Diario de murphyslab

Sometimes it's useful to browse species visually. I find this feature particularly useful for moths, as although I've photographed several, I lack sufficient expertise and familiarity.

I've used the iNaturalist taxonomy under Moths and Butterflies for moths to create a table of superfamilies to visually browse. The site limits display to the top 500 most frequently observed species within a given search, hence for some superfamilies (SF) such as Noctuoidea, the individual families (F) need to be perused in order to see all of the species identified to date.

Other tools exist, however these tend to display pinned moth specimens, whereas the images on iNaturalist tend to be photographs of live moths with their wings folded. Comparing between your photo of a live moth and pinned specimens can be difficult, hence why there's a benefit to looking at the species list on iNaturalist.

Perhaps this will also be useful to others.

Visual Tools for Lepidoptera Identification

These are other tools that I use regularly:

North American Moth Photographers Group: Plate index of North American moth species.

Pacific Northwest Moths: Photographic Plates. Coverage is limited to the following moth families:

• S.F. Bombycoidea (only native families: Saturniidae, Sphingidae)
• S.F. Drepanoidea (only native family: Drepanidae)
• S.F. Geometroidea (only: Uraniidae) ... not: Geometridae (!)
• S.F. Lasiocampoidea (Lasiocampidae)
• S.F. Noctuoidea (Notodontidae, Erebidae, Euteliidae, Nolidae, and Noctuidae)

Lists of BC Moth Species Observed on iNaturalist

How was this made?

The above list is just a table. Journals use Markdown formatting, and there is also Markdown formatting for creating tables.

The easiest way to make a Markdown table is to first create the table in a spreadsheet (mine was in Google Docs), then to copy the table and paste it into the Markdown Tables Generator. That site will quickly convert the table into Markdown code. Copy and paste the code into the journal and voilà, you're done.

To make the links, I used a CONCATENATE function, which is commonly found in spreadsheet applications, to place the taxon_id number in each link. Here's an example formula:

=concatenate("[link](https://www.inaturalist.ca/observations?place_id=7085&taxon_id=",D2,"&view=species)")

If you wish to replicate this for yourself,