Hello all, you may have noticed there have been some changes to the blog, notably a complete revision of the various pages, an updated For Sale page, and the removal of a lot of older posts and photos. As mentioned in my post “Blog Updates”, a lot of my old postings showed a lack of knowledge (I was naïve to put it bluntly) with regards to many invertebrates, were rambling, and kind of all over the place. As I am now becoming more involved with invertebrate cultivation in terms of taxonomy and conservation, I believe these older posts do not really add any value to the collective discussion of invertebrates, and while I have saved them for my own personal perusal, I have decided to remove most of them. The few that I have left are the interviews, the velvet worm post, and a few others that hopefully help some people with their collection.
A less professional reason for this removal of posts is I ran out of space to upload photos here on the blog; seeing as the majority of pictures that were taking up space were so often my C-grade, unsized images, I figured it would be better for me to download them so that they aren’t lost, but then take them off the blog. I am using a new camera so I hope to make up for any dearth of imagery with fewer, but better, pictures.
In terms of material I am adding, I am in the process of completely redoing the “Other Resources” page, as I have discovered tens, if not hundreds, of new webpages that are useful to invertebrate enthusiasts in one way or the other. Not least of these sources is one of my own projects, The Millipede Enthusiast Database, and the umbrella resource it falls under, the Digital Encyclopedia of Arthropods (currently unpublished), which I hope to see grow over the course of the next few years.
One other thing that I have been pondering deeply is how to reconcile various aspects of my Christian faith with things like the phylogenetic species concept and conservation vs. dominion. Those of you who have been watching my blog for a while will remember my sporadic references to my beliefs, but they never really had any depth. In keeping with my desire to bring up the quality of dialogue on this site overall, I also want to start exploring some of these problems on here, so that hopefully I can foster some dialogue with others on the problem. I don’t see Christianity and science as being in conflict, and I certainly don’t want to get political, but I definitely want to further research these things and present what I find here to y’all.
Aside from these resources, I have started to branch out in the platforms I hang out on; while I still spend a good amount of time on such sites as Arachnoboards and Roach Forum, you can now also catch me on formiculture.com, phasmatodea.com, WhatsApp, iNaturalist, BugGuide, and possibly Twitch in the near future. I also have been spending a lot more time out in the field scrambling up and down rocky slopes in search of invertebrates, and similarly in order to to identify those invertebrates I have been spending a lot more time rummaging around on the Biodiversity Heritage Library trying to find obscure descriptions of even obscurer species, ha ha.
In the end, I hope that this website can continue to serve as a sort of public online journal of mine, and a springboard for others to access information shared by those much more knowledgeable than I. Now Arthroverts, start putting your money where your mouth is and go make those posts!
May your collection prosper, and I look forward to continuing to explore the wonderful world of invertebrates here and elsewhere.
Thanks,
Arthroverts