British Insects: the Insect Orders
British Insects: the Insect Orders |
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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 Insects’ 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 Entomology: illustrations and descriptions of the genera of insects found in Great Britain and Ireland (1824–1840). The first 12 volumes of the first edition (up to 1835) were directly available to us, and pages issued from 1836-1840 have been accessed from other sources (see Notes on John Curtis’s British Entomology).
In addition to presenting Curtis’s and other early illustrations, all the ‘British Insects’ subsets incorporate descriptive data organized under the DELTA system, and taken as a whole purport to offer at least partial identification and information retrieval facilities via the interactive program Intkey (Dallwitz, Paine and Zurcher 1995). This one aims to provide brief taxonomic descriptions of the Orders, to permit interactively identifying any adult British insect to that level, and as such to serve as an identificatory gateway to the other data sets should one be needed. The extent to which it succeeds at this early stage of development remains to be determined, but in any case the DELTA data (from which updates of the interactive package are easily generated) are readily accessible for improving, correcting and extending. Users wanting to refer categories of insects (wasp, beetle, snake-fly, etc.) to their Orders via their common names can do so via Intkey (see ‘Hints on using Intkey’ within the Intkey package).
The present descriptions of the Orders were compiled mainly from Britton et al. (1970) and Imms (1956), then cross referenced against keys currently available on the Internet (see References). They were then further improved by feeding back information obtained during preparation of the subsets for individual Orders. The nomenclature of genera and species illustrated has been aligned with reference to the ‘Check List’ of Kloet and Hincks (1945), updates of this, and subsequently via recent, invaluable Internet postings (well exemplified by the Fauna Europaea Web Service; see References). The few Curtis names not yet located are indicated by quotation marks in the Intkey displays of descriptions and images, and the plates involved are presented under the pseudo-taxon ‘Unidentified Images’. By including illustrations additional to those of Curtis from the numerous early works listed in the References, we are able to exemplify all the British insect Orders (plus Phasmatodea and Mantodea, of which introduced species may occasionally be encountered) with at least one picture.
The orders Coleoptera, Diptera, Ephemeroptera, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Odonata, Orthoptera, Lepidoptera and Trichoptera are detailed to Family and/or lower taxonomic levels, and illustrated very extensively, in the separate data sets associated with this one. Their names appear in upper case in this subset. Of those not treated in separate data sets, the British species of Blattodea and Dermaptera are mostly illustrated in this one.