Scioly.org

Froggie wrote:

Kenshi Takahashi wrote:Hey everyone!

I was a little confused about how identification would work in Herpetology. I was an Invasive Main for two years, and identification in Invasives was simple enough as each species was separate. You were shown a picture of, say, Rock Snot, and that was that.
However, in Herpetology, if you were shown a picture of, say, a Box Turtle, you would only identify it as a "Box Turtle" and not Common Box Turtle, Spotted Box Turtle, Eastern Box Turtle, etc.

Which brings me to my question. How would one go about making a binder for this event? For Invasives, there'd be an entry for, say, Asian Citrus Psyllid, and then Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, and so on. However, for Herps, identification seems vastly different, and I am at a loss for how to correctly make a binder to account for all the different species.

Organizing by "Common Name" on the list (i.e. one entry for Box Turtles, then Western Pond Turtles, and so on) seems like it might make sense, other than the fact that there are a TON of different Box Turtles, each with their individual distributions, anatomy, repdroduction, etc., and one factsheet for Box Turtles would have to contain individual information for a bunch of different kinds of Box Turtles.

Any help, ideas, or wisdom are appreciated. Thanks!

I'd say to do all the ID stuff up to the level on the list (i.e. if there was a picture of a box turtle just put box turtle).
But I have no idea about the third paragraph. That's a good question.

varunscs11 wrote:

gavinnupp wrote:
I noticed that it says "or" rather than "and" in reference to a binder and field guide. In previous taxonomy competitions I believe both have been allowed simultaneously; teams would be allowed to have a binder AND a field guide. Why the change?

I'm guessing the national committee wants to change the way ID events are done. I mean for biologic ID events it was always 1 sheet of notes and a field guide but they changed that with invasives because there was no field guide. I'm guessing they liked how the event turned out with the binder and want to change the strategy for ID events. The only events that used to have the field guide and binder were the geologic ID event and in 2017 they got rid of the field guide for rocks. Personally, I think it's a very interesting change to the rules because now teams have to decide which resource they want to use and how they are going to deal with the shortcomings of each resource.

CVMSAvalacheStudent wrote:Isn't herpetology the study of herpes?

dvegadvol wrote:While they're both genus Lampropeltis, there are 69 sub-species (45 king & 24 milk, iirc) in that genus, so a "generic" milk snake is not a king snake or vice versa. However, if you identified it as Lampropeltis, and missed or left out the species, I think you'd at least get partial credit. A good question would be comparing certain Lampropeltis species to Elapidae species...