It looks like not all Xanthopygina are brightly colored after all

A new paper just came out where Adam Brunke and I describe a new genus and three new species of Xanthopygina rove beetles. What makes this genus different from any other Xanthopygina that I have recently described is they are dull brown, with short elytra and no hind wings (aptery). You can read the whole paper here (open access)

Here is a little bit of background on this paper: many years ago I received a bunch of weird looking rove beetles from Zack Falin at the University of Kansas. Zack is a friend and long term collaborator/enabler of my rove beetle studies. Zack had identified these beetles as Xanthopygina but when I first looked at them, I thought "No way" and left them in a drawer. 

Part of the reason why I am writing this blog post is because sometimes we, taxonomists, tend to ignore some specimens and not wanting really to acknowledge their existence.

I sort of repeated this exercise (look at the beetles, say no way) every year for a a number of years until last year. I am working on the revision of Xanthopygus, a multi-year project and I was looking for another project that I could finish relatively quickly so I can publish a revision before the Xanthopygus one. As I was browsing through the Xanthopygina specimens in my office, I noticed these little beetles again and I started looking at them under the microscope. I hated to admit it but Zack was right, these specimens were Xanthopygina. It also appeared that they did not belong in any of the existing genera currently in Xanthopygina. Last year, Adam and I finished a paper where we produced a phylogenetic tree of all known genera ofd Xanthopygina. So we reran the analyses with a few more morphological characters (there are no molecular data for Ikaros) and you can see the results below. We can definitely say that they do not belong in some lineages but until we get molecular data we wont's be able to say exactly where they belong.

I am particular proud of the etymology for this new genus. As I mentined in the paper: "The word Ikaros is an alternate spelling of the word Icarus, the son of Daedalus who (in the Greek mythology) constructed the Labyrinth. Icarus and Daedalus escaped the Labyrinth by flying with wings made of feathers and glued by wax. However, Icarus flew too close to the sun and the wax melted. The name is rather appropriate for this genus considering these are species found in high altitudes that have lost their wings."    

Then again...

I think I am fairly good in self motivating myself to push through projects to completion. Instead of describing two new genera in a simple Zootaxa-style paper, how about we produce a phylogenetic analysis of Xanthiopygina and add all known genera, including these two new taxa? Sure, it will take a year more or so, but it will keep the engine running.

The thrill is gone

One of the biggest challenges for me is to push through a work to publication, when I have figured everything out. Last week I was on Twitter telling the world about how awesome it feels when you finally figure out something -- a unique characteristic that unites a group a three undescribed taxa into a genus.

That glorious moment when you finally find a unique characteristic for a group of species that you thought belong to a new genus #taxonomy

— Stelio Chatzimanolis (@schatzimanolis) October 18, 2017

But then the thrill is gone. I have figured out that this is a new genus. I know that there are three new species. Now I have to show this to the rest of the world. But by this point there is nothing (or almost nothing) new to be discovered. I just have to spend endless hours taking photos, drawing and writing descriptions to persuade my peer community that these are indeed new taxa. But there is very little personal satisfaction in the process and this can slow down the process a bit.

Two new genera and at least five new species. 

When I was starting out as a graduate student, I was trying to maximize the number of papers I could get and sometimes published papers as"least publishable unit". Now I think I am at the opposite spectrum. Last week I submitted a paper where I was reviewing two genera (Dysanellus and Torobus). And for my next paper I seriously consider putting together a description of two NEW genera together. 

Figuring things out

Recently I published an new paper describing the genus Phanolinopsis and describing four new species. While writing a paper like that is pretty straight forward once you have figured things out, it usually takes a lot of time to figure things out.

Many many years ago I was visiting a natural history museum examining their collection of Xanthopygina beetles. Among the materials was a specimen of Phanolinopsis erythros.

Phanolinopsis erythros Chatzimanolis

I was puzzled. At that time, I was working on the revision of Nordus and Philothalpus and had finished the revision of Elmas. Let just say that my understanding of Xanthopygina was limited. I asked a Very Important Rove beetle systematist at the museum there what they thought of the specimen and they looked at it and said: "Yes, I have examined it, I could not figure it out, I doubt you will".

Well, they were right in a sense, it took me 11 years to figure it out. I guess what I am trying to say is that figuring out things in taxonomy sometimes takes a very long time. So while writing a taxonomic paper is 'easy', deciding what goes in that paper may take a lifetime. I have been lucky to be able to work with Xanthopygina for ~17 years now, so I had the time to "figure things out". But I am afraid, the way we do science nowadays does not usually allow for having that much time of working uninterrupted* on a project or taxonomic group.

On an unrelated note, on the same paper I named a new species after my daughter.

Phanolinopsis norahae Chatzimanolis

* Over the years,  I have worked on other things other than Xanthopygina, from phylogeography to fossils, but I have never stopped looking at these beetles. 

Xenopygus species

Back in November I published a paper in Zootaxa with new species and synonymies for Xenopygus Bernhauer. There are a lot of stories that can be told about this paper and if you are skilled in reading between the lines you can probably guess some by reading the paper itself.

Xenopygus davidi Chatzimanolis

But I want to tell one of the stories here. This is the story of how sometimes we are unable to deal with the backlog of specimens (perhaps data in general) until something happens. For many years I had two new species of Xenopygus awaiting description in my Xanthopygina cabinet. This is not unusual. By a quick count, I probably have ~100 new undescribed species of rove beetles trapped in the cabinet in front of my desk. But taxonomists do not spit out species description despite being urged to do so many times because we want to put these new species into context. That context is typically a revision of a genus, a phylogenetic analysis or fauna checklist.

But back to Xenopygus. I was sitting on these two new species because properly revising the genus meant dealing with thousands of specimens of one of the most common xanthopygine rove beetles, Xenopygus analis. It also meant changing the generic concept of Dysanellus (one of the described species there belonged in Xenopygus). And it also meant dealing with some bad taxonomic decisions made in the 70s-80s.

Xenopygus pycnos Chatzimanolis

So I was waiting until, I do not know, I was ready to deal with them. The Xenopygus manuscript was probably no. 7 in my "in preparation" manuscripts. Well, that changed when Caron et al (2016) published a paper revising Xenopygus. I was not aware of that paper until it came out in Zootaxa. Which was unfortunate, because I would have told Caron et al. about all the problems mentioned above. Caron et al. published two new species that ended up being synonyms of taxa that had been described before. To their defense, it was almost impossible to figure this out unless they had seen photos (or examined) of every single species in Xanthopygina. But on the plus side, they dealt with the revisionary aspects of X. analis and that allow me quickly to publish the two new species and regrettably to synonymize the species they described as new.  

I guess the story here is that we all need motivation in our lives. Sometimes motivation to finish that manuscript comes from places we do not expect.

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.

How do you know a species is new to science?

Students often ask me, how does one go about a describing a new species? It's easy, you just have to know what has been described before! I am kidding, of course. Knowing what has been described before is by far the hardest part of describing a new species.

Here is an example: I work with a group of rove beetles belonging in the subtribe Xanthopygina, a group of 30 or so genera and ~400 species. To be able to describe a new species with confidence, I need to know how all 30 genera and all 400 species look like. Why? Because the generic limits that we recognize today might have been more relaxed in previous years, and species currently in one genus might actually belong in another (this has happened multiple times to me in the past). So if somebody wants to describe new species in e.g. the genus Plociopterus Kraatz, seeing just the existing species in Plociopterus is not good enough. People of course describe like that all the time (or by just finding a species in a "new area"), but this leads to sloppy (at best) taxonomic work.

Over the past few years I have been working with myrmecophile Xanthopygina. One of the most prominent early 20th century myrmecophile entomologist was Wasmann. His collection ended up in Maastricht and this week I was able to finally see all of the Xanthopygina species he described.

This post-it note was glued on my monitor for the last three years. A constant reminder that there were still species described in Xanthopygina that I had not seen. But now this over and I feel much better describing new species that are in or close to Plociopterus. And I have to say, I did get rewarded for insisting to see these species: one of the two  both species described by Wasmann probably belong in a different subtribe altogether.

The 5 most difficult papers I have written so far

I recently passed the 50 published papers mark (sure, no such benchmark exist, it just feels nice) and looking back at the list I saw some papers that were horrible to write (or the peer review process was awful) and others that were really a piece of cake. Of course, for the majority of the papers the process was fun but… normal. Anyway, I decided to write a couple of posts, first this one about the 5 most difficult papers I have written and another one later about the 5 easier ones.

First of all, some data: the complete list of my papers can be found here (pdfs included). In the old days of graduate school/postdoc, I used to write my papers using Word. Nowadays, I am using Scrivener and Pages (or Google Docs if I have coauthors). Before I got tenure I was trying to publish my papers in the “best” possible journals. After tenure, I have focused my attention more to open access journals or journals that do not have byzantine instructions to authors (with some exceptions, I am looking at you Koleopterologische Rundschau).

So here is the list of the 5 most difficult papers (in chronological order) to write/take through peer review. As a side note, this list include only papers that I wrote as the first author. Some other papers where I was the second/middle/last author had troubled histories but I do not think it is my place to discuss those.

1. Chatzimanolis, S. 2003. Natural history and behavior of Nordus fungicola (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae). Annals of the Entomological Society of America 96(3): 225–230.

 

Nordus fungicola

I think I lost count how many times this paper was rejected before it found its home in the Annals. The whole process was very discouraging to a young graduate student and there were moments I thought this paper will never get published. But the core of my PhD committee (“the readers” the late Steve Ashe, Michael Engel and Mich (Charles Michener) were very supportive and really helped along. I think some edits by Michael after a few rejections really helped that paper.  I believe I was trying to get this out during the second or third year of graduate school, so I really did not know how to write a paper. Also, this was a descriptive natural history paper, and behavioral ecologists that were reviewing this paper really did not like it.

2. Chatzimanolis, S., A. Trichas, S. Giokas, and M. Mylonas. 2003. Phylogenetic analysis and biogeography of the Aegean taxa of the genus Dendarus (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae). Insect Systematics and Evolution 34(3): 295–312.

Dendarus maximus Photo by A. Trichas

 

[I guess 2003 was a bad year?]  

This paper also went through a few rejections before it got published. The problem with this paper was that it started as my undergraduate thesis at the University of Crete. Steve Ashe was really pushing me to send it out even though it was not what I was doing in Kansas (also the paper is on darkling beetles while my PhD was on rove beetles). I started working on this paper the second year I was in Kansas, and by that time I realized that my undergraduate phylogenetic analyses were crap. So I had to borrow many specimens from my undergraduate home (the Natural History Museum of Crete), recode many characters and redo the analyses. The whole process took more time than I want to admit. I first submitted it for review to the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, where the then editor (long retired now) sent it to just one reviewer who provided a three sentences review… The first sentence was that the phylogenetic part was crap, the second that the biogeographic part was crap and the third that the journal should not publish undergraduate work. How is that for constructive criticism to a graduate student? The next time I sent the paper for review I got smarter and removed any indication that this paper had started as an undergraduate thesis. 

3. Chatzimanolis, S. 2004. A revision of the neotropical genus Nordus (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae). Entomologische Abhandlungen 62(1): 3–64

The main paper that came out of my PhD, so I guess it really deserves to be up here. It just took forever to put that paper together and it was the first time I was putting together a major monograph as the first author. I went through the 99% rule (when you think you have done 99% of the work, but in reality you still have 99% to do) multiple times. The reviews were fine but the editor made me write a SECOND key for 38 species because he did not like my using of coloration and male-specific characters (whatever, I still hold a grudge, Klaus). That’s the closest I have been to losing it during a manuscript revision process. But to be fair, besides Steve Ashe, I do not think that anybody has ever read this paper as carefully as that editor. 

4.  Chatzimanolis, S and M. S. Caterino. 2007. Limited phylogeographic structure in a flightless ground beetle, Calathus ruficollis, in southern California. Diversity and Distributions 13: 498–509.

Lot's of resolution, right?

My first paper as a postdoc. It took a long time to become familiar with the phylogeography field before I could write this paper. Also, this is a paper where we reported more or less negative results (no phylogeographic structure - certainly not what we wanted to see). More troublesome was the fact that I had not done any science writing for more than a year. You would not know that by looking at my publication list, but as a (then) Greek citizen I had to do compulsory military service after I finished my PhD and before I started my postdoc (from Sept. 2004 to Sept. 2005). I had worked very hard as a graduate student to make sure that there would be no years without any publications, but when I started in Santa Barbara my writing skills were rusty to say the least. Mike Caterino had to teach me almost from scratch how to produce a sound scientific paragraph. 

5. Chatzimanolis, S., D. Grimaldi, M.S. Engel and N. Frazer. 2012. Leehermania prorova, the earliest staphyliniform beetle, from the Late Triassic of Virginia (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae). American Museum Novitates 3761: 1-28.

I started writing this paper in 2009. I could not make one my coauthors respond to me requests/comments for almost a year due to some issues. This paper was in prep stage for almost three years. On top of that, when the paper came out (it got glowing peer reviews) I realized that some people really did not (and still do not) like the paper. Long story short, some folks think that what we described as a rove beetle is not rove beetle. I will not go into the details here (perhaps another blog post) and I still stand by this paper, but those issues almost caused permanent damage to some long collaboration/interactions with colleagues. 

New species, new characters

Scaponopselaphus diaspartos

I recently described a new species of Xanthopygina rove beetles in the Biodiversity Data Journal (I will write another post later to talk about that experience). The species is Scaponopselaphus diaspartos from Colombia. This is the second species in the genus, the first (S. mutator) described by Sharp long time ago (1876) in the genus Trigonopselaphus. The genus Scaponopselaphus was erected by Scheerpeltz (1972) when he realized that mutator was not similar to the other species in Trigonopselaphus.

The genus is rather easy to tell apart from other Xanthopygina rove beetles thanks to a unique morphological feature: the first tarsomere of the mesotarsus in males has spatulate setae. This is unheard of in other genera of Xanthopygines and that makes it a nice and easy diagnostic feature.

Mesotibia and mesotarsus of S. mutator. Arrow indicates the location of the
 spatulate tibia on mesotarsus. Scale bar = 0.68 mm. 

Spatulate setae are very common on the protarsi of rove beetles, but not so much on meso- or metatarsi.

The epithet of the new species (diaspartos) means "scattered" and refers to the distribution of the peg setae on the ventral side of the paramere. 

Twitter to the rescue

A short story on how twitter (and specifially Lu Musetti ‏@osuc_curator) really helped a lot with a project today, despite my obvious typo on the original tweet.

Head and pronotum of Triacrus dilatus

I have been working on a project to redescribed Triacrus dilatus Nordmann and at the same time we are doing some fancy allometry work with them. These are fascinating beasts because according to the literature they live (and attack) with paper wasps. Wassman (1902) pointed out that they live in the nests of Polybia vicina Sauss. and later Kistner (1982) in his monster chapter (222 pages long!) "The social insects' bestiary" refer to the wasp genus as Stenopolybia.

I have been trying to find out information about that wasp for a long time, but Google was not returning many results -- a clear indication that something was sketchy, but who am I to doubt Kistner, right?

But as shown above, the name Stenopolybia  is typo of the genus name Stelopolybia, which was synonymized by Carpenter (1999) with the genus Agelaia.

So, the correct name of the wasp is Agelaia vicina, a wasp used as a keystone species in southern Brazil and with its own wikipedia page. 

Now, who said again that Twitter is a waste of time for academics?

Sabbatical projects

My sabbatical officially starts Monday (first day of classes for the Spring semester), so I decided to put here a list of projects/papers I want to finish by August 1. The main reason for putting these up here, in public, is to try to keep myself honest more than anything else.

So in no particular order:

1. NSF pre proposal submission

This should be straight forward to accomplish, considering that the pre proposal is written. All I have to do is coordinate with the local grants office and get final approvals.

2. Revision of Smilax (not the plant :))

Currently, there are four species in the genus. This is a complicated revision because I have no access to two of the types, for reasons I am not going to address here. But I have accumulated almost all other specimens from museum around the world, and done a lot of the prep work already. Smilax species are myrmecophiles, known to occur in leaf cutter ant nests and there are a lot of bizarre (and potentially belonging to new species) specimens.


3. #365papers

An idea I got online from the twitter feed of Meg Duffy (@duffy_ma) to try to read one (new to me) paper every day. For as much as I am emphasizing the primary literature to my students, it is amazing how many days can go by without reading a paper.






4. Description of a new genus with multiple new species from South America.

This is the taxon listed as "Undescribed" genus in the phylogeny of Chatzimanolis 2014 and potentially the sister group of Isanopus. I have been accumulating materials for three years now and I doubt I could (easily) locate many more specimens without extensive field work. So I am pretty confident that this is the time to describe the taxon.

5. Research trip to Copenhagen

I plan to visit Copenhagen in March to meet many fellow rove beetle systematists. I am really looking forward to this trip because there are a few projects waiting to be finished, several new project/grant ideas to be discussed and cool types in the Fabricius collection to look over. Could I have Skyped in the whole thing? No. One week of one-one interactions is way beyond Skype can offer. Plus, when I travel I tend to focus 100% on the discussion/projects ahead, while staying here does not have the same effect.

6. Review of Phanolinopsis

Currently a monotypic genus but at least two more undescribed species and couple of other species that need to be transferred here from other genera.

7. Allometry in Triacrus?

The question mark here means that I really do not know if this is an actual project. We have taken a lot of measurements and compared males and females but we have not done any statistical analyses yet, so... to be determined I guess. I got the idea for this project when I received a box of ~20 specimens from the Natural History Museum in Vienna with amazing size differences among different males. These are interesting beetles because they are predatory of larvae of wasps and they can only be found in the refuse piles of these wasps.






8. New species in Scaponopselaphus

There are a couple new species in this enigmatic genus from South America. "This should be an easy paper to write". The last time I said that (actually I did not, my graduate advisor did) back in 2000, I ended up describing 17+ new species for a genus I thought there were just one or two more new species to describe.

So here they are, five papers, one research trip and (at least) one grant proposal. Probably overly optimistic. And these are the projects where I am the first author, there are a few others where I have a lesser role and I am not mentioning them here. I will make sure I will report back in August on how I did with all these.

Lots of new projects going on

It's been a while since I posted anything here - the semester classes and other writing caught up with me. But just wanted to post a quick note saying that we have many new exciting projects going on.

Photo by Jaimie Davis/UTC

Above is a photo of Max who is doing a massive photographic project of xanthopygine rove beetles. Max is also working with me on a morphological allometry project, but more details on that soon.  

Ten facts about rove beetles

I wrote a small blog post hosted by Christopher Buddle at Expiscor.  The post is about what I thought were 10 really cool things about rove beetles. Go read it here.

Celebrating synonymies in taxonomy

Taxonomists like to celebrate every new species described. If it happens that one described a new species after a famous person or a particular feature of a famous person, then our papers get a lot of media attention, which (trust me) is a good thing.

However, as taxonomists we also tend to propose a lot of synonymies, i.e. recognize that a previously proposed taxon has already been described, or perhaps that it belonged to a different genus, family, or order [yes, once I transferred a taxon from Coleoptera to Dermaptera]. Unfortunately, we do not emphasize synonymies because we see this as just correcting past mistakes or perhaps as a decrease in the number of species for a taxon. The latter argument is of course wrong because synonymies decrease the number of names for a species, and do not produce a net decrease in the number of species. Proposing synonymies is really important in taxonomy because it really helps in making order out of chaos. And do not start me on how much taxonomists contribute to chaos formation...

One of my all-time-favorite papers was written by Vladimir Gusarov while he was a postdoc at the University of Kansas. In that paper Vladimir proposed more than 100 synonymies of aleocharinae rove beetles, cleaning up the mess of aleocharinae taxonomists for the last 200 years.

So, I recently started counting how many synonymies I have proposed. The number (20) is not as impressive as the number of new taxa I have described, but to be honest, I get much greater joy for every new synonymy proposed, than for every new species described.

A beetle and a coin

A species Trigonopselaphus Gemminger and Harold next to one $1c coin. For European readers, the size of the coin is between the size of 1c and 2c Euros. Some of the species in this genus are among the largest of all Staphylinidae with total length in excess of 20mm. Perhaps some Platydracus or Tasgius are larger than this, but not by much.

When I started working on this review, I thought (naively) that due to their size it will be an easy review (easy to find specimens in museums and easy to see the characters). I have been wrong on both accounts, with just a handful of specimens among major museums and almost zero variation of character traits between species. You would think that in a >20mm beast you would not have to count punctures or setae, but...

Stephen J. Gould had written once (don't remember the specific Natural History essay) that when mammals become very large they all tend to look alike and I start to believe that this may be the case for rove beetles as well. 

Working with a Darwin specimen

Today a paper came out where I describe a new genus and species of rove beetles. The description was based on just two specimens, one from the Natural History Museum, London and one from the Museum für Naturkunde der Humboldt Universität, Berlin. We typically want to have more specimens before we describe a new species. However, I decided to go ahead with the paper for two reason (1) I have been visiting major (accessible) entomological collections for more than 12 years and I have not seen other specimens and (2) one of the specimens was collected by Darwin himself!

Below is a photograph of the holotype of the new species, Darwinilus sedarisi Chatzimanolis.

Image Copyright, The Natural History Museum, London.

The Darwin specimen was collected in 1832 and there are traces of (non water-soluble) glue on the ventral side of the specimen. You undoubtedly noticed that the specimen is "dirty".  I did not attempt to "clean" it, either physically or post processing (i.e., in Photoshop). I was both in awe and scared to death handling the specimen, so I really tried to minimize time spent handling it. To dissect the genitalia I followed the steam method described by Beulah Garner (curator of Coleoptera in the Natural History Museum, London). But I did not attempt to relax the mouthparts of move the legs, a standard practice on more recent specimens, as I did not want to press my luck.  

Here is a close up of the head, where all the dust is visible in exquisite detail:

Image Copyright, The Natural History Museum, London.

I know I could have very easily cleaned the specimen with a fine paintbrush. But in a specimen as old as this, who am I to say that the dust does not belong there, especially when it does not affect the specimen description?  In a later post I will write about how I stumble upon the specimen. 

The making of a paper: Spanish Amber edition

Recently this paper came out, describing the fauna of rove beetles in Cretaceous Spanish amber.

I thought  I would provide here some details on how I ended up collaborating with two people I did not know before.

About a year ago I got an email from David Peris, a graduate student in Spain. He had a large collection of fossil rove beetles and as part of his PhD he wanted to describe them. He had funds from Spain for a trip over the Atlantic and wanted to come here, at UTC, to work with me for a period of ~ month. It turns out that my University does not have a clue on how to host an international long term visitor  was working hard towards building in infrastructure for visiting scientists -- but nothing inexpensive was available yet. For a little while it seemed like things are not going to work out, but my good friend at the University of Kansas, Michael Engel, offered to host us both there.

David arrived in Lawrence in June and I got there a few days laters. We spent ~ 2 weeks describing and discussing beetles and I am rather proud of the end result. The bed bug bites I got at the Lawrence hotel were totally worth it (also, three new specimens of Cimex lectularius for the teaching collection). We finished all descriptions during our time in Lawrence, and then David spent a bit more time back home getting all the illustrations and photographs ready for the paper. I think we submitted the paper in September, got accepted in November and published online in January.

Also a side note about writing papers: very frequently I hear people (typically in a condescending tone) saying that taxonomists can produce papers very fast (I guess as shown above), so for example an ecologist producing 1 paper/year should not feel bad if a taxonomist produces n papers/year. Two things: (1) yes, writing a description is fast, but to get there it typically requires many years of prep work to figure out what is new and (2) productive people always produce many more papers than non-productive people, regardless of the field, simple as that.

Beeria nematocera: The most interesting rove beetle in the world*^

A few months back I was asked to identify some Staphylinini specimens from Prince of Wales island in Alaska by Derek Sikes. If I remember correctly there were a lot of Atrecus and Quedius (pretty boring things for a neotropical rove beetle guy like me who is used to beetles like this) but one specimen made the whole sorting worthwhile:

I present to you Beeria nematocera (Casey). The species was first described by Casey who described it in Philothus from some specimens collected in the Pacific Northwest. Later Smetana (1977, paper behind paywall) transfered the species in its own genus and for a long time it was considered a "hybrid" between Philothina and Quediina. 

The species is extremely rare in collections (I will be shocked if there are more than 10 worldwide) and I know that several rove beetle systematists have sampled the type locality without being able to collect any specimens. The specimen I received was collected by Derek and students in a pitfall trap and the habitat looked like this:

Photo by D. Sikes. Original photograph here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alaskaent/5155883864/in/set-72157625334180410

Yeah, good luck collecting Beeria down there without a trap. 

The detailed record for the specimen can be found on the Arctos database that Derek maintains at the Museum of the North (love the name by the way), University of Alaska here and here.

A recent morphological phylogenetic analysis of Staphylinini (Brunke and Solodovnikov 2013, paper behind paywall) placed Beeria as the sister group of 'Staphylinini propria' ("Anisolinina", Staphylinina, Xanthopygina, and Philonthina). However, the particular position on the tree may be an artifact due to the lack of proper morphological characters to clearly identify the sister group of Beeria. I mean, look at the huge postcoxal process here (yellow arrow):

Now, can I have some DNA quality specimens please? 

* where 'interesting' means we have no clue where it belongs phylogenetically and I really want it for DNA work, and 'the world' really is North America here.
^ whoa, people are very geographically sensitive. I am not implying here that "the world" is North America; I was just paraphrasing the "most interesting man in the world" commercial...

The limits of morphology

I was told early on as a graduate student that an insect taxonomist should "kill first, ask questions later" during fieldwork. This was usually said in the context that you might lose a rare specimen if you spend time looking at it, rather than putting in a vial. I am here to tell you that I have deeply regretted following that advice.

Every single time I am working on a taxonomic paper I catch myself having the same wish: "I wish I had seen these specimens alive, just to get a glimpse of how they are using these structures." Morphology can tell us a lot of things but sometimes a dead insect hold its secrets very well.

Exhibit A: In a paper published in 2005, Steve Ashe and I revised the genus Philothalpus. These are striking beetles with questionable taxonomic affinities (at least according to DNA).

Philothalpus brooksi

Abdominal sternum VII

Males in this genus have a perplexing structure (indicted by a white arrow on the figure above) on the ventral side of their abdomen, specifically on the 7th abdominal sternum. Back then we called it a "porose structure". Truth is, we have no idea what it is. A hole on the body with setae around it. Only males have it. But how do they use it? I have no clue. I guess I will be inclined to accept the notion that is used in male/female interactions since it is only present in males but, boy, if only I had seen these guys alive...

The example above came to mind when I recently examined a species (in another genus) with a similar structure:

Exhibit B:

 The structure is present in the same abdominal segment (VII) but it is clearly different than the one above. Are these structures homologous?  Are they used for the same purpose? Morphology cannot answer these questions. Sure, we can do fancy evo-devo here, but that requires live specimens, identifying conserved developmental genes and so on.

What we really need is good old basic natural history observations that can solve these problems. But "kill first, ask questions later" attitudes really do not help. So, next time you are in the field, jot down some observations before you kill those insects.