Macrostomorpha taxonomy and phylogeny

I am relieved to announce that the software, iView Media Pro, with which I am currently cataloging my extensive collection of flatworm image, video and audio files (>25'000) has hopefully been resurrected from a near death experience, which it suffered when Microsoft bought iView Media Pro in June 2006 (only to rename it Expression Media and halt any serious development).

Anno Faubel has today asked me via email to please remove the PDF file of his unpublished 'Monograph'. I of course regret that such a useful document will no longer be available to the general public, especially as his website at the University of Hamburg, were I originally discovered the Monograph, seems no longer functional.

The Scratchpads Team has finally rolled out a working solution for batch image upload and annotation, after an unfortunate hiatus of well over a year. I have therefore recently been able to start uploading specimens again, and hope to find some more time for this in the near future.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to all the users that have either sent me worms or images of worms, and who had hoped that these specimens would go online soon. I hope this will happen soon.

I just attended a Scratchpads Training course organized by the Swiss Systematics Society, which took place on Thursday, November 25, in the Natural History Museum of the canton Ticino.

About a year ago Anno Faubel of the University of Hamburg, Germany, posted a PDF document on his website, entitled 'Monograph of the Macrostomida and Haplopharyngida (Plathelminthes: Rhabditophora)'. This document offers the most comprehensive literature collection on the Macrostomorpha since Ferguson's monograph in 1954. Moreover, it gives a detailed introduction to the morphology and ecology of these animals, and a list of the described species.

An invaluable source of information about the usage of the scatchpads is the official website of the EDIT sctatchpads, which you can find at http://scratchpads.eu.

The site has a collection of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), and other useful information, such as the Scratchpad Training Files, which include the documentation used during the Scratchpad Training Courses.

The software running the scratchpads was updated in autumn 2009 and it has improved a number of things:

- the image galleries now sort images by file name, which means that date-stamped image files are displayed in the correct order; this may eventually allow to get rid of the separate manually assembled specimen pages, if the image galleries are upgraded to allow the display of movies

- the Administer functions that are visible by default have been simplified, which will new help users to get started

The recent shift of the technology underlying the scratchpads (from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6) has led to numerous changes in how information is uploaded and displayed. Moreover, some previous functions currently do not work (e.g. the lists of the specimens and locations have disappeared), and the fileshares seem to have been abandoned. 

I am in the process of trying to familiarise myself with the new system, and hope to be able to support your questions again soon.

Best wishes,

Lukas

We are about to get started with the Scratchpads Training Course, which is taking place as part of the BioSyst Meeting in Leiden, The Netherlands.

I hope that this will improve my ability to support the different users of the MTP Site, and to learn about upcoming features as part of the Drupal 6 roll-out.

More later,
Lukas

During the recent 3rd International Macrostomum Meeting in Hasselt, Belgium I gave a lecture on observing and documenting Macrostomum in vivo.

Moreover, I introduced the participants to the main functionality of the Macrostomopha Taxonomy and Phylogeny website.