My late night habit of reading open access papers published in Zootaxa continues to provide some interesting small papers. Last week, a paper of mine was published from this work: Richard Littauer (2026). Lathrobium sapaense Tokareva \& Bekchiev, 2025 is the available name (Staphylinidae: Paederinae). Zootaxa 5792 (1) : 200–200. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5792.1.12 The paper is, in short, a…
Today I facilitated the Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington PGSA Special General Meeting, where we adopted a new constitution, elected some new executive committee members, and said thanks to those who were rolling off of the committee - including me. I’ve been helping with the PGSA since I first landed, if at first in a minimal, arm’s length kind of way. I knew when I got here that…
After the last Wikicon Aotearoa in Ōtautahi Christchurch in May, 2025 , I made the decision to change the license on all of my iNaturalist photos to enable easy reuse for Wikipedia and elsewhere. I am not a professional photographer; while I have sold art before, and while I have had showings of my work, I don’t prioritize returns on my photography. I am just happy to see it used. Which is why I…
I arrived in Wellington with fresh eyes and a spring in my step, back in 2024. I almost immediately signed up and gave a talk at Kiwi Pycon 2025, where I also volunteered a bit and helped out setting things up. The community seemed amazing - a great group of pythonistas who worked on furthering the language and building a lasting, fun community here in Pōneke Wellington. Some of my friends from…
TAXACOM is a mailing list that started some time in the forever ago, and ran until it was suddenly cut off at the end of 2025. It was one of the primary places for discussions of taxanomy and nomenclature as a listserve or public forum. I, together with Shinichi Nakahara and my mentor from the Royal Society Te Apārangi Neil Birrell , restarted it as a Google Group to allow continued discussion.…
Last year, I was on the organizing committee for Kiwi PyCon , the main Python conference held in New Zealand. Python is the most popular programming language in the world - this wasn’t a herpetology conference. This was part of my role and responsibilities as a board member for PythonNZ, which I joined because I wanted to help the Python here out, and to make new friends and learn. I had another…
On October 16th, I was voted in as a Fellow of the Linnean Society . The Linnean Society was founded in 1788, and is the oldest learned society devoted to the science of natural history. It continues to provide access to collections, to host a variety of journals, and to provide services to its members. Why join, though? Most days, I wake up and have to reform myself. I use some tricks to do this…
I recently had the immense joy of visiting Burnt Fen. No, I’m not talking about this website. The name in Burnt Fen has a rather long history. In high school, I was eager to break away from the yoke of Christian evangelicalism that I grew up under. One of the logical reasons I used to nurture budding atheism was the argument that ex nihilo nihil fit . This phrase has normally been used to justify…
The PGSA is a student association for PhD, Masters, and other postgrad students at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. The goals of the association are to further advocacy for those groups - which have pretty different needs than undergrads or staff - and to organize events and prizes. Yesterday, the PGSA had a general meeting to discuss constitutional changes. First, we voted on…
I keep a list of all of my publications in a few places - on my CV, on ORCID, on Google Scholar, and on this site . When I have the opportunity to include a bib file in those lists, I try to. In order to do that, I keep a folder of all of my bib files. I use LaTeX, I find bibtex a useful format for storing citations, and I want to make it easier for everyone else to cite my publications. I’ve been…
In early September, I published a new paper on ornithological nomenclature. Littauer, R. (2025). Nomenclatural corrections for gender of species-group names for two Solomon Island birds. Emu - Austral Ornithology, 125(3), 261–263. https://doi.org/10.1080/01584197.2025.2551298 This was the first paper that I have published that corrected the name of recognized, extant species names. Earlier in the…
There’s a wonderful Calvin and Hobbes strip – almost certainly my favourite – where Hobbes comes upon Calvin, hands down in the creek, and asks him what he is up to. Calvin responds that he is looking for frogs. “Why?,” Hobbes asks. “I must follow the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.” In the final panel, Calvin adds as an addendum: “My mandate also includes weird bugs.” Rarely have I felt so…
Last month, I was lucky enough to be announced as one of two recipients of the PhD scholarships from the Royal Society Te Apārangi Wellington Branch . They give these out annually. The award is unrestricted, and will go towards my living expenses here in Aotearoa New Zealand, as I am otherwise unfunded for my studies. On their website, they added this blurb: Richard’s thesis title is: Building…
Yesterday I gave a talk at the 2025 IEEE New Zealand Central Section Postgraduate Symposium, about the preprint which I and many other coathors published: 10 quick tips for making your software outlive your job . The talk was only five minutes, but it was fun to give. I regret that I was pretty sick with tonsillitis and was unable to stay for the whole conference, as it was a good showing and I…
Nomad as Fuck is a project I ran, highlighting awesome nomads and talking about some of their stories. By nomads, I mean people with enough privilege to travel around the world and work remotely – somewhere between expats and tourists. This was the term I used ambiguously in the mid-2010s, pre-Covid and without a serious lens on what nomadism might entail. The porject was born out of my desire to…
A couple of years ago, I was reading about differentiating subspecies of swans when I came across a paper that used a term that made me stop and stare. The paper was from Britain in the 1960s, describing how individual Tundra Swans could be differentiated by the pattern of black and yellow on their bills. Some birds were called “Nobbly”, some “Pennywise”, some “Shieldy”… and some “darky”. I’ll…
I often need to grab the title of a web page. For instance, this comes in handy when I am creating a new Wikipedia Page, like this one for Raoulia grandiflora , where I needed to grab the title of web pages for the references. To do this, I used to manually write out the titles, or guess at them. Then, I figured out that I could load up the sourcepage for the page using Firefox, and find the…
ICZN Case 12162: Designation of a neoneotype Borg, Carreras, Liberstein, Arno-Hunderra, and Kitchen (2034) have been widely lauded as the geneticists behind the de-extinction of Palaeoloxodon falconeri (Busk, 1867). In particular, the YouTube video of their children riding the dwarf mammoths has enlivened an otherwise dusty field of taxonomy. However, their publication poses grave concerns to the…
New publication post! On February 4th, I found a Wellington Tree Wētā stuck in my recycling bin. When I took it out to take some photos of it for iNaturalist, I noticed some odd sounds it was making - a thin, scratching rasp. I recorded it, and then looked online. And I found nothing. Not a single recording on XenoCanto or on iNaturalist. No one had uploaded the sound before, as far as I could…
This week, my first paper on zoological nomenclature was published. It’s not my first zoology paper – I wrote some horrendous papers on laryngeal air sacs in Homo during my second masters. But it’s the first paper I’ve published talking about the names of living things, and the first new paper I’ve had in the literature for a couple of years. You can read it here: Corrections for grammatical…
I want to share stuff, and I don’t think I can easily, because of how publishing works. I am currently going through a large list of scientific names for birds, looking for issues where grammatical agreement needs correction. In short, the ICZN has a Code which moderates how all scientific names - the Latin ones, like Passer domesticus or Homo sapiens , are properly formed and used. Part of this…
In my last post , I talked about applying for an ISSN. In short, I wanted to get one because the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature has a code, which mandates how scientific names are made - and names are only made valid according to that code if published in particular types of publications. Getting an ISSN would be one of the ways to make an independent website like this into a…
Today I’ve applied for this blog to have an ISSN, so that I can fix issues in Latin names for animals more easily. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is the standard by which scientists in zoology know how to properly name species using the Linnaean classification system. It’s the reason that humans are known as Homo sapiens and not Homo the people who walk upright who think they…
As of last night at the AGM, I am now a new Committee Member for PythonNZ . This is the local community group for the Python language and ecosystem, here in Aotearoa New Zealand. We hold meetups and host an annual event called KiwiPycon. While I don’t use Python in everything, I do use it almost every day I am on a computer, and it is great to be able to support and be a member of a local tech…
I am the eBird reviewer for St. Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha, three separate island archipelagos in the south Atlantic. They each have their own different ecology and biomes, with their own bird life that includes endemics for each group. Ascension and St. Helena are individual islands, with some small islets that often host large bird populations due to the lack of introduced…
I’ve started a new podcast, focusing on open source and the climate crisis. Fundamentally, I think having open models and open source code reduces friction in development, and allows for greater uptake and usage - crucially important factors when dealing with the largest issue humanity has ever faced. OSS for Climate Podcast If you have the time, listen, and share. Tobias Augspurger of…
A couple of days ago, I wanted a way to open my daily note in Obsidian for tomorrow, the day before. I couldn’t figure out how to do this easily, so I googled a bit and found this plugin . It was easy to install, and did exactly what I wanted, and saved me an hour of figuring out how to do it myself. Looking at the README, I saw that the owner had a Donating section, where you could buy him a…
I have added a few items to my publications list recently, and I wanted to add them here, too. None of them are peer-reviewed publications, but I thought each merited note there as they represent current work. Book Contributions I have contributed to these publications, and am listed as a contributor: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2021). Developing a toolkit for…
The best place to reach me is undoubtedly Signal or email . I don’t use social media very much at the moment, or, in the least, not in any structured, coordinated way. But, when I do, I use these accounts: Mastodon: mastodon.social/@richlitt Mastodon for Aotearoa New Zealand: cloudisland.nz/@richardlitt BlueSky: @richlitt.bsky.social LinkedIn: Here Instagram: @richlittv3 I use various Slack,…
The majority of my coding these days appears to be based around birds. Much of what I’ve been working on has been fun little side projects for birdinginvermont.com , my little site for playing around with eBird data and for finding new ways to gamify or help understand birding and birds. One tool that I’ve built recently is a VBRC checker: https://birdinginvermont.com/vbrc-checker . The VBRC -…
One of the books that I’ve read recently which has furthered and deepened my appreciation for the natural world is Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac . In the last chapter, he lays out a land ethic - how we can approach land ethically and sustainably. While I was reading, I couldn’t help but think about the corollaries between land and open source. The metaphor of open source as a digital…
I haven’t used this blog in a while, but I want to do so again, for a couple of reasons: I don’t like the old journal system I had set up. It leads to me not knowing where is what. I don’t want to split attention across dozens of journals for my readers, either. I don’t think that having a coherent blog is as important as it is. I think that posts are more interesting. I don’t go to websites…