underside.
That's a a useful character.
We didn't look at any of those. We looked at cheek.
Dimensions. Let's see if we do.
A simplify, because I believe the information about more information about cheek dimensions or in the hidden characters.
So if we go now.

Maffei, Clare J 35:57
I am.
We do have a quest to look at that angle.

Droege, Sam 35:58
Yeah.
OK.

Maffei, Clare J 36:03
And I might actually like maybe when we get through this little bit and then when you backtrack for that, because I just noticed in our identification notes for the female that one of the one of the gotchas is a tiny shiny area below the Prenotal Ridge near the.
Collar where the integument is not tessellated.
And I know that I've needed that character before.

Droege, Sam 36:26
OK.

Maffei, Clare J 36:28
So let's show it.

Droege, Sam 36:31
OK. Was that in the just mentioned in the species description?

Maffei, Clare J 36:37
Yeah, in the the for the andrina, we've done a really good job of having these identification notes that I think came from.

Droege, Sam 36:43
OK.

Maffei, Clare J 36:45
One of the one of the guides.
And that's that's one of those things. But it's not in our key.

Droege, Sam 36:51
K.
We'll go back to that.
So mallor area. So we have the mall area was substantial.
And we're gonna say somewhere between long and extremely long.
And Carolina is still in there.
And now we're back with our old friends groups.
There's the same group that we saw on the females are a largely a picami.
I'm not sure why it was in there, but the rest are all in that andrina sense is strict too.
So.
This classification, Lisa, is currently done.
So we're gonna hit simplify again, because why not?
It just gets rid of things that aren't useful anymore.
And now we're back to searching for the 8 and trying to figure out which of these to look at.
So some of this we had.
So there was our cheek with, I don't know what happened.
So about twice.
So 4 species would.
So about half of them would disappear because if we click that, but we need to score these down here label process.
Looks like this could be useful.
Let's take a look.
At.
A label process here.
And we also wanted to look at the.
I'll just set up the see if I can so some of the some of the problems are.
That sometimes you can't see.
If there's a Bruno collar or not, I think we should be able to see this here, and also it appears to be shiny in the mail.
So we're going back, we're backtracking.
To.
And her collar characteristics.
Bring down the magnification.
There's our specimen sort of half upside down.
And.
What we're gonna look for now is the see if we can see in. So this is the.
Half the trick, which is you often I have to put my glasses on on this one.
You often don't, so we're looking upside down, right?
So this is the pronoter collar area and there's hairs in the way.
The head is also not tilted to one side or the other.
When you hold these things. So I'm gonna do some tilting myself.
When you are holding this, I could see it easily under my microscope, but I'm not sure.
That we're going to be able to see on this specimen. Oops.
That pronounced caller easily.
Let's see what this brings us.
So this is a view from on top to the back of the head. So this is good in that you can see the pronoter collar area.
So this is the skutom tegula head.
And here's a pronoto collar. This bee's head is angled downward, exposing more of this collar area.
So this the head basically is fitting over.
This pronounced collar.
And I don't know. It's like our neck or something, but this is more form fitting.
So the head is is actually fitting back on there and.
We can see that we have that about 1 1/2.
Acre difference distance to the back of the head, which I think if we if I recall right, pretty much distinguished nothing.
So here though is the start of the area that is different.
This is all relatively is smooth.
So right here you can see something, something going on.
I know from experience that that's going to be a little corner.
And there's gonna be a Ridge running off in this direction.
But look at all this cheek here.
Look at all this hair from the thorax. We have to see into there from the side.
I'm not sure that's going to be easily possible.
I'm gonna try a couple more times. Then we can look at the female and see if that's possible.
So, oh, a little bit.
All right, so remember, we've flipped it now.
But.
You're not.
It's ****.
It's just not going to show much here.
I believe Dave Caprott has a bunch of pictures that are good on here, but it's going to be in this area right here and in this particular species.
It's shiny.
It's not all tessellated up.
But can't really see it.
So we'll go to the female.
You might as well just do a female right now.
And see if I have one who's who. This one's head has fallen off.
How convenient.
Let's see if the Pro Nodal caller is still on there.
Oh my goodness, it is still there.
Palmeri. Very convenient.
OK.
I'll put this back under here.
So this is a female.
They're both male and a female have these Bruno collars.
We're going to first look at.
The.
So it's also black, right?
So which doesn't discriminate a whole lot in terms of.
Shape and surface because everything is so dark.
I wonder if it'd be helpful.
I'm gonna try and add more light.
And a heck of a lot more.
That useful?
Think so?
You don't know what I'm looking at right now.
But.
Pull this up full screen.
So yeah, we were looking at where the pin was instead of down here.
OK.
So well, to convince you of this, we're gonna look at several different angles.
Alright, so the top this is this would be the top of the dorsal area.
So this is say the centerline.
This is the pronodine and or and this is the collar part.
So the prenotum actually does all kinds of interesting thing.
There's a lobe over here and it runs down quite a bit, but we're just concerned about this upper part. So in most species.
This is a completely smooth transition.
There's no differentiation of the surface in terms of angles flat areas.
It's just rounded over like you shaved it with a rasp.
But this one and others.
Have a have structure.
So first of all, here's that corner that we detected in that other specimen that was very hairy right there.
And I said, well, there's probably an angle running off.
So if we use our imagination.
We can see this angle running right here.
So this is actually a Ridge. In other words, it's not just a line. It looks fairly two-dimensional here, but it's actually 3 dimensional and this surface is flattened and shiny. In this particular case. So.
Let's change that angle of the little bit and see if we can see.
I'm gonna change it so the employee with my finger which does nothing for anybody and see if we can see this area a little bit.
Better.
When we change that angle.
Right, that's a leg.
A little disoriented myself without having a head on this thing.
OK so.
It's not the full picture, but here's that sharp angle running down here. We're looking from the side. This is not smooth over.
This is a flattened area.
Going to change it again.
And bring it in between those two last two shots to see.
If we can see that pretty clearly.
This is a tricky 1.
It took me a while to really get comfortable with what I was seeing, so we're kind of back where we were before changing the focus a bit.
But you can see then we're going to look straight on.
You can see this angle and this shiny area in the back.
That's what usually happened. This area, if it's going to be any different in terms of surface texture, it's going to be that smaller area. If we jump up in magnification to as much as we can go, you can see.
This would be called tessellation.
See the reptilian scale like.
Patterns more like little cells that tends to be what they would call tessellation, and they might use a term called imbricate if it actually did look like overlapping fish cells. This is in between.
Sometimes it's used, but mostly what you're just looking for is the surface is not really reflecting much light because it's got all these microscopic lines all over it.
This area is reflecting so.
Because it has none to much fewer.
All right, so now bring this back down.
I'm going to change it again.
So you have to imagine though you don't get to snap the heads off your specimens. I guess you do if they're yours. But.
That you would have to be peeking into the side, which makes it.
Challenge.
So bring this back here.
Bring this surface U.
Oh, this is better. OK.
So we're looking down. So this would be the head attachment area.
There's a skewed edge of the skewed.
And here, recall that one in specimen that was hairy.
That's that start of that corner and you can see now a bit better this transition.
So here's a Ridge.
So sometimes this Ridge is is.
Pretty sharp. In other words, there's a quick transition between the this surface, this rounded surface and the other one to create a flat area on the other side.
So this flat area would be here and other times.
The surface transition between those two surfaces is more rounded over.
And not as sharply defined, but you can still see that this shape, this collar.
Is different.
Is not.
A unbroken smooth.
I.
Donut collar horse horse thing.
That there's there's some angle angularity to it and different two different surfaces that you can clearly choose those two.
So I'm not sure it's worth spending any more time.
Thank you specimen for having no head on.
Your thing right now.
So here over here you can see.
Here's that Ridge on that side.
So this whole pro nodal area does not look any longer as it would in another species. Just being around it over thing. You can see these two angles when you come in when the head's on, you have to look in the side and look for.
You're going to rock the specimen back and forth, and you're looking for this transition.
So this this difference between this surface and that surface? Sometimes super obvious, sometimes not, and sometimes you like, I just can't see it.
So you don't use that here.
Right. Everyone satisfied there with that one?
If not.

Maffei, Clare J 50:09
I hope so.
That was the whole class.
We only have 7 minutes left, so I don't think that we're gonna move along.

Droege, Sam 50:16
Oh my God, just one species.

Maffei, Clare J 50:18
But I will announce because I.

Droege, Sam 50:19
OK.
Well, I can go back to the mail. Go ahead, Sir.
No. You go ahead, Claire.

Maffei, Clare J 50:24
OK, I keep forgetting because we've been only using it within the lab the class.
But I've put in the chat, Sally, our wonderful intern, has made a discover life. Be photo request.
Google form so you are we would we would love to have that the best way to use that would literally be copy and pasting language from the guides and it would be more helpful to have that than you saying oh, can I have a pic like I just.

Droege, Sam 50:43
Here we go.

Maffei, Clare J 50:58
Posted this request for a picture of this feature.
I copy and pasted from the language of the species page rather than can I see that shiny spot on the Carolina female? Not helpful.
Let us use the language that we have on there and we will try to get photos up.
Can't say that. That's like going to be a super quick process, but it will really help us.

Droege, Sam 51:24
It's it's recorded somewhere other than someone's e-mail.

Maffei, Clare J 51:27
Exactly, exactly that.
And so we'll be able to pass that off when people have time for photos to do that.
So I'll start including that in the weekly e-mail.

Droege, Sam 51:40
Well, magically I was able to put this mail in just the right spot and pretty given what we were looking at last time. You can see this very shiny area.
That's the flat surface.
Here's the top corner.
That and the Ridge is going to go down like that on the other side.
And.
That's a a good indication if you have a a good contrast to this is andrina perplexa because we see a lot of it.
It's big.
It has.
Not so much this big, shiny, flat, different surface.
It's more.
It's more that this area right here is projects out as.
Basic a big ear and then has a vague Ridge running down so they're not all gonna look like this.
This sensu stricture group has largely these kinds of characters, but you'll see quite a different set of variation from smooth, which is the.
You know basically the the the more common character too.
Something's going on and paying attention to what that shape and size is useful, particularly if you have.
A bunch of different specimens that are all sort of in that same category.
Just look at looking at the Pronodo collar area and comparing.
Because it does vary quite a bit, but sort of your expert level to see that in such a thing now also in view is that cheek thing again.
So here you can see a little bit better fact. We can run the. Oh, it's already at high magnification.
So recall that we had this very long cheek. So I'm gonna change the guide here to reflect that and we're going to look here and this is curled up.
It's not straight and it's got a very sharp thing and this this is not.
Well-rounded either the bottom of the cheek.
Let's in our little bit of remaining time, we can go back here.
And see if there's some more cheek stuff.
Here we go.
OK, head cheek. Karina or Ridge. OK. So Karina or Ridge are kind of interchangeable.
Terms. So Karina is theoretically a raised line, but sometimes these kerini on specimens could be more characterized as a Ridge. And what we're saying is there's something going along on the rear edge of the cheek.
So we saw that.
So here we have absent.
So you can look here.
Oh, this could be useful.
Or here's one that has six.
Maybe not.
'Cause we have only 8 and so here it says absent present but weak and only in the upper half.
So up here present distinct spanning the whole thing. And here is what we have present only in the lower half. The genal area or near the posterior ventral angle. This thing and often weak.
So that's what we saw.
And so we will get be able to get rid of two things. Carolina is still in there and the last thing we'll do because I know.
That Claire.
Has to go and I do too actually.
We will look to see if I can get a good shot of because this is another one of those tricky areas looking at S6.
And the rim of S6 to see.
What's going? Well, first of all, just to see it.
And then to characterize it correctly, 'cause, it's usually a lot of stuff going on down there. And I'm looking at this specimen in particular.
And so this one has its genitalia sticking out, which makes this a little bit I'm not sure we're gonna be able to see this.
I'm not even 100% I.
I'm a little bit hesitant of even using it, but if I were.
Able to guess. I'm gonna say that.
It's.
This one, but I'm guessing at this point, which is not what you should be doing in the guide, but you can but not sure where you should be counting on when using a guide.
But it has no there's no reason not to be like, oh, it's in there. I'm not 100% sure and I'm going to turn it off and keep going, but that was information like, I guessed it felt like it was not 100% and.
We're in that ballpark.
Maybe we'll just Scroll down here and see if there's a Carolina specific.
Oh, look here. Head shape in profile as a bump.
Distinct angle.
Well, they all do, so that's not useful.
And see if Carolina.
So these are our basil tooth species and Carolina does not have.
A well, so we know that there is a character somewhere that talks about the basal tooth and that would get rid of this one, this one.
This one.
This one leaving only these two left.
And.
Then we can look at some of these other characters.
And.
Figure out which of these two match, but at this point I'm going to be going too fast and.
So I'm going to stop.

Maffei, Clare J 57:37
I'd love to interrupt you for a second. So if you're rounding out so there's.

Droege, Sam 57:39
Yeah, I'm. I'm finish.
I'm going to stop just because I'm feeling the pressure of time, but go ahead, Claire.

Maffei, Clare J 57:48
Well, we can.
We can always start back up where you are.
There's a nice chat in the chat about folks that hit take good pictures, and as you mentioned a lot, David takes amazing photos and can confirm that we get behind a bit on uploads.
However, I'd be happy if you guys post things to Flickr or some other site.
Include those on the weekly.
The weekly resources that I put in the emails.
And also.
Get access to your photos and they can go up at some point in a batch we can sidebar on the most effective way to have file naming there so that they can go.
Directly where we want them to go.
As that can kind of be.
A.
You know a bottleneck there. There was a question in the chat of, oh, it'd be great to know. Like, what characters?
Yes, I'm going to see if we can make that those responses available as a read only on the Google Drive.
I think that's probably available to us, but and also any pictures you take would be great.
They will end up if nothing else, on a species page though if we have closer conversation, we can get them up onto a character if that's appropriate.
And I say all that to also remind you that go when you go onto a species page, there's often underneath the photos that are just appearing there on the screen, a more thumbnails.
So look out for that, yes.

Droege, Sam 59:20
Which which will expand to more pictures.

Maffei, Clare J 59:24
So, for example, today we're looking at Carolina.
I think there is.
You know, maybe a dozen Max photos on our justice page, but on the link for more the thumbnail link, there's 3435 pictures.
So always go there and if you send us your pictures, they will at least send up on species pages and we can work closely to have them put into character guides.
Also, if you are an academic with students and interns and things like that.
Yeah.
Any help is always good help. At this point we're gonna say goodbye and I'm gonna stop the recording. And I'm so excited that there are people who have photos.

Droege, Sam 1:00:04
Yeah. So I the way to think about these species pages is that for most people, they don't have access to a museum, which is the best way to confirm your specimens other than giving it to a expert, I suppose.
Because you can then directly go back and forth, back and forth between a known specimen and yours, and do a comparison.
So this is a not optimal, but is.
Part of that.
World, where we try to help other people and their identifications, and you can at least get some kind of comparative information out of the pictures.

Maffei, Clare J 1:00:50
Hi recording over you guys can keep hanging out. You're amazing.

Droege, Sam 1:00:50
That's what I got.
OK, I have to go too.
Alright, see you, Claire.

Maffei, Clare J stopped transcription