Question: When your finding insect, spiders and bugs how do you know if its the same species?

  1. Terrific question! Some scientists’ specialise in taxonomy, which involves identifying, describing, naming and interpreting the interrelationships between one and another. These scientists write “taxonomic Keys” (in scientific papers or books) this enables other scientists (or interested people) to work out what an animal is.
    Using my general knowledge of an area, being able to recognise what I’ve seen before, going to the resources available or on occasions directly to scientists working in the area all help in the identification process.
    Sometimes the differences between species are relatively straight forward to work out, but on other occasions species identification can only be done via internal examinations or genetic tests – so it can be very specialised. The really specialised “stuff” is not the taxonomic end I tend to be involved with.

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