What follows is our humble effort to help make staphs more accesible. In order to partition the family into maneagable groups, subfamilies and sometimes lower divisions are considered individually.There are many distinctive forms which, when they are learned and (mentally) removed from the list, leave the remainder much easier to appreciate. Notwithstanding this it soon becomes obvious that the problems involved with identification are formidable, and the situation is compounded by there being no comprehensive keys available in English.
At this stage, i.e. early in ones study of the staphs, it is worthwhile learning enough German to be able to make sense of the works of Freude et al ¹, these books give only line drawings but they are lucid and somehow easy to use, they do not repeat the mistake of Joy's Handbook ² where line drawings are proportional to a species size so that the smallest figures, which might have been most useful, become almost useless without a great deal of experience.
Admittedly one needs to be single minded and very determined with the staphs, they are difficult, but every successful identification provides material that can help guide other specimens through the keys. Studying staphs will soon generate a considerable number of identified specimens but in each case they should be taken as far as possible and then labelled and listed for future reference. This will be frustrating but also worthwhile, the secret is to keep on trying to key things out and remain aware of how far your unidentified specimens go, sooner or later things begin to fall into place.
This situation is unfortunate because for those interested in or even (as, sadly, with one of our group ³) excited by dealing with microscopic rove beetles the amount of work needed is very considerable.
Almost, it seems, by way of compensation the syaphs are not difficult to collect. They are found in most situations at most times of the year and just about any collecting technique will produce them. Samples of almost anything organic (sometimes even seaweed) will probably contain at least some; sweeping, beating, light trapping, ?? netting, pit fall trapping etc. etc. will produce them. It would be far easier to list situations where they are not found. Some idea of the ecology of the group is given under the subfamily and species descriptions.
² Practical handbook of British beetles, Joy
³ The author's son, one of our junior members, continually provides copious amounts of specimens which the father is expected to set, mount and identify - Webmaster.
Part of the reason for presenting this site is to show people some of the Coleoptera of our area while providing guidance as to how to make identifications certain. In some groups of staphs this is very difficult and, for this reason, the Aleocharinae are left out of the following discussion covering subfamilies. Apart from this the sequence follows that of the checklist from the Coleopterists website which represents, we trust, the latest ideas in staph phylogeny. In this list the former families Psephalidae and Scaphidiidae are treated as subfamilies of the Staphylinidae and so are considered here. Aleocharinae, which require a rather more detailed approach, will be considered separately following the subfamily discussions.
