Interactive keys for brittle stars

Two interactive keys in Xper3 format can be used freely online:

Key to the species of Ophiuroidea from Araçá Bay, Southeastern Brazil:

https://www.xper3.fr/xper3GeneratedFiles/publish/identification/-2625900241884135148/mkey.html

Reference:

Reference: Alitto R. a. S., Bueno M.L., Guilherme P.D.B., Domenico M.D., Christensen A.B. & Borges M. (2018). Shallow-water brittle stars (Echinodermata: Ophiuroidea) from Araçá Bay (Southeastern Brazil), with spatial distribution considerations. Zootaxa 4405 (1): 1–66. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4405.1.1

Key to the families of Ophiuroidea:

This key works best for the genera it was built on, because several of the families are morphologically highly heterogeneous (e.g., Hemieuryalidae), so that few typical family characteristics could be identified. For morphologically homogenous families (e.g., Amphiuridae), it should work well.

https://app.xper3.fr/xper3GeneratedFiles/publish/identification/7495441984259574364/mkey.html

Reference:

Goharimanesh, M., Stöhr, S., Mirshamsi, O., Ghassemzadeh, F., & Adriaens, D. (2021). Interactive identification key to all brittle star families (Echinodermata; Ophiuroidea) leads to revised morphological descriptions. European Journal of Taxonomy, 766, 1-63. https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2021.766.1483

This key is also available in DELTA format freely downloadable from Zenodo.
https://zenodo.org/records/5261537. Please, follow the below instructions for usage.

How to use the interactive key:

  1. Download the DELTA zipfile (The link is available in supplementary 4 of the main paper [Goharimanesh et al. (2021), see below]). Open the downloaded zipfile in File/Windows Explorer, and drag the folder ‘delta’ from the zipfile. It can be placed anywhere, but the root of your ‘C’ drive is recommended. This will produce a folder ‘C:\delta’.
  2. Download the interactive key folder including the Ophiuroid identification key by the link provided in the main paper.
  3. You can run the Intkey app by double-clicking on ‘C:\delta\intkey5.exe’ in File/Windows Explorer. In the ‘Select data set’ window, browse to an initialization file, or type or paste the name of an initialization file, which may be on your computer (interactive _key_folder/intkey.ink)
  4. For convenience in running Intkey, you can associate it with its initialization-file type, ‘.ink’.

Windows 10

In File Explorer, double click ‘C:\delta\sample\intkey.ink’. A dialog opens, with the message ‘Windows cannot open this file’. Scroll to the bottom of the list. Leave ‘Always use this app to open .ink files’ checked, and click ‘Look for another app on this PC’. In the ‘Open with...’ dialog, browse to ‘C:\delta\intkey5.exe’, and click ‘Open’.

Windows 8, 7, Vista, and XP.

In Windows Explorer, double click ‘C:\delta\sample\intkey.ink’. A dialog opens, with the message ‘How do you want to open this file?’. Select ‘Select a program from a list (of installed programs)’, and click ‘OK’. In the ‘Open with’ dialog, leave ‘Always use the selected program to open this kind of file’ checked, and click ‘Browse’. In the ‘Open with...’ dialog, browse to ‘C:\delta\intkey5.exe’, and click ‘Open’. Click ‘OK’.
  1. You will now be able to start Intkey by double clicking on an Intkey initialization file in File/Windows Explorer, e.g. ‘interactive_key_folder/intkey.ink’.
(The instruction above is almost extracted from delta-intkey.com)
  1. When the interactive key is running, the characters are listed on the left (it is also possible to ask the software to show all/the best characters to separate the taxa). In addition, on the upper right, all taxa, and on the lower half, only eliminated ones are shown.
  2. By clicking on a character, the states will be shown to choose from, and images can be requested to distinguish the states precisely. After selecting the states, the software eliminates some taxa. The remaining taxa are then shown in the upper right half of the window.

The user can continue the identification process based on the characters that are possible to observe on the specimen and narrow the identification until one taxon remains. Moreover, characters can be used in any sequence. Some family characters may not be present or ambiguous in some species. Therefore, it is possible to skip ahead, facilitating faster identification.

NOTICE:


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