John Partridge

A copy of the WBRC database at home does tend to produce some ‘what have we got’ thoughts, and some recent collecting and subsequent identification problems led me to look more closely at our carabid records, so that I could see what we had got, and check that I wasn’t producing records of highly unlikely species. That led me to compare the species with just a few records with the national Provisional Atlas published in 1998.

This comparison produced a list of ‘possibly dubious’ records - although none of them looked impossible - which I showed to John Meiklejohn, who immediately started to check who had produced them, and what could be checked further. Thankfully, this showed very few problems, apart from one glaring error - at least it glared to John - which must have happened when I was inputting the records from cards back in 1998.

The list (Table 1) and maps (Figs 1 &2) show the carabid records we have, together with the number of records of each species, which gives some idea of the species probability. This has been checked as far as we are able. It may well be that there are other local recorders who have carabid records that could support some of the singleton occurrences, or would just fill in some of the gaps on the map - if so we would be pleased if they would consider letting us have them.

There must be a number of people out there like me who have dabbled with carabids, as they are supposed to be one of the easier beetle groups. I wonder if there would be any mileage in having a ‘carabid workshop’ at some time in the future, perhaps when the educational facility at Smite is up and running, either just ourselves comparing specimens, or bringing in an ‘expert’ for the day - if this would interest you please let me know.

Later note: It was pointed out by Kevin McGee that the records for Cicindela sylvatica were highly dubious, as this is very much a southern species of limited distribution. I did not investigate this earlier as there appeared to be 5 records. Further research shows that these originated from one record, by Fred Fincher, in Cleeve Prior, in 1949. It will need some further work in searching Fred's notebooks to check this further, although, as John Meiklejohn points out, the species is very distinctive. It just shows the problems of verifying historical records.

LUFF, M.L. 1998. Provisional atlas of the ground beetles (Coleoptera, Carabidae) of Britain. Huntingdon: Biological Records Centre.