Six Months of Prompt Engineering: Building Scientific Altitudinal, Topographical, and Geological Visualizations for Spiders

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  Six Months of Prompt Engineering: Building Scientific Altitudinal, Topographical, and Geological Visualizations for Spiders By: Luis A. Roque,  Arácnido Taxonomy Six months ago, I set out on what seemed like a relatively straightforward goal: create better visual representations of where spiders live. What I quickly discovered was that producing scientifically meaningful ecological visualizations requires far more than simply asking artificial intelligence to draw a landscape. It requires learning how to communicate ecology, geology, geography, climate, and biodiversity in a language that AI can understand. Over the past six months, I have spent hundreds of hours developing, testing, refining, and rewriting prompts designed to generate publication-quality altitudinal, topographical, geological, and habitat-based visualizations for spiders, particularly tarantulas and other species whose distributions are closely tied to specific environmental conditions. What began as a curi...

The arachnological collection at the Natural History Museum of Bern (NMBE), Switzerland: scope, history, and significance

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The arachnological collection at the Natural History Museum of Bern (NMBE), Switzerland: scope, history, and significance

Abstract

The arachnological collection at the Natural History Museum Bern (NMBE) comprises approximately 120,000 vials containing around 500,000 specimens of spiders (Araneae), harvestmen (Opiliones), and scorpions (Scorpiones). While the material originated from around the globe, most of the specimens were collected in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The collection is organized into five main sections. It encompasses the collections of Konrad Thaler, Peter “Otto” Horak, Peter Sacher, and Ambros Hänggi, along with a general collection that features rare specimens, including material collected from caves. The material is stored in 80% pure ethanol. Since 1996, a total of 60,000 vials with 235,000 specimens of Araneae, representing 2080 different species, have been digitized and electronically catalogued. The collection also holds type material, including 25 holotypes and 453 paratypes of Araneae, three holotypes and paratypes of Opiliones, and one holotype and two paratypes of Scorpiones. A detailed list of the type material is provided in Suppl. material 1.

Kranz-Baltensperger Y, Kropf C, Sann M (2025) The arachnological collection at the Natural History Museum of Bern (NMBE), Switzerland: scope, history, and significance. ZooKeys 1258: 1-8. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1258.167351