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Re:We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the ... by throwanem on Monday February 22, 2021 @02:18PM (#26229106)
iNat is good, but crowdsourced, and anything but a panacea; for example, I'm very confident in my identifications of the Auplopus mellipes and Auplopus architectus metallicus individuals I encountered and photographed last year, but those (plus one braconid, of which I'm admittedly uncertain myself) are the only observations I have on iNat that haven't had any species confirmations from other users. (That's fair; I needed considerable literature review to develop that level of confidence, and I doubt most iNat users share the extent of my interest in wasps.)

Another option is BugGuide (https://bugguide.net), which I've actually found more useful - it did me a lot of good figuring out those auplopids. It doesn't provide any sort of dichotomous key (that I've been able to find), but there are a lot of observations available, often with very high-quality images, which helps a lot when specific identification depends on subtle features.

In general, though, hymenopterans and especially solitary wasps are just difficult. There are many genera and even whole families that are hard to tell apart with much confidence. One of the first things you notice in the literature is the importance to specific identification of male genitalia, which are internal, practically microscopic, and only even potentially useful if you have the good fortune to happen on a very rare male of a solitary wasp species - and even then, sexual dimorphism can be such as to make a solid male identification useless for spotting a female unless you actually observe them to be in copula. (Female mutillids, aka "velvet ants", don't even have wings!)

All of which is to say, I would expect the more obscure solitary bees to pose the same sort of difficulty.

Re:We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the ... by cmehdy on Monday February 22, 2021 @02:34PM (#26229374)
Do you know of any place where one could simply contribute?

Bugguide seems to be North America only, but while I stayed in a remote area of the Indio Maiz reserve in Nicaragua I stumbled upon a spider that I haven't identified in years and can't quite find any place to simply share the photo[0].

[0] unknown spider on a banana leaf in eastern Nicaragua: https://i.imgur.com/iFMJxtl.png

Re:We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the ... by pvaldes on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @06:12PM (#26244305)
> unknown spider on a banana leaf in eastern Nicaragua: https://i.imgur.com/iFMJxtl.png

Without having the eye arrangement is not easy, but taking in mind the habitat and shape, a member of Ctenidae would be my first candidate

Compare for example with Ancylometes or Ctenus.

If not, we could start weaving further from there. Zoropsidae, Lycosidae or Sparassidae (check Heteropoda venatoria for example) would be other acceptable family candidates. Those last couple of legs seem very characteristic.

Re:We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the ... by pvaldes on Thursday February 25, 2021 @06:17AM (#26261780)
Definitely Araneomorpha Lycosoidea, so there are ten families of interest or so. We don't have the eyes so we'll never know. Cuppiennius appears often in banana leaves, but doesn't have that strange angle in the last legs (Maybe is an abnormal specimen or an effect of the camera?).
Re:We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the ... by cmehdy on Friday February 26, 2021 @05:40PM (#26280718)
The legs were definitely like that, and it's too bad I didn't get the eyes then!

I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't particularly known, considering it was deep within the Indio maiz reserve (not just by the only town of Greytown but 5-10 hours by boat into the reserve from there)

Re:We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the ... by pvaldes on Saturday February 27, 2021 @04:57PM (#26288549)
There are thousands of candidates, and could be even a new species.

The name Lycosa aragogi is already taken...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycosa_aragogi

Re:We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the ... by Symbiote on Monday February 22, 2021 @03:07PM (#26229852)
Isn't this the primary purpose of iNaturalist?
Re:We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the ... by throwanem on Monday February 22, 2021 @03:21PM (#26230033)
Yes, iNat is worldwide and that's the first place I'd try.

That said, I wouldn't necessarily expect a whole lot. I'm not even an amateur arachnologist, but my sense is that spiders are about as complicated as hymenopterans, if not more so; especially outside well-known families like the salticids, it seems like it's not rare to find difficult identifications.