Burnt Fen Creative

New Paper: _Lathrobium sapaense_

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:41:03 +1200

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 correction of a single name published in a new paper, so that the ending of the species name conforms to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. Why is this important? It isn’t. It is in no way important. The Code is incredibly silly for mandating this kind of change. But what is important is that we follow the Code.

Codes like the ICZN are arcane and byzantine. They’re difficult to manage and difficult to follow. The more obscure rules, like with gender agreement, are annoying. But when we don’t follow those rules, the entire edifice of the Code is threatened, and we’re closer to not having a Code at all. That would be very difficult for science as a whole, as these names are currently the standard for talking about taxa.

I wrote this paper because I think that following the Code is important – and because I want to not-so-subtly shift the field towards making these sorts of changes unnecessary, by pointing out to scientists how silly the Code currently is. The more people have to wrestle with a poor Code, the more they are likely to push back and go through channels to ask their commissioners to change the Code.

It’s not the best strategy. A better strategy would be for me to talk directly to commissioners about changing the Code (which I’ve done), or to write articles about the changes directly (done that too), or to get myself elected to the commission (tried that). Given that those avenues are already being used or are exhausted, I’m doing what I can - by making sure the Code is upheld as it is. Further, I am also incentivized to publish papers. Academia is silly, too.

This paper is so short it doesn’t have an abstract. And, because I paid the $25 fee and because the paper is therefore under a CC-BY-NC license, I can reprint it here:

Lathrobium sapaense Tokareva & Bekchiev, 2025 was first described as Lathrobium sapaensis Tokareva & Bekchiev, 2025. The etymology states: “The specific epithet is an adjectival form derived from Sa Pa, the forest waterfall in mountainous Lao Cai Province, Vietnam, where nearby the species was discovered.” (Tokareva, Bekchiev and Nguyen 2025) The adjectival Latin ending -ensis has been added to the stem, sapa. This is the normal process for using this morpheme to latinize scientific names with non-Latinate etymologies. However, the suffix -ensis marks for the masculine and feminine gender; the neuter gender would be marked with the suffix -ense. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN 1999; henceforth ‘the Code’) mandates in Articles 31 and 34 that adjectival species-group names must agree with the genus-group name with which they are combined. In this case, Lathrobium Gravenhorst, 1802 has neuter gender, so the species-group name must agree in gender with it.

The gender of Lathrobium can be ascertained through combination with other species-group names in the genus, such as Lathrobium longwangshanense Peng, Li & Zhao, 2012 or Lathrobium tarokoense Assing, 2010, or by analysis of the generic name according to Article 30 of the Code. Under Article 30.1.3, the name is neuter because it is a Greek word, most likely λάθρῃ ‘stealthy’, with a change of ending, and so should take the neuter gender as -um is normally neuter in Latin. Using a different interpretation, the word does not resemble a Greek word exactly (necessary under Article 26), but it is combined by Gravenhorst with other neuter names, such as in L. lineare or L. terminatum (Gravenhorst 1802). Under Article 30.2.3, this confers neuter gender on the generic name.

The available name is Lathrobium sapaense Tokareva & Bekchiev, 2025

You can read the paper here: https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5792.1.12

Te Herenga Waka PostGraduate Student Association

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:05:35 +1300

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 it would be tempting to help with the PGSA, because I like organizing and helping students, but that it would be exactly the sort of job that would take a lot of my time, wouldn’t be paid work, and would get in the way of my thesis and my other organizing, such as with CURIOSS. Last October, after a year of attending events and meeting fellow postgrads, I realized at the AGM that there was a constitutional issue involving the amount of postgrads on the exec. So, I volunteered to run during the meeting, and ended up being elected.

For the last six months, I’ve been helping out where I could as an exec – helping to figure out strategy, advising on how to handle negotiations with VUWSA, the student association that includes undergrads and which was trying to take over all of PGSA’s activities, serving on various faculty boards where a postgrad voice from PGSA was missing, and organizing and attending some events. Today was the capstone of that, as I helped shepherd through the new constitution, something that was mandated by the Societies Act here. I helped with PythonNZ’s new constitution, too, as they went through the same process. The SGM today was a bit difficult to facilitate, as there was some excellent and very difficult questions to answer about how the new constitution is going. I think we managed. All of the motions passed.

I ran for the position of VP Academic/Research, but iff (if and only if) no one else ran. Thankfully, someone else did. So, for now, I find myself as of this afternoon without a position. I am now just a member of the PGSA again. I look forward to doing what I can on Te Here Tāura Rangahau Faculty of Graduate Research (FGR) board, and on Te Wāhanga a Manaia Faculty of Science and Engineering (FoSE) board, and others. But, from now, the exec meetings are optional – which is great, because it means I can focus on my thesis work. I’m happy about that.

I’m looking forward to being able to attend the coffee meetups, and just saying hi.

Kōkako photos in the press

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:29:15 +1300

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 was excited to get a Google Alert a few weeks ago that my name had been published somewhere on the internet. In this case, I was pinged that I had been mentioned in an article called Rat-free forest offers rare boost for kōkako north of Rotorua. The article talks about how an indigenous Māori-led conservation project in the north of the North Island is doing exceptionally well at eradicating predators that imperil the native birds here in New Zealand. The focal species for this project is the Kōkako, a beautiful endemic that has a haunting, organ-like call. I’ve only heard it once, on Tiritiri Matangi near Auckland, where I managed to snap some photos of a Kōkako as it munched on some Taupata on the coast.

I didn’t explicitly allow RNZ to copy this image. They didn’t ask. They didn’t need to, as it is freely available under a CC-BY license on iNaturalist. I don’t profit on this work. That’s OK. I profit in other ways - my work was part of a movement of people trying to save this rare species, and through having access to free, good imagery, the journalists were able to make the project come alive to a wider audience. That’s profit enough.

PythonNZ Committee: 2024 2026

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:36:00 +1300

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 the before times were also at the conference - most notably, Chris Neuegebauer and Deb Nicholson, my former boss at the OSI and now the president of the Python Software Foundation.

When elections for PythonNZ occurred, I decided to run. Somehow, disturbingly, I was elected. So, from 2024 until today, I was on the PythonNZ committee. While I was there, we dealt with the normal rigamarole for these sorts of nonprofits - making a new constitution, dealing with finances, having long committee meetings where people talked over each other. It wasn’t always fun, but it was rewarding. I learned a lot.

We also planned and hosted Kiwi Pycon 2025, which was an entire conference in itself. Together with help from Chelsea Finnie and Devi Ganesan, we produced the first academic proceedings and academic track the conference had ever had - small, but a good start. I gave a talk. I got an arbovirus. I missed half the conference. What I saw was still great.

The time commitment balooned to a year and a half, due to changes in our constitution and how we decided to do the fiscal years going forward. So, today, at the AGM, I rolled off of the committee. I am now strangely noe a member of any nonprofit boards – wait, no, I am now on the EC for the PGSA. Good lord. Well, it’s one down, anyway.

I was grateful for the help and support I encountered being on this board, and for the friendship and care of those involved. We didn’t always agree - it’s a board - but it was well worth the effort.

During my tenure, I attended not a single Wellington meetup. I wish I could say I didn’t know about it, but the truth is that I live just far away that driving into Wellington is difficult, and because someone in my house is immunocompromised, we mask everywhere. Going into a meetup at night is never on my list of things I want to do. It’s difficult. I wish masking were easier, but it’s not for me.

PythonNZ isn’t just about the meetups - Kiwi Pycon is great, by itself. It’s also about the wider community and the Discord and so on. I felt honoured to have been voted in and to have been able to serve.

Now to take a much needed nap before I work on my thesis.

Taxacom

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:13:00 +1300

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.

I’m hoping that we’ll end up having more good conversations in the years to come. I’m also hoping to institute the Contributor Covenant as a Code of Conduct, too.

Join us.

Kiwi PyCon 2025 Academic Track Proceedings

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:37:00 +1300

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 motive, too. I wanted an academic track for Kiwi PyCon, so that researchers and students could submit academic papers or conference abstracts and have them count towards their publication records.

Today, I finished that task by publishing the Kiwi PyCon 2025 Academic Track Proceedings. You can read them here: https://zenodo.org/records/18516794.

All in all, this took a bit more time than I expected. In the lead up to Kiwi PyCon, we had to plan how who would be on the academic committee, eventually settling on me, Devi Ganesan, and Chelsea Finnie, who provided much needed support to keep the work going. We decided to publish only abstracts for the conference, not full papers, as previous experiences at PyConAU suggested that reviewing papers and submitting them to JOSS was too much effort. We sent out marketing materials for the event, wrote up a CFP, emailed university programs to share it, and organized a small group of peer reviewers. In the end, we had very few submissions - just three. Two of them were chosen to also be part of the main program track, and so were presented at the conference.

These abstracts have now been published on Zenodo, complete with DOIs and references and some light editing. You can read and cite them here:

Littauer, R., & Ganesan, D. (2026, February 10). Kiwi PyCon 2025 Academic Track Proceedings. Kiwi PyCon 2025, Wellington, NZ. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18516794

One of the published abstracts was, somewhat embarassingly, mine. I presented on similar work to what I had presented a week before in Rio for the OpenForum Assembly, on Open Sustainable Technology.

Littauer, R. (2026). Mapping the Open Source Ecosystem for Climate Science and Sustainable Technology. Kiwi PyCon 2025 Academic Track Proceedings, 4–5. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18597029

You can also see a recording of my presentation here.

I am amazed that I seem as cogent as I seem, as I was very out of it that day. I didn’t make it to the second day of the conference, as jetlag and an unknown arbovirus knocked me out flat for the next week.

This is my first time I have been an editor for a proceedings, not counting my failed attempt in 2012 to publish ULAB proceedings, published ten years later by others who took up the mantle here. It was surprisingly easy to do on Zenodo, although a bit finicky to publish both the abstracts and the compiled proceedings together.

Thanks to Devi for being coeditor, for Chelsea for the encouragement, and to the Kiwi PyCon 2025 team for organizing a brilliant conference.

Fellow of the Linnean Society

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 14:57:00 +1300

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 - journalling, routines, laying out goals for the day the night before. Some signals in my environment obviously tell me who and what I am - the house that I live in, my partner, the food in my kitchen, the language I speak. Other signals are less strong but still evident daily: my body tells me it needs to exercise, my emails and calendar remind me that I am a PhD student at a university, my bank account and obligations remind me that I am the type of person who does the work I need to do.

If I woke up tomorrow in a newer world, with no ties to the past, no English, no clothes, I do not doubt that I would act differently and that I would be a different person. We are the fictions and truths that we build up. I’m fond of saying that I remain on earth because of my friends and family (and possibly also myself as a friend, too). Without connections, what worth would there be in living?

Joining this learned Society is another way for me to signal who I am, to myself, and to others. Hey everyone: I work in the field of natural history, I am a dedicated evangelist for science, I value sharing and communication and ethics in what I do.

To be a fellow, one needs to apply and then be voted into the society by the Fellowship Committee. I am happy that they approved of my application, which I sent in with referential help from my advisor Kris Bubendorfer and my mentor from the Royal Society Te Apārangi, Neil Birrell. It feels good to feel welcome (and no, I don’t know the acceptance rates).

Really: I am incredibly grateful to the society for approving my application. I didn’t expect that. I’m grateful to those who’ve helped me get to the point where this is possible, too. Not just people who’ve listened to me natter on about nomenclature for the last year, although they are certainly the most patient.

One of the fun things about being a member is that I get to use the post-nominals ‘FLS’. I’m also a member of the Royal Society Te Apārangi (although not a fellow), which means that my full title is properly Richard Littauer MA (Hons) MSc FLS MRSNZ. Which is pretty wordy, to be honest.

I have a few qualms about this process. Am I being elitist by joining a learned society? I’m unsure. I’m far more privileged than most - but does application and inclusion itself lend itself to elitism? Another one - how are the funds of the society disbursed, and is it worth the annual fee? I don’t know yet. Is there ever a proper place to say, “Richard Littauer FLS”? I guess my CV. Otherwise, no idea. If you have thoughts on any of these, or other questions, I’d love to hear them.

But for now, I join a society with a rich history, whose fellows included Darwin, Huxley, Franklin, Attenborough, Turner, and others. I’m glad to be part of that number.

Visiting Burnt Fen

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 21:00:00 +1300

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 continued existence of all matter, and by creationists to point to the idea of God – nothing comes out of nothing, so all of this world must have come out of something. I’ve never understood that. God must have come out of something, too, if the logic is applied. For me, the argument was just as useful for showing that the existence of the world isn’t in itself a proof of God having created it. There’s no way to know, one way or the other, what caused it.

I was perusing The Strand, a bookstore in New York, when I found a hardcover copy of W.B. Yeats’ plays. On the inside cover, a Richard L. Fenn had written their name. I felt connected to that name, not least because it was so similar to mine. Fenn is an acrostic for ex nihilo nihil fit. And, since as long as I can remember, I have always loved swamps, bogs, vernal pools, and wetlands in general. I’ve always wanted to be near them, to find salamanders and turtles and life in them. Fenn seemed as good a name as any for a pseudonym. I tried it on for a while, mostly written underneath really bad poems.

In college, I started a webcomic. I wanted to write something like Buttercup Festival, a comic I continue to love (and David Troupes, the author, has a Patreon you should all support). I needed a url and a name. I thought of fenn.co.uk, but that was taken. Reading my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary with a magnifying lens, I found that fenne was an old variant spelling for fen, and that couk (from co.uk) was a variant spelling of coke, a byproduct of smelting. I thought that sounded pretty cool. Fenne.co.uk. I figured I would call the comic Dragon Ash to be more acceptable.

The problem is that there was already a Japanese band called Dragon Ash. They’re still going. I didn’t really understand copyright law very well, so I went back to the drawing board. I learned that Burnt Fen was a place in England which had been a large fen, and where Hereward the Wake, a real-life precursor to Robin Hood, had marauded from. I added a pretentious name for wandering on the end, and called my comic The Burnt Fen Maunderings.

The comic was not good. Some of the strips were alright.

It didn’t matter much. I ended up buying burntfen.co.uk, and eventually just burntfen.com. Years later, I needed a name for an LLC to show I was more respectable than I was, so I founded Burnt Fen Creative LLC, and set up gmail on the domain. I’ve been using burntfen.com and Burnt Fen Creative ever since.

Every few years something happens that reminds me that Burnt Fen is still a place. I was overjoyed to learn at some point that https://www.burntfen.co.uk/ had been rebought, and was now used for an alpaca farm from Norfolk. That’s the best!

This September, I travelled to see my friend Stephen Kyle in Ely, near Cambridge. I had planned a few days at his house to get over jetlag before I attended RSECon in Warwick. We luckily had a day or two to hang out before he left me alone for the weekend to convalesce. Besides dragging him around all of the RSPB sites in the land to find rare birds, we had one outing that was absolutely essential - a trip to Burnt Fen.

Burnt Fen used to be a part of the fenlands - a vast area of England that was both covered in water half the year and exceptionally productive in terms of waterfowl, eels, and human life. It was an excellent example of a well-run, community-driven commons, where people worked together collectively to manage nature and their own livelihoods without excess for thousands of years. This only changed when wealthy landowners ignored the people’s needs, drained the swamps, and sent militia to deal with any dissenting opinions.

Burnt Fen itself is fairly unexceptional; it’s a sign on the road, mainly. The area is now mostly plowed fields, as this is England’s breadbasket. But even a sign is worth photographing. I doubt that anyone has ever travelled from New Zealand to see Burnt Fen itself - although the author of Imperial Mud, James Boyce, a Tasmanian, comes very close. (It’s a great and very readable book, and has a surprising amount in common with open source and the defense of the commons. It even mentions Ostrom!).

So, almost twenty years after I first bought the domain, I finally have been to the actual Burnt Fen. Here’s a photo. Thanks Steve.

Postgraduate Student Association Time

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 21:20:00 +1300

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 letting the committee in principle change parts of the constitution related to quorum for executive members, designating a Māori ex officio seat to the general student assocation at the university, VUWSA, and for removing advocacy as one of our main goals and instead delegating that to VUWSA. In return, VUWSA has promised to give us funding for a full staff member - 30 hours a week for advocacy, 15 hours for admin - so that the society can function. Currently, the society has been allocated a skeleton budget by the university. None of the executive positions are paid or given honorariums, and there’s no funds for even a part-time executive assistant.

We voted on the constitutional changes: they all passed. And then we voted new members in. We now have a new president, the fourth or fifth in a year, a new VP, and a few new executive members.

The coming year is going to be difficult for PGSA. Without funds to do a ton of events, it’ll struggle to justify itself for more funding to the university. With advocacy delegated to another organization - itself a competitor for university funding, which comes from a finite pool that officers must put in bids for - it’ll be difficult to justify funding the PGSA for advocacy in the future. And without remuneration for officers, all of the work will be volunteer, by people who already do not have a ton of time (postgrads).

I think it’s possible for things to get better, through assiduous effort, keeping VUWSA accountable on the advocacy front, and through working with the university to get access to the 5,000 postgrads at the university. Part of every postgrad tuition goes to the university with the express purpose of funding VUWSA. I think it’s a shame that more students don’t know this, and I think that the university should work with PGSA to help ensure that our rights are met as part of that.

Of course, for things to get better, there needs to be a strong executive committee. I wish I could say “Good luck to them!”, but it would seem oddly self-serving, because I threw my own hat in the ring to help.

So, here we go. I’ve added a new page to the homepage about my involvement.

If you’re a postgrad at VUW, reach out whenever. If you’re a member of a student association elsewhere, I’d probably like to pick your brain on how to help keep the plane flying.

Formatting bibtex entries

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 21:10:00 +1300

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 using cat to automatically make a giant list of all of the bibfiles for a while. But this wasn’t really great. What I wanted was a script that formatted all of the entries, and which checked the DOIs.

A few months ago I used an LLM to automatically generate a Python script to check DOIs and to concatenate the files easily. That worked well. Today, I extended it to check multiple DOI registries (not all DOIs are registered everywhere) for validation, and to use bibtex-tidy to automatically format each of the entries. I’m happy with the result; each individual file is more readable now. For example, this file:

@article{Littauer2025ZootaxaPycnocraspedum,
  author        = {Richard Littauer},
  year          = {2025},
  title         = {
    On the correct spelling of \textit{{Pycnocraspedum} rowleyense} {Schwarzhans, Psomadakis \&
    Nielsen}, 2025 ({Ophidiidae})
  },
  journal       = {Zootaxa},
  volume        = {5692},
  number        = {1},
  pages         = {200--200},
  doi           = {10.11646/zootaxa.5692.1.12},
  url           = {https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5692.1.12}
}

It just looks better.

That script is here. I hope its useful to someone else.

How do you keep your publications in order? Do you?