British Insects: the Genera of Lepidoptera-Geometridae
British Insects: the Genera of Lepidoptera-Geometridae |
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This data set is generated from a DELTA database (Dallwitz 1980; Dallwitz, Paine, and Zurcher 1993). The original intention of the ‘British Entomology’ suite of packages, of which it forms part, was primarily to present scans of the fine hand-coloured engravings of insects in John Curtis’s British Insects: illustrations and descriptions of the genera of insects found in Great Britain and Ireland (1824-1840), of which the first 12 volumes (up to 1835) are available to us. For further information on this aspect, see Notes on John Curtis’s British Entomology.
In addition to presenting Curtis’s and other early illustrations, all the ‘British Entomology’ subsets incorporate descriptive data organized under the DELTA system, and aim to offer at least partial identification and information retrieval facilities via the interactive program Intkey. However, the Lepidoptera component goes further than the rest. The present subset represents an extension to generic level of the Families of Lepidoptera subset (q.v., with which a more detailed Introduction is provided). It is at a relatively early stage of development, and offers abundant scope for additional characters, refinement of the present character state definitions, and more extensive checking of generic descriptions against specimens. Nevertheless, the limited testing conducted to date suggests it offers a reasonable prospect of identifying any British geometrid moth to generic level, via routine morphological characters, wing patterning, geographical occurrence, etc.; and by including comprehensive scans from Newman’s excellent woodcuts (1869; see Notes on Edward Newman’s British Moths and British Butterflies), supplemented by Kirby’s (1907) chromolithographs, its scope has been extended to illustrate virtually all the British species, including most of the ‘adventives’ presented in the Bradley et al. (1972) and Bradley (2000) updates of Kloet and Hincks’s Check List. For educational purposes and as an identificatory aid for genera and species, scans of Newman’s individual figures have been grouped into ‘plates’ comprising related insects, and where required, Kirby’s plates have also been re-organized to conform with more recent views on relationships. We have recently (2007) further extended this data set, and the accompanying ‘Families of Lepidoptera’ and ‘Noctuidae’ packages, to exemplify melanism and “industrial melanism”; illustrating these phenomena by original colour photographs of specimens collected in ostensibly rural habitats near Stoke-on-Trent and Manchester in the decade 1948-1958 (i.e., before implementation of the “Clean Air Act”).
The classification and formal nomenclature have been aligned via the same Check Lists, with the addition of English common names. The latter, the usefulness of which is alluded to in the introduction to the accompanying Lepidoptera Families subset, may be accessed in the present data set via the ‘Refer common names to genera’ (target) button in the Intkey main toolbar.