Posted by Juergen Peters on 17-10-2016 16:15
#8
Hello Sundew,
Sundew wrote:
you have a forum of your own and more that 9,500 posts in this one
accumulated since 11 years now...
so you should not stress your "nonprofessionalism" too much!
I am a layman knowing a little bit of this and that, but nothing in deep. And Diptera are only one of my interests, I am more a generalist. It's a pity that we have no real dipteroligst in our forum, so that I often have to relegate people to diptera.info, because I cannot identify their flies.
Likewise you have meanwhile gathered a lot of experience that also allows to read keys.
The problem is not only to read keys, but to identify the given characteristics on photos. I am often not able to count antenna segments (not really important in Diptera, but in Hymenoptera etc.), because I don't recognize the borders between them. And counting bristles on fly thoraxes or legs confuses me totally. I admire the specialists who see them clearly and know where they belong.
I do not want to bother the handful of true experts too much, and it makes me proud to find out many names myself
Oh, come on, that's not fair! I am also not the one who posts dozens of pictures of animals, spoiling the experts precious time for flies I also could identify myself. I guess this is the one and only
Eristalis I posted in the whole year 2016 - from hundreds of photos of Syrphidae I took this year.
I have got photos of unidentified Diptera (and many other insects of course) here on my harddisk dating back to 2005 or 2006. Maintaining a forum of my own and trying to answer questions of many (more laic than me) people is very time consuming. And especially when you have a weak health like me and cannot sit at the PC for more than two or three hours in a row, then you cannot go into the depths of all special subareas of the science like learning the different terminologies in every branch (and it IS different between dipterology and arachnology (where my roots are) for example), which are necessary to interpret keys from different subfields.