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.

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. 

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. 

Beetling in Tennessee and Georgia

Late last Spring, I finally started doing some serious fieldwork around here. It only took me seven years since arriving at UTC. Don't take me wrong, I had wonderful excuses: came in with two grants that required constant attention, had to do a bunch of new lecture preps, and get tenure. But they were excuses, and now I am kicking myself for not starting earlier.

At the end of my second post-tenure year, I told myself, "why the hell am I in the lab all day?" And just like that I decided I needed to be more out there. Don't take me wrong, my biology origins are in the field and throughout the (student, postdoc) years I have done a lot of fieldwork. But not as a UTC professor. I can spend decades in the lab examining museum collections for my revisionary studies of rove beetles, without stepping a foot in the field. But this is not a very satisfying life.

My first ever Biology experience as an undergraduate was helping a-then-PhD student set up some pitfall traps on the slopes of Mt. Giouhtas in Crete, Greece. My first paid job in Biology was sorting bulk pitfall samples for the Natural History Museum of Crete to the various arthropods subgroups. I was getting paid ~$3 per pitfall trap and I remember going home, closing my eyes, and still seeing bulk arthropod samples. As an undergraduate, I was dreaming of a centrifuge-like device to remove floating Springtails from a pitfall sample. I still have the same dream sometimes. But back to the point of this blog post:

The Tennessee River and the Tennessee River Gorge photographed from Lookout Point. 

I am lucky to have funding this year from an R. Holberg Grant to combine fieldwork, undergraduate training and outreach activities in Tennessee and Georgia. Our focus are two sites, the Lula Lake Land Trust on Lookout Mt., Georgia and the Tennessee River Gorge, near downtown Chattanooga.  I am grateful to both of these land trusts for allowing me to set up long term traps on their properties.

Photo taken at Lula Lake

In both places we have set up a regiment of traps that include a Malaise trap, a flight intercept trap (FIT), a Lindgren trap, and one or more pitfall traps. We frequently collect leaf litter and and pretty soon we will be doing some black lighting. We pick samples from the traps approximately once every month and then everything (i.e. the beetles) get pinned, labelled and databased.

One of Malaise traps

And one of our FITs

Of course we have had our fair share of trap accidents (see below) but overall collecting has been a blast.

I have been really amazed with the diversity of things that is flying, crawling, or otherwise finding our traps. There have been several "first" for me on the traps: two different families of Archostemata, adult male Phengodes (glow worms), several species of Palaminus (common in the tropics, not so much up here) and of course countless other records of rove beetles.

We are not quite ready yet to give a full report of our summer collecting (a lot of the specimens are still getting pinned etc) but I am looking forward examining all of these specimens. I have to admit that spending time in the field has given me a new and much needed appreciation/admiration of my "surroundings".

Sabbatical report

Well, for better or worse my sabbatical has come to an end and the Fall semester is set to begin in ~ four weeks. Earlier I wrote a blog post about my sabbatical projects and now I have the sobering duty to report on it.

So here is the abbreviated list of what I wanted to do:

1. NSF pre proposal submission
2. Revision of Smilax
3. #365papers
4. Description of a new genus with multiple new species from South America.
5. Research trip to Copenhagen
6. Review of Phanolinopsis
7. Allometry in Triacrus?
8. New species in Scaponopselaphus

Items 1, 3, 5, 7 and 8 were all completed or are going rather well in the case of #365papers. I am particularly proud of 7 that was a student led project and is going to appear soon on PeerJ, but more on that in a couple of weeks.

Numbers 2, 4 and 6 are not done and they will not be done for a few more months. There are some complications on these projects (like missing types or more new species than expected, and I am going to write more about these in due time).

But other things happened that were not listed above.
1. I wrote a taxonomic paper on Triacrus (soon to be published in The Coleopterists Bulletin) in addition to the allometry one.
2. I submitted in collaboration with friends in Copenhagen and Austria a great paper on the phylogenetics of Staphylinini.
3. Our collection database was moved to Symbiota and now it is available for anybody to explore.
4. And I also applied and received a generous internal grant from the Provost that allowed to kick start an amazing field program near Chattanooga.

Speaking of field work it has been a blast and I am really enjoying the opportunity to get to know the local beetles. I do not think I would have been able to initiate something like that without a sabbatical. We have been accumulating thousands of specimens and we do expect amazing new discoveries soon. Now, can I submit this blog post as my official sabbatical report to UTC instead of answering their canned questions?

And the most common xanthopygine rove beetles is

Xenopygus analis (Erichson). Distributed from southern Mexico all the way down to Argentina, also found in the Caribbean and introduced in Hawaii.  By far the most frequently encountered and most frequently collected Xanthopygina.

As they say, I would be a millionaire if I had a penny for each specimen I had identified in collections

around the world. With so many populations around central and south America, this is a going to be a cool phylogeography project someday. 

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.

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.