Lizard Island Field Guide uses the same searching system for all name searches. Specifically, the text entered into the search form is broken down into its constituent words. The exception to this rule is that words enclosed in double quotes are treated as a single search term. Trivial words are then removed (and, the, it etc.).
If a word or quoted phrase is prefixed by a + symbol, that means that the word or phrase is required to be present in the results matching the search criteria. If a word or quote phrase is prefixed by a - symbol, that means that the word or phrase must not be present in the results matching the search criteria. If no symbol is present, then the default behaviour is to require the word or phrase to be present in the results matching the search criteria.
If the search criteria includes multiple words and/or phrases, then the results are required to match the constraints implied by all of the words and/or phrases, not any of them.
A search term may return a list of species and sub-species, some with photo images and some of which say indicate that there is no photo yet. Entries that have identification photos are typically ones that have been infused with local knowledge and research. Those without identification photos often have rich references to relevant research papers, information about their distribution, and links to relevant information on external websites. Keep clicking through to explore all the links.
Lizard Island Field Guide facilitates searching for species by one or more colours. For each colour that you wish to match, add a colour selection control to the search form. Just the colour selection control to choose a colour close to that of the species observed.
If the search does not return results matching your observations, reduce the precision with which the colour matching is done by sliding the precision control to the right. This will tend to yield more matches.
The set of species that are returned as a match to the specified colours is limited by the species within the branch of a field guide that was being viewed when the decision was taken to search by colour. In this way, you can navigate within a field guide to the branch most likely to contain the species being searched for (e.g. fishes) and then do a colour search to find all fish in the field guide that have colours matching those that were specified.
Searching will only return species that have had their colours specified using the colour picker system. If you are logged in, you can specify the colours that are observed on a specific species by selecting them (and adjusting them where necessary) from identification images that are included in the species descriptions. Have a go at specifying the colours for a species. It is a lot of fun and adds real value to the field guide system. Simply navigate to the description of the relevant species, and choose the colour picker from the drop-down box that appears under "advanced content editing features".