It’s not a plant!

It started as a joke. For a couple of years it was the number 1 item in my to do list  on the lab whiteboard: “Revision of Smilax”. My botany colleagues would come in and start asking me if I got tired of rove beetles (never!) and wanted to switch to plant systematics. You see, Smilax L. is a cosmopolitan plant genus. My typical response was “It’s not a plant!”

So here it is: Smilax deineinephyto sp. n. described in the recently published revision of Smilax (pdf here), the myrmecophilous rove beetle genus. The epithet translates in Greek “It’s not a plant”.

Sometimes we go collect in a rainforest and come back with many new species, species that we knew in the field that were new. Or, we visit a natural history museum and look through their unsorted specimens and we immediately know that there is a new species there. Well, this is not one of these stories. The funny (or annoying, disturbing, same old -  depending on who you ask) story is that the species I described as new in this paper had actually been illustrated before.

From Scheerpeltz 1936.

Scheerpeltz in his 1936 paper, compared the species of Smilax pilosa with Smilax cyanea (then in Cordylaspis). Unfortunately, it seems that he did not study the type specimens for these taxa because what he identified as Smilax pilosa was (mostly) Smilax lynchi (Bruch). Also the type species for Smilax cyanea is conspecific with Smilax pilosa, and does not match what he illustrated as Smilax cyanea above. And thus, here is a new species, hidden in a collection for several decades, masqueraded as a previously described species.

References

Chatzimanolis, S. 2016. A revision of the myrmecophilous genus Smilax Laporte (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Staphylininae). Zootaxa 4162(2): 283-303

Scheerpeltz, O. 1936. Die von Prof. Dr. H. Eidmann gelegentlich seiner im Jahre 1933 nach Brasilien unternommenen Studienreise aufgesammelten Staphyliniden. I. Die in den Nestern von Atta sexdens L. aufgefundenen Staphyliniden, nebst einigen Bemerkungen über die Gattung Scariphaeus Er. Archiv für Naturgeschichte, N.F. 5 (4), 483–540.

Remembering Tom Taylor

I found out the other day that one of my graduate school professors had passed away. Tom Taylor was a paleobotanist at KU and member of the National Academy of Sciences. When I arrived in KU in 1999 as a starting graduate student, Tom was the department chair of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. My advisor Steve Ashe (probably realizing how "green" I was) recommended that I should take a class offered by Tom called "The art of becoming a professional scientist". To this day, I do not think any other activity as a graduate student influenced more my trajectory as an academic. His class really helped me and dozens of other students over the years to realize what it takes to be a graduate student, to start networking with colleagues (as an exercise we had to send five reprint requests per week), and to start publishing early and consistently.

There were many times in my graduate career that I barged into Tom's office to ask him questions [and remember this guy was the department chair] and he was always welcoming. I remember one particular afternoon in my third year that he spent a good hour talking with me [without scheduling a meeting with him] about career and life in general, trying to help me in a particular difficult spot in my life. I look back now [with a better understanding of time constraints and work load] and I am both surprised and grateful of how open Tom was to impromptu meetings like that.

I do not know how well liked Tom was as a department chair; the few departmental meetings that I attended as a graduate student were     l e g e n d a r y. But I have come to realize that no department chair is ever liked by his/her faculty. And I know many graduate students that found their footings in their professional life because of Tom's class and I am deeply grateful for the impact he had in my life. 

Plociopterus ain't no myrmecophile!

In a paper just published in Coleopterists Bulletin (pdf here), Mariana Chani-Posse and I moved two myrmecophilous species of “Xanthopygina” in Philonthina. Both species had been described by Wasmann 1925 in the genus Plociopterus. And so for the last 90 or so years, Plociopterus was known to have two myrmecophilous species. Unfortunately, several authors discussing the origin of myrmecophily in Staphylinidae (or at least specifically for Staphylinini) was using this as an example of independent evolution of myrmecophilous life style. The problem was that nobody had checked the specimens since the original description, because none of those species belonged in Plociopterus. They are Belonuchus (at least until the genus is revised) and for those keeping score at home, this is also the wrong subtribe…

The moral of the story is this: people make mistakes and generic concepts change over time, as well as our understanding or higher level relationships. As I have mentioned earlier, If somebody described a taxon 100 years ago, chances are that this taxon now belongs in a different genus or is a synonym of something else. Using raw data in biodiversity studies without going through the lens of a revision is almost guaranteed to lead to erroneous results.

As a side note, Plociopterus is in terrible need of a revision. There are multiple new species awaiting description and many taxa that have to be placed in synonymy. But the genus has an infamous history among Xanthopygina workers: at least twice people have started its revision (both in the lab of my late PhD advisor, Steve Ashe) and both times people abandoned the effort. Perhaps third time’s the charm?

Thoughts on studies using taxonomic data

tl;dr version: Your results are mostly wrong. Unless someone has revised (in a taxonomic sense) the species you are using in your study.

Longer version: People make mistakes. When we describe a new species, or a group of new species, we sometimes place them in a taxonomic rank (let’s say genus for argument’s sake) we think is correct but we cannot be absolutely sure, unless we have a very thorough phylogenetic analysis. Phylogenetic analyses are awesome, but in the age of genomics they cost a lot of money. And in many cases (incorrectly in my view), building that phylogeny is beyond the interest of the person describing these taxa.

Now consider that the majority of species were described a long time ago, long before people were thinking about phylogenetic relationships. Also, some of the early (we are talking 19-early 20th century here) taxonomists were not specialist per se, and would describe species among many different families of insects, thus not really knowing where those species belong. So, in many cases, if during the last 40 years nobody has taxonomically checked (=revise) the species you are are using, chances are that these species are: (a) synonyms of another species; (b) placed in the wrong genus or (c) placed in the wrong higher rank.

Example: in 2004 I published with several colleagues a study on when (day or night) rove beetles were active on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. If you want to read the details, the paper is here, but to save you from a lot of trouble, I just set up a flight intercept trap and for a period of 12 days I was sampling at dawn and dusk. Here is part of table 1:



My 2004 self made two three mistakes there. What we thought was Dysanellus ended up being a new genus of rove beetles described as Zackfalinus and Dysanellus is restricted to the southern part of South America. Likewise, what we thought was Philothalpus ended up being Oligotergus, because nobody had looked up before how messed up the generic limits were in Philothalpus. UPDATE: Adam Brunke correctly reminded me that all specimens identified as Quedius were indeed Cyrtoquedius based on this paper.

What I am saying is this: if you are pulling data out of a digitized collection of GBIF, good luck. I hope a taxonomist was interested in the taxa you want to use.

Of course, this idea is not new. Meier and Dikow (2004) have said this much more eloquently. 

Hiding place

Every time I need to finish a manuscript I have to find a hiding place: a place where I am going to take my laptop and a bunch of papers and write. Although I can write in my office or at home, when I need to really focus to finish that paragraph in either a paper or a proposal, I have to get away. No matter how much I clean my office from distractions, there is always something: a specimen, a knock on the door, a stupid post-it note on my computer screen. Today my hiding spot is in unused biology lab. The gentle him of the refrigerator and the mowers outside provide enough white noise to write and even take breaks from writing to write this little note.  

Celebrating TN Valley beetles

During the spring semester a super dedicated team of undergraduate students and I curated (pin, label, database and identify) nearly 5000 specimens of beetles from the Tennessee Valley. Our main field sites are in the Tennessee River Gorge Trust and Lula Lake Land Trust. Over the next several weeks, I will start posting on my Twitter account several photographs of charismatic beetles from these two locations.

All of beetle photographs can be found online on this page. Below is a just small screenshot of that page.

Stay tuned for more photographs!

Collecting in Winter

For the past several months I have been collecting beetles at Lula Lake Land Trust and at the Tennessee River Gorge Trust. I started near the end of spring and I plan to do a full year of collecting in each site. Winter is here and even though it is not really cold (by midwest standards) the temperature is hovering below zero Celsius for many days in a row.

I have to say I love doing field work during this time of the year. Yes, it is not super-productive but it is so much more pleasant: no ticks or chiggers, no 90% humidity and I am not covered with mosquitoes. And the traps have some very interesting beetles in them. Granted, the diversity is rather low and I have to sort through mountains of flies to actually see the beetles, but I will take it.



Here is a typical pan (out of eight) of my Flight intercept traps (FIT). This picture shows insects that fell in the pan between January 5 to February 5.

Collecting with Lindgren traps can be a bit more tricky. During the past month we had some very windy/wet conditions that resulted in having my propylene glycol being washed out of the trap. The water that remained in the collection cup did not play very well with the subfreezing conditions and resulted in this:



However, underneath all this ice, there were beetles, including several rove beetles.



If you are interested in seeing what we have been collecting, all of our specimens are included in our Symbiota database that recently surpassed 10,000 beetle specimens.