Hi Frostfire,
Quote:
Originally Posted by frostfire
I've been looking though some books and think that it might be a Amblyteles armatorius.
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Well, in general, the problem with "looking at books" is that hardly anybody has the sort of books that show
all Ichneumonid wasps. It's a rather huge group and it seems (I do
not 'know' these things - just copying what I read elsewhere) that for mostly
any species displayed in mainstream insect books or even specialized 'picture books' there are a handful of (less frequent?) lookalikes, sometimes even from different genuses or families.
Of course, what exactly qualifies as "lookalike" is in the eye of the beholder, but if the beholder is a generalist looking at mainstream fieldguides chances are the number of possible lookalikes (not displayed) will only increase. Specialist of the group are scarce and those that are rumoured to exist seem to have better things to do with their time than hang around on internet forums (some do however seem to be friendly toward people sending in specimen for ID
)
I have great respect for people such as Dogghound who have at least had the ambition to look at the group in some detail and 'dare' to come up with names, but if 'any old forumuser' comes up with names in the same way you did I think it's always sensible to inquire how they got the name to try and judge how reliable it might be.
For me the problem is that, obviously, there are also some species that
can be ID-ed reliably from photo - I just don't have the faintest idea which
My 2 cents, Arp