Tasmanian Thipsels

A research blog

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Not M4 - whoops

An embarrassing result of writing a running research blog is that it exposes the researcher's mistakes. The tiny M4 male I collected on Sisters Creek four days ago turns out, on much closer inspection, to be an M16 male.

This is good for distribution mapping, because it neatly fills in the long coastal gap in the M16 map. It's not so good for M4 identification, because I do need a better gonopod image for that species.

I built a reference library of thipsel gonopod images in 2012 by grabbing images with a fairly low-resolution eyepiece camera. My new method uses a 18 MP eyepiece camera and focus-stacking. You can see the difference below. On the left is today's M16 whole-telopodite image, very much reduced. On the right is the 2012 version.

M16 images

I'll try again for an M4 male in coming weeks. Memo to self: don't trust low-magnification (40X) identifications of thipsels.

2026-07-08