Birds, Leps, Observations & Generalities - the images and ramblings of Mark Skevington. Sometimes.

Thursday 8 April 2021

Erroneous Aneurus

Way back in May 2014, I found a couple of flat bugs under bark on dead rotting wood at Ketton Quarry. I confidently identified them as Aneurus laevis on the basis that they completely matched the images and, I believed, the description on the excellent British Bugs website. Here's one of the beasts in question:


Fast forward to March this year, and I happened to be going through a load of notifications on my iRecord account - these are mainly stating that records have been verified etc, and don't come through as e-mail notifications at all. Amongst them, I noted that my 2014 record had been re-determined by none other that Tristan Bantock - it was now Aneurus avenius. I was perplexed, and immediately went to check the British Bugs website to see how/where I'd gone wrong .... only to find that there was no longer a page for A. laevis, and that my images did indeed match well the images that were present for A. avenius. Had I completely fucked this up, or was I going mad?! Quite possibly both.

But - I messaged Tristan to double check and discovered that the British Bugs website page had been reworked from A. laevis to A. avenius as he'd realised that all of his specimens/photos were mis-identified. I guess the follow up to that was checking all records on iRecord etc.

So, some solace that whilst my ID was wrong there was a rational and good reason for it - I was working to an incorrect reference point! As it happens, my record was the only one for either species in VC55 - so changing it from A. laevis to A. avenius does not deprive me of a VC first and all is good.

1 comment:

martinf said...

Superb video that. Tense, moody and a great song to boot. Can't get that worked up for a bug though ;)