The Ephemeroptera slide-collection compiled by James G. Needham at Cornell University represents an important collection of imagines, subimagines, nymphs, or parts there-of. There are nearly 3800 slides of representatives of 18 families. The collection contains mostly material from the Nearctic Region with an emphasis on the area around Ithaca, NY, New York state, and North Carolina state. Some specimens, however, were collected in South America, e.g. Argentina, Brazil, British Guiana, Peru, or Surinam, tropical Africa, the United Kingdom, or India. With the help of this database we want to make this important collection of mayflies more easily accessible to the Ephemeroptera research community.
The database contains the following information: family, genus, species, author (in only very few instances), locality, date of collection, collector, number of slides, parts mounted on slide, and remarks. The collection is arranged alphabetically after family, genus, and species. The Mayflies of the World - A Catalog of the Family and Genus Group Taxa (Hubbard, M.D. 1990 Flora & Fauna Handbook No. 8 Sandhill Crane Press) was used to check spellings of generic names and assign them to families.
The easiest way to search for specific species is by species-name. Please be aware that misspellings might occur because the handwritten labels are sometimes difficult to interpret. Additionally, in only few instances the author was given on labels so that a search on a specific species might give ambiguous results. Be aware that the species are listed according to Needham's identification and genus-species combinations or synonymy of taxa will not always represent the most recent knowledge.
We use an open keyword search to look for terms in any one of the following fields: family, genus, and species. The best search strategy would be to have any of the following information before hand:
The database is also browsable, so don't worry if you're not sure what exactly you're looking for. If you are looking for type specimens of species described by J.G. Needham or J.R. Traver then please check the type database (link) as these are not listed in the general Ephemeroptera database.
Please don't hesitate to contact us if you are interested in borrowing slides. Just contact the curator James Liebherr (jkl5@cornell.edu) or the collections manager Rick Hoebeke (erh2@cornell.edu).