[Taxacom] Lisarda - a butterfly genus??

[Tony Rees]

Hi Mary,

If I can offer my 2 cents worth...

You want to know a few few things - that the name is correctly spelled, and
that if it is a homonym, you are looking at the correct instance i.e. in
the right taxonomic group (sometimes homonyms are in the same group but
generally the valid name is generally clearly recognised those cases).
Having the authority for the name will also help a lot e.g. for searching
Google Scholar in particular.

If you are sure that the name is correctly spelled, then for (almost all)
published zoological names you can get the genus authority from ION
(sometimes in multiple variants as used in the secondary literature). In
this case the query would be of the form

  http://www.organismnames.com/query.htm?q=Lisarda

from which you can find that there is just one instance of the name known
to ION after minor deduplication, it has the authority Stal 1859, and
clicking on that link takes you to the present ION classification
(generally to family but not always) and a couple of recent article titles.

Once you have the phrase "Lisarda Stal", entering that into Google Scholar
gets you a lot further than just entering "Lissarda", e.g. compare

  https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=Lisarda+stal

with

  https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=Lisarda

(the latter is almost useless in this case).

To establish whether the genus name might be a homonym (across multiple
kingdoms too if that is needed), my own IRMNG compilation is set up to do
this (also returns authorities as well), however not all the names are
presently as taxonomically well resolved as in ION or some other places.
IRMNG presently comes in two flavours: the most recent/ongoing version
which is as www.irmng.org (based at VLIZ in Belgium), and a "frozen"
version at CSIRO in Australia (last updated in 2014) which nevertheless
still does a few things not currently in the VLIZ version (although the
latter of course has other useful features based on the WoRMS model). Both
versions will check for homonyms as known to the system/s (only one
instance of "Lisarda" in this case, but in other cases there may be
multiple ones), and the older (CSIRO) version will also automatically check
for near matches in cases the name you want is misspelled, but is masked by
a correctly spelled name of something you did not want (if you get my
drift). The VLIZ version of IRMNG also checks for misspellings but only if
there is no other name on the system that matches the misspelled name you
entered.

Here are the direct routes to query the two IRMNG versions; you will note
that the display format is a bit different but the underlying data is
similar (the VLIZ version will, however, have the latest updates and
corrections post 2014 that are not in the CSIRO system):

IRMNG at VLIZ: (most up-to-date, but near matches are displayed if no direct
hit):

  http://www.irmng.org/aphia.php?p=taxlist&tComp=is&tName=Lisarda  (or
substitute last word with "Wagneria" to see a more extended example)

IRMNG at CSIRO: (less up-to-date but will include near matches too which may
in fact contain the name you were looking for):


http://www.marine.csiro.au/mirrorsearch/ir_search.go?hlevel=genus&searchtxt=Lisarda

I find the last very helpful to check for potential misspellings in
particular.

Once you have the desired target name plus authority, Google Scholar is
your friend and you should be away.

Best regards - Tony




Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
https://about.me/TonyRees

On 17 October 2017 at 07:22, Mary Barkworth <Mary.Barkworth at usu.edu> wrote:

> Once again, my problem is that I cannot find the name of the genus is any
> of my go to places. There are several records from the genus in SCAN. They
> place it in the Reduviidae. Has the genus been transferred? If so, to what?
>
> Mary
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