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. 

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.

Revision and new species of Trigonopselaphus

 I recently published the revision of Trigonopselaphus, a genus that includes some of the largest rove beetles known, with sizes ranging from 30-40 mm (trust me, this is huge size for rove beetles). The paper is available here. Previously I had blogged about the loss of the type for one of the species, Trigonopselaphus herculeanus. That species was described by Laporte and was lost in the Smithsonian fire back in the mid 1800s. So, as a good taxonomist that I am, I designated a new type (called a neotype) for that species.

I also described a new species from Ecuador and Peru, named Trigonopselaphus diplopegus. The epithet refers (of course) to the specific structure of the genitalia. But while I was working on this paper, these beetle heads looked oddly familiar.  And finally, a few days ago, I got it: anybody else see the resemblance?

Image of Blue alien head from here http://www.zazzle.com/blue_alien_head_poster-228206002344045167

Maybe little blue aliens do live among us after all. 

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?