Processing and identifying insect remains
From the following scene.
The scattered remains of an unknown insect
Curation - The first thing to do will be to label our specimen. Since mounting would involve gluing parts to a card, or trying to re-assemble the parts in order to have an intact specimen, for this example that will be skipped. However, label data is essential for all of your specimens, so here is the label data to accompany this assemblage:
    USA: Florida: Alachua Co.
    5802 NW 57th Way
    Gainesville; 26-V-2004
    P. M. Choate collr.
    specimen found dead in driveway

Identification: The next step will be to see what information is need for each level of identification. For this we will use our textbook and examine morphological characters needed to arrive at the following taxonomic categories.

  • Order
  • Family
  • For Subfamily, Genus, and species, a variety of literature will be consulted, as you will see.
Introduction | Identification
.