How to use interactive keys

Menu Bar Icons

The open book icon allows you to read an introduction, description, acknowledgements and references.
The blue-star icon presents the best characters to continue your identification.
The traffic-light icon starts a new identification.
The curved-arrow icon allows you to change previously entered information about the specimen being identified.
The squiggly icon allows you to change your error tolerance. If you are not sure of your identification or suspect that the taxon you are trying to identify has a lot of morphological variation, then you can click on the squiggly and move the tolerance level up or down. If you change from 0 to 1 then the program will tolerate a 1 character difference by all taxa in the set.
The unequal-circle icon.
The traffic-light ? icon sets Intkey into query mode. When you use blue-star the identification procedure only takes characters scored for one or more states (overlap) into consideration. Unknowns and inapplicables are not considered. In non-query mode overlap, inapplicables and unknowns are all taken into consideration.
The 3x5 card icon lists all characters in their order of appearance and allows you to choose the character that you prefer. This is very useful if you know something specific about your specimen. For instance stenopodidean shrimps are the only crustaceans with extremely large third peraeopods. If you choose the peraeopod 3 size character, then in one step you will be able to identify stenopodidean shrimps.
The equal-circle icon will display the differences between taxa. For instance it will tell you that there are four differences between caridean and stenopodidean shrimps.
The green equals sign icon allows you to search for taxon names.
The yellow vertical oval icon allows you to use subsets of characters for identification.
The green horizontal oval icon allows you to use subsets of taxa for identification. For instance, if your specimen was a female with a brood pouch and you realized that is indicated a peracaridan crustacean, then you could choose the subset
The blue information button displays descriptions and images of taxa.

 

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