Miridae (Plant Bugs) - time for more levels?

There is a possibility that it's another species.

http://research.amnh.org/pbi/catalog/names.php?genus=Phylus+
family: Miridae
subfamily: Phylinae
tribe: Phylini (but we're not doing tribes yet)

Maybe now some of the more difficult Mirids can go to subfamily or tribe?

i'm eager to help all i can, but have to get a lot of learning first

Most people approved of your changes in Miridae and in fact we were all very happy about the new pages. Robin's comments under the Pentatomidae discussion applied to that family and not this one. And it seems that he didn't object to all the changes, just the creation of several tribes and the rush about the change. But the new Miridae pages were done after plenty of discussion.
I hope that you saved all that work in your hard drive and can restore Miridae to the newer version. Personally, I am most interested on the overviews of genera because I find them extremely valuable. Can you restore that at least? And, as I have said again and again, I wish we had them for every taxa.

Evidently there is a rule that any proposed changes have to wait a mandatory 30 days before implementation. Threatening to have me removed as an editor if I don't wait for proper approval is not exatcly a big deal, it may even be a blessing, but I don't own BugGuide so I removed the changes pending proper approval and waiting period. Maybe I'll feel up to redoing the effort again mid-December after the 30 days.

I put some good images back on the info page following our current "structure".

the 30-day quarantine's over. It's time to reinstate the mirid structure. Please.

I assume this is still in Tribe Mirini after the split from Lygocoris?

should be moved into Neolygus.

.

At the same time, please move the following image into the newly-moved species page.

I guess if we accept a Neolygus page, then we accept the species in it as well.

Any other Lygocoris images at genus level go to Neolygus?

among Lygocoris species listed nearctica.com. Another species (L. lucorum) belongs to the genus Apolygus. The remainings belong to Neolygus.

I think there is no image of L. pabulinus in the Lygocoris page, but the following image looks like an Apolygus species.



Concerning to the genus Apolygus, i got to know its existence in North America for the first time, and some photos of Apolygus species might be misidentified as Taylorilygus apicalis. Apolygus and Taylorilygus can be distinguished by the color of spines of hind tibiae. That is, Apolygus has black spine, while Taylorilygus has yellow to brown spines with dark spots at the base. Furthermore, A. lucorum is always greenish and relatively short and it has a immaculate scutellum. (See http://www.britishbugs.org.uk/heteroptera/Miridae/apolygus_lucorum.html)

Based on this, i think the following images are Apolygus species.


In the meantime, one of the key characteristics of A. lucorum is the lack of dark spot at the peak of the cuneus. However, all images except for the last one have dark spots at the cuneus. Among the palearctic Apolygus species, A. spinolae is very similar to A. lucorum. The key difference between the two species is the black spot at the end of the cuneus. Therefore, although i don't know whether A. spinolae is recorded in North America, there is a possibility that the former four bugs are A. spinolae.

Therefore, i suggest that the four bugs along with #129222 are moved to the genus Apolygus page, and the last one to the species A. lucorum page.

Without Neolygus being recognized at Neartica or PBI, I'm not sure how it got to BugGuide (I may have just missed the topic). This forum isn't about dissolving Lygocoris and moving all of the images elsewhere. You should start another discussion for just that subject.

one is Neolygus, and the other is Apolygus.

The issue related to Neolygus was suggested here.
The reason why i re-classified the species was the genus Neolygus page had been already created. If the genus Neolygus page was not created, i would not do that and i have no will to strongly argue about it until PBI or other authority list it.

Apolygus is a different issue. I found it when i was looking around the Lygocoris species for extracting Neolygus species. PBI listed Apolygus as a genus although Neartica did not.

Now, what should i do for two issues?

I moved vitticollis back until the issue of Neolygus acceptance is confirmed. As far as Rob Curtis' IDs, I can't figure out where they are coming from. To me it seems like one day as if by magic he had a bunch of species names and we accepted them all without knowing who the IDer was (expert?) or what characteristics made it so. For now I'll let someone else worry about that.

and, by the way, not always updates his BG posts -- he's very busy with his other galleries/work; i'll ask him about his IDs' provenance -- could you pls email me the links to his pix that make you wonder?

^^

Some here http://bugguide.net/node/view/242303 just have a species name added or I now have this as... Other users tend to say ID by Dr XXX and often have a quote "due to the xxx not longer than the yyy, darker zzz, etc.". Those are the best because you can judge who and why. The ones that just say Dr AAA says this is GGG make me wonder how definite the ID was and what it was based on. Was it a probably or a maybe type ID or was it definitely that species? Without the IDer or the why I am very sceptical.

But, the IDs of Rob Curtis should not be considered useless. Bcause i thought they were reasonable, i asked for new guide pages. Also, it is noted that the "genus Neolygus" is not baseless. For example, Fauna Europaea lists it as an accepted genus name and the genus name is commonly used in Europe.

The issues of [b]accepting[b] something may be separated from the reliablity of the thing. The former is the matter of choice.

Then, i have questions:
i) should i ask for a new guide page for the genus Apolygus to another forum?
ii) should i ask for solving the problem of conflict between the guide pages Lygocoris and Neolygus to another forum? If so, where?

I think that Taxonomy Proposals would be a good place to suggest accepting Neolygus and all of the species in it.

Actually, i do not want to raise a serious taxonomy issue because i am not a professional in entomology as you know... But, i cannot avoid this matter...

Although i wished to treat Neolygus as an independent genus, i didn't expect the genus page was made so early. So, i am now extracting the Neolygus species among the Lygocoris species. Maybe, the number of the Neolygus species is greater than that of the Lygocoris species.

WonGun will tell for sure, i hope

And I already said that it was a valuable contribution.

^^

Please do

...

*

In Korea, most of Phytocoris are gray and black, sometimes mixed with pale green...

What Phillip did in the Coleoptera page and what you are doing in Miridae is what we should have for most taxa if not all. I have been doing the same for Hymenoptera and several subtaxa.
Browsing is too cumbersome and many times shows images that are not truly representative or even wrongly IDed. That is why we need carefully hand picked representative images for each taxon.
Ideally such overviews should have their own page with their own tab along with: Taxonomy, Info, Images, Data, etc. If we had such category of pages they would constitute the true guide in Bugguide. I mentioned it once to John and will keep hoping that we end up having such section because we really need it.
Let us remember that originally: “Each guide page includes five sections, identified by clickable tabs at the top of the page: browse, info, images, links, and books” as stated in the introduction. Data was added later so I see no reason why another section couldn’t be added too.

Beatriz Moisset’s and John Maxwell’s ‘atlas’ pages are very valuable additions to the guide indeed. Thank you, colleagues! I just wonder (and apologize for my technical naiveté) whether the thumbs can be arranged, to facilitate comparison, side-by-side (to fill the space of the page) rather than vertically. Wouldn't it be nice to see the representatives of all the microparasitic families onscreen at once?
[unrelated: John, this is the most popular topic in this section since mid-Aug 2007!]

I like the work your doing on the Hymenoptera page. In many ways I like the MPG approach, just the best images. Not give us your tired, your poor focus, your cell-phone camera, anything you found in a spider-web... Sometimes I have to work my way through a few pages of images before I find a worth while image to include as a thumb when giving an ID. :-(

for Miridae and click on VIEW ALL, you can see the entire classification as it now stands on BugGuide for the Mirids with live links to all the pages. We're guessing (though we don't know how!) that it is possible for John V or one of the other tech experts to copy the page with the live links right to the home Miridae page. (You somehow have to open the page to see the actual links before copying and that's what we don't know how to do.) Once that is done, you can simply go in and add missing information or take out the species details and keep just genera or whatever you would like the home page to look like. Just a thought - it might be an easy thing to do??

Added a shell for now, will try to add images soon. Right now it isn't any better than going to the taxonomy page, but I can add to it.

Any comments would be appreciated. I think I need to collapse the genera to a single line per tribe/subfamily like the Cerambycidae page.

Which is better? Or mix them?

Also, there is an error in the Info page of the Miridae.
Generally, Mirids have no oscelli, but the species in Subfamily Isometopinae have oscelli.

The PBI site that WonGun linked to previously shows only 3 genera in subfamily Psallopinae (Isometocoris, Isometopsallops, Psallops), representing only 9 species. One species occurs in Panama, one is known only from a fossil (in Baltic amber), and the rest are from Asia. The genus Psallus occurs in North America but is placed in subfamily Phylinae, not Psallopinae.

PBI's Systematic Catalog is excellent, with its mulitple-choice searchable database on the left of the page, and a navigable directory on the right. There's now a link to it on each of the North American subfamily pages in the Guide.

http://research.amnh.org/pbi/catalog/names.php?id=90043&v=1

Page removed.

will add convenience + structure + value

^^

I tried it (easy to undo so no harm in a little test). The problem is that almost everything ends up in Mirini, grrrrr. Oh well, they are what they are.

Currently nothing in:
Tribe Hyalopeplini - seems to be absent at Neartica - removed
Tribe Mecistoscelini - seems to be absent at Neartica - removed
Tribe Scutelliferini - seems to be absent at Neartica - removed

So is it worth the extra level of browsing when too many just ended up in Mirini anyway?

Although the tribe Mirini is still a large group, the page of Subfamily Mirinae in the tab "Brows" clearly shows how different shapes the remaining four tribes have!