A birthday toast to you all (i'm sipping a rather fine japanese whisky.. cheers!)

What i see is an ever increasing number of PSL'rs adding their lists - it would be nice to have an all singing all dancing interstellar hub where we detail every amazing new find.. but the sheer numbers of people who are swelling the dry old list is a good indication that the website is at least encouraging some serious PSL activity out there in the field.. (or mayeb letting like minded addicts connect up for therapy..)

More than a 100 listers, more than 75 with a list into four figures, almost 50 at the 2K mark, nearly 30 at 3K, and if you'd stop mucking about t'tother side of the planet there would be 20 of us over the 4K mark.. that's a lot of people with very broad exposure to a huge range of UK wildlife.

Personally I'd love to add more to the website, but I find I'm short of time, and the 'oh that would be good to blog' soon turns into a 'shit I still owe so and so records for way-back-when' or a huge backlog of determinations - but that may just be disorganised and easily distracted me... There's some shitty day job that gets in the way as well... (worse I had a cracking wild service tree / golden haired lichen write up ready to post and then the person who gave me the sites got cold feet and asked me for suppression :( )

Still I get stuff from the website.. so I should put something back.. I'll see if I can get the long overdue linyphiiid s/s into working order this week, and make sure the latest mesofauna acari key is referenced.. is there a way of searching the resources? Its only 2 pages at the moment but will get hard to find stuff once its pads out a bit.

Cheers,

Matt

As someone who's only just gotten around to updating my total here after more than a year and only really visits intermittently at the moment perhaps my view is less relevant - or perhaps I am the sort who should be targetted to ensure I visit more regularly...

To me there is little to be gained from visiting the site generally as it stands, other than the occasional ID query which can be better handled by iSpot or similar websites. Perhaps one way to improve this would be to have some way of people giving a 'heads-up' when there's a chance for people to fill gaps in their lists - either through pointing out that a certain species (or group of species) is common at the moment, or through sharing techniques to make 'easy' gains for their lists.

An example would be the fact that if anyone (at least those in England & Wales) goes out & beats a sycamore tree at the moment, two species of aphid will fall out - the green one is Drepanosiphum platanoides and the black one is Periphyllus testudinaceous (if the green one has spots on the wing the ID gets a little trickier). Bang - two species to add to the list if you don't have them already.

Alternatively I could point out that a visit to a spring rape field will harvest you Phyllotreta atra and P.cruciferae (the former has white stripes, the latter doesn't) plus Meligethes aeneus and M. viridescens (slightly trickier to seperate, aeneus is commoner and has a 'plain' middle femur whereas viridescens has a 'spike' on the hind edge. All four species can be gathered by a cursory search around the growing tip of the rape plants. 

More little tips like these - plus perhaps some discussion on seperating tricky, common species or what species you are likely to find in a certain habitat would be handy and, I think unique to this forum - WildAboutBritain used to have something along those lines - particularly some very good stuff on microfungi but that site seems to now be defunct.

something else that occurs to me would possibly be useful would be a series of posts along the lines of 10 (or 20) species you should have - detailing some of the commoner, easily identified species from under-recorded groups and how & why they should be on their lists.

Again, an example for aphids - the abovementioned two could be on there plus:

Nettle aphid - Macrosiphum carnosum - if it's green & on nettles its this species

Dogwood-grass aphid - Anoecia corni - a common & distinctive species with a black pterostigma giving it a spot-winged appearance

Grain aphid - Sitobion avenae - a common aphid on grass heads with distinctive combination of yellowish body & black siphunculi

Mealy cabbage aphid - Brevicoryne brassicae - forms grey colonies at the tops of oilseed rape & other brassicas

Peach-potato aphid - Myzus persicae - a common pest on brassicas & potatoes, dark green colour and slightly swollen siphunculi quite distinctive

Bird cherry-oat aphid - Rhopalosiphum padi - a common cereal pest but probably best found over winter & early spring when the eggs and early colonies can be found on the leaf buds of bird cherry

etc., etc...

I'd like to see similar for the likes of grasses, fungi, mirid bugs, staphs etc. 

Chris,

A great naturalist friend once said he'd like to be able to recognise all the distinctive species of British wildlife. In fact, I think he said that all decent naturalists should be expected to recognise all the distictive species! He's right either way, and that's still what I'm aspiring to do. There are many thousands of distinctive species!

It needs someone who is really expert and familiar with the group to guide others through what is distinctive and what is more technical, as you have done for some of the aphids. I think if you think something should be done, please do it, and never miss an opportunity to nudge others to do the same. Maybe you'll be the one to get the ball rolling.

"a visit to a spring rape field will harvest you Phyllotreta atra and P.cruciferae (the former has white stripes, the latter doesn't)" - some mistake! Not sure it's safe to call all the all-black ones atra - all those I've dissected this year so far have been diademata.

Cheers, Mark