Natural History with toddler

Lately after I pick up my daughter from daycare, we come home and we go sit on the bench in the backyard. I call this the "Banana/Natural history time" and typically involves her eating a banana, while we both unwind from our day activities. This is becoming fast my favorite time of the day. As mentioned in a famous book series "The world is quiet here" during that time.

The above-mentioned toddler during snack time

Right behind the bench, there is a little patch (maybe 1x2 square meters) of native plants. Inspired by David Haskell's book (The Forest Unseen) we have been doing daily natural history observations during the "banana time".

We have been watching ants digging new tunnels, blue-eyed grass flowering, azalea's dropping their flowers and creating pulp-like substrate and bryophytes producing their sporophytes. Now, I do realize that my 21 month daughter cannot assimilate most of that, but you got to start them early, right?

Biology related music

We all get feedback from students and frankly this two way communication is one of the best perks in the job. During the Spring semester, I was talking about conifers in my Principles of Biology II class. Specifically, I was taking about the bristlecone pines (Pinus aristata) found in the western USA and how some of those have been around for several thousand years.

One of my students later emailed me saying that my lecture reminded her of the song "Bristlecone" by the "The New Empires".  It is a lovely song and you can listen to it here. 

Do xanthopygine rove beetles eat fruit?

It's been a long time since the last post, but I was out for good reasons: end of the semester craziness, grading a mountain of exams, working for a three letter (scientific) government agency and on top of all  these a sick child. Now I need to start the paper writing machine for the summer.

I have been uploading several video clips of rove beetles on figshare and you can see many of those here Almost all of those are from my graduate school days and were shot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, either in 2000 or 2001. I used some of the data to write a paper on Nordus fungicola natural history (a link to the paper is here).

Here is a clip of another Xanthopygine rove beetle (Xenopygus analis) munching on rotten Gustavia superba fruits. Almost all xanthopygine rove beetles are considered to be carnivorous, but I guess there are always exceptions out there.

                                             http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.693731

Here is a more typical example of feeding behavior,  a male Nordus fungicola stealing a prey item from an ant (no idea what this is) and then proceeding to chew (technically speaking, this is extra oral digestion) the fly larva. 

The value of teaching collections

When I first arrived at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga five years ago, I did not expect to find much in the form of an entomological collection. To my surprise, our little Natural History Museum had a descent teaching collection (~48 drawers) with many of the families of insects found in the Southeast. Like most teaching collections, specimens are collected by students, identified (typically) to the family level and the locality labels can be problematic (e.g. on non-archival paper, with non-archival ink) without enough details. I bet most specimens in the collection have labels in the following format:

TN: Hamilton Co.
Chattanooga, date
collector.

Yet despite these problems, teaching collections can contain real gems. Last week we had a visitor from Alabama (Steve Krotzer) who wanted to examine our collection for tiger beetles. Tiger beetles are particularly hard to collect and if you don't care much about them (let's say you study rove beetles) you don't collect them, so our research collection did not have any. The teaching collection contained 31 specimens (10 species) and among those they were 13 new county records (!): ten from Tennessee, one from Alabama, one from Georgia and one from Florida.

Anybody else want to examine specimens?

   

Green River rove beetles

Part of my research program is dedicated to paleoentomology and so I frequently describe fossils rove beetles. The fossil below is from the Green river formation (~50 MYO).

It's probably a member of the subtribe Cryprobiina (Paederinae). I presented a poster of on the fossil rove beetles from the Green River formation at the Annual Meeting of the Entomological Society of America and I have a ms in (the very early stages of) preparation.  Since the paper will not be available for a couple of more years I have decided to post the poster online at figshare and it can be found here. 

TOL, EOL and rove beetles

I have been rather sad to see the diminish of the Tree of Life (TOL) project. The TOL is still of course available on line, but to my knowledge no new pages have been added for a while (at least according to the growth monitor list). I was a somewhat regular contributor with ~16 pages of rove beetle genera and several other node pages.

What I really liked about the TOL: there was a classification structure to the pages. Perhaps it was not perfect, with sometimes genera missing, but there was a logical structure where you could navigate and find what you were looking for.

But people move on and eventually want to do other things. So the TOL project at some point did not have funds to hire more people and the site stopped growing.

The Encyclopedia of Life is a project that started with a lot of fanfare (hey, E. O. Wilson). I think the site is very successful on what it does (random deposition of biological data) but it is not TOL. A search for rove beetles produces this page:

Can we count how many things are wrong in this page?

1)"Staphylins" is not a common or scientific name for rove beetles, unless of course you are French.

2) Staphylinidae "found in 5 classifications", three of them being various iterations of the erroneous ITIS classication, another being the Paleobiology database and the last one being the Marine species database (seriously?). So, EOL uses five classifications, all of them problematic. How about using the one in TOL?

3) A picture of Tachinus as the first image on the website? Among all magnificent rove beetles, the best we can do is a Tachinus?

And do not get me started on the travesty of how EOL harvests content from the TOL. Compare e.g. the pages for Nordus in TOL and EOL.

Don't get me wrong, I see the value of EOL for the general public. But is the opening page for rove beetles much better than the Wikipedia page for the family? Honestly, I do not think so. So what is the value of EOL to me as a scientist, besides a statement on my NSF proposal regarding broader impacts? That's something I am struggling with since I do want to have meaningful broader impact contributions.  I am just a bit more skeptical now than I was five years ago regarding the longevity of all these projects, and the permanence of placing data online.

Finally, a rove beetle post!

One of my current projects involves the revision (or better, "a review") of the genus Trigonopselaphus. The name (as it is currently defined in Herman 2001) does not mean much and this is part of the reason why I am working on this review. These are truly amazing rove beetles, some with lengths over 20 mm and bright metallic coloration. They are also extremely rare in collections with just a handful of specimens known in all major collections.

Taxonomy had always such a great appeal to me because part of what you do is detective work - you try to figure out what happened to names (and specimens!) since they were originally proposed. Usually the work is rewarding but sometimes frustrating and perhaps disappointing, especially when you realize that historical specimens are lost forever.

One such story is the fate of Trigonopselaphus herculeanus (Laporte), 1835. The species was described originally in the genus Staphylinus (like anything else in those early days) by Laporte, whose full name was François Louis Nompar de Caumont LaPorte, comte de Castelnau. Neal Evenhuis wrote recently a great paper in Zootaxa regarding Laporte and the mysterious loss of (part of) his collection. To make a long story short, Laporte decided to donate his personal collection to the USA and the collection arrived in the National Institution (later to be called Smithsonian) in 1842. Unfortunately, that collection was destroyed by fire in 1865. But perhaps the type of T. herculeanus was not included in the materials destroyed by fire?

A second collection of Laporte is held today in Australia at Museum Victoria but that collection contains only his later materials. Ken Walker (curator at Museum Victoria) explained to me that Laporte kept little cardboard drawings of all the species he did not have for his second collection. And unfortunately, a drawing of T. herculeanus was present in his Staphylinidae drawer at the Museum Victoria.