The Fly Trap (Book Review)

     The Fly Trap is a modern creative novel: one part biography, a second part history of entomology, a third scientific explanation, with rapture at flies mixed throughout. I’ve been reading Moby-Dick recently, and the similarities are striking. There’s the same tendency to switch themes between paragraphs and chapters, to weave the scientific, historical, and biographical together, and to embiggen fact when necessary. But what draws the entomologist in is Fredrik Sjöberg’s replacement of Melville’s whales with flies and the hope that the author will do the subject of our work and life passions the justice they deserve. How often is any particular family of insects besides butterflies made the subject of literature?

     Sjöberg’s centerpiece is the two-winged fly family Syrphidae, more commonly known as “hover flies” or “flower flies”, names which refer to incredible flight capabilities and the tendency to be nectar feeders. They are commonly yellow and black mimics of bees and wasps. Unlike the animals they’re mimicking they have no stingers to deter predators, so they avoid predation by looking like something dangerous. Sjöberg peppers his chapters with vignettes about individual species, including everything from taxonomic and regional history, physical and ecological diagnoses, and personal anecdotes. My favorite is the sudden “invasion” of Eristalis smilis which overtook the Swedish countryside, contrasted with Doros, of which there are only occasional sightings and elaborate rumors.

     The other subjects are “islands”, whether those be Sjöberg’s home island of Runmarö or a tree stump in a recent clear-cut. “Islands are generalizations of a kind”, he writes. “And where there are no islands, we have to invent them. If only for the fun of it.” He cites the loneliness and isolation of islands both positive and negative. Islands are perfect ground for the cataloger, sometimes disparaged as “buttonologist”, who provides a complimentary and more detailed worldview for “mapmakers”. 

“But the person who makes maps can never include everything in his picture of reality, which remains a simplification no matter what scale he chooses. Both attempt to capture something and to preserve it.” 

I particularly enjoyed his description of the Fly Tree, an enormous, 500 year old black poplar that was an island ecosystem onto itself. These species descriptions and descriptions of “islands”, are the stepping stones on which Sjöberg’s stories rest. 

     Yes, stories. There are actually two stories here, two interwoven biographies. One is of the author’s work with hover flies. The other biography is of the heroic, larger than life Rene Malaise, who sits in sharp contrast to the author. Malaise was a great explorer, eponymous trap inventor, and collector abroad, especially in eastern Russia and Southeast Asia. Sjöberg tries to avoid all collecting and exploration beyond his small island in the Baltic Sea. He says of the tropics, “Tropical nights can build into tremendous explosions of downright Cambro-Silurian cacophony when a thunderstorm starts or cicadas celebrate their orgies in the treetops. They’re magnificent, but no more than that. The indescribable sound of the Madagascar nightjar is worth the entire trip, but in the end it is merely interesting and exciting and fun to tell people about later.” Of the Congo River basin, “What an adventure! What stories I would tell! About freedom! But it didn’t happen. I never managed to say much more than that the forests were vast and the river as broad as Kalmar Sound. And that I’d been there.” Yet he idolizes Malaise and his travels, to the point where he starts a collection of Malaise-related ephemeralia. This ends ironically with an expensive purchase of a painting once belonging to Malaise. The author, so adverse to crazed collecting, has become a buttonologist. But Sjöberg stays to his island, claming glorious isolation and “slowness” allow him an illusion of control over these impulses.

     One of The Fly Trap’s most overreaching themes is what Eliezer Yudkowsky calls “The Virtue of Narrowness”. Sjöberg’s collection only contains the 202 species of hoverflies (plus one) found thus far on Runmarö island. He feels he must justify his narrowness, so he writes that it’s purely for pleasure. No, it’s because he loves the D.H. Lawrence style of isolation provided by islands. No, it’s a sort of “buttonology”, a collecting disorder, which in his case is benign. No, it’s an attempt to slow down in our fast-paced world. He doesn’t beg the reader to accept his reasons for collecting and observing his island’s hover flies as scientific. Even when he claims his study allows him to “read nature’s language”, the result is for enjoyment. Maybe he feels he can’t explain the usefulness of this small study on his small island to broader natural history, not even to a lay reader, but I don’t think he needs to. The Virtue of Narrowness is the precision and accuracy of your knowledge. It’s enough to only explain hover flies on Runmarö, and Sjöberg knows it, but he still claims “hobby” because it’s not his “real” job.

     True, he does romanticize his narrowness whenever possible. But I enjoy some romanticized narrowness. In my favorite poem by the midwestern American Tom Montag, “The Farmer’s Manifesto”, the farmer says of his father, “He had no /ideas but the things which /his hands could touch, or /those his eyes could find /at great distance—a glint /of sun off farmhouse windows. /Or close at hand, beneath /his feet. What he could /catch as breath; wind would /carry. He knew those weeds.”  Romanticized or not, that sort of narrowness holds an incredible depth of knowledge, what Montag could only name as “strange /dark madness, some amazing avalanche /of wolves, lakes, stars, tongues” and the ability to “hear corn grow in summer; /can hide your face in /the curving surface of sky; /examine a potato in light /so special you know something /flies back at you”. This is the sort of knowledge that comes from doing the same thing repeatedly over a small stretch of world and small number of subjects until they become windows. What seems like buttonology is deep expertise.

     I don’t mean to say that The Fly Trap is perfection or free from cliche. It belongs firmly within a genre of creative natural history writing first made popular in the 19th century, a Euro-centric and primarily masculine genre written by men for men and boys. Women are largely incidental to the story and are mentioned mostly as love interests or as props. His wife features prominently at the end of the first chapter, but only as the nameless “girl who sat in the audience one evening”. Of professional meetings, he says, “Normally no women take part at all. And the few who do happen to show up are usually the better halves of the biggest crackpots, wives who could easily pass as personal assistance from a psychiatric open ward. Well, maybe that’s unfair. But the fact is that unattached women could hardly find a better hunting ground than entomological societies. Unusual men, no competition. Just a suggestion.” Does that mean the only reason for women to attend meetings is to pick up men? Even the preface quote ends with the condescending line, “Me, I just concern myself with flies — a much greater theme than men, though maybe not greater than women.” The only exceptions are the short biographical sketches of the incredible, possibly lesbian Esther Blenda Nordström, a writer, explorer, and ethnologist who briefly married Malaise and traveled with him to Asia. Unfortunately, her story was abandoned when Sjöberg realized Malaise hadn’t named a species after her, and therefore Malaise’s “love” for her couldn’t be verified (unlike for Ebba Soederhall). I could have read an entire book about Nordström and her travels. Fortunately she wrote several. Unfortunately, I don't read Swedish (but maybe you do).

     The Euro-centrism is more forgivable. The Fly Trap was originally written and released in Swedish. The intended audience was Swedes, the setting was (mostly) Sweden, and Sjöberg is Swedish himself. The English translation came ten years later, so it should be read as a Swedish novelslashbiographyslashcreative-nonfiction and shouldn’t be taken as worldly. Especially since Sjöberg repeatedly admits his own non-worldliness.

      I realize I haven’t said very much about flies in this review. Fact is, if you’re still reading this and you haven’t already read The Fly Trap, you probably already have some interest in flies and will be delighted as I was of the hover fly natural history in this book. There isn’t anything to criticize about those descriptions except to say that they’re wonderful and I wish there was more of them. I recommend The Fly Trap for entomologists and non-entomologists alike.

 Sjöberg, F. 2014. The Fly Trap [English translation, Thomas Teal], Pantheon Books, NY. Amazon

Canfield - Field Notes on Science and Nature

Just what is the best way to record and organize my research notes? I've long been interested in answering this question. On the first day of my master's degree, I started a bound notebook (I love the squared, softcover Moleskine notebooks), and used it for caddisfly-exclusive notes. In particular, the notebook filled with sketches, observations, and thoughts pertaining to my work on the genus Cheumatopsyche. When I started my PhD program, I did the same for my tachinid research. I also keep a Grinnel-style triad of field journal, catalog, and species accounts for any field work and dragonfly observations. These are less often used, as I spend most of my time in the lab looking at dead specimens under the microscope.

I had been meaning to read Field Notes on Science and Nature for several years now, and finally just got around to it. The book is a mixed collection of biologists, anthropologists, and geologists, writing about their methods of taking notes in the field (whatever "the field" might be). The individual chapters are accompanied by photographs of the actual field notes, so you get both the text explanation of methods as well as a visual example. The primary methods of these researchers range from the above mentioned Grinnel system, to more informal collections of notes and drawings, to careful logs of stratigraphy, to the completely electronic recording system of insect taxonomist Piotr Nasrecki.

However, the overall feel is less that of a textbook on field work and more artbook-slash-nature journal. Most of the chapter authors supply prose accounts of exciting field observations, particularly those working with large mammals. And the journals in themselves are both art and historical artifacts; they carry information, but are also pleasant to look at.

One theme stretching through the work that seemed most important to me was that "the field" is not necessarily out in nature. It can be, in many people's research, simply in the presence of potentially living specimens. For me, viewing specimens at the microscope is "the field", and the notebook in which I record my observations is my "field journal". Another point many authors made was that observations should be recorded as soon as possible, in a permanent method which other people can use in the future. Who knows what piece of information may be useful?

I appreciated these and other suggestions on design and maintinance of field notes, including Jenny Keller's heuristic for drawing biological specimens in the chapter "Why Sketch?". I have been illustrating genitalia for some time now, but I have no formal art training, so some of her methods were completely unknown to me.

I recommend this book for anyone who does natural history research, because, even if you have already found your perfect method, you will appreciate the diversity of approaches to keeping notes in the field.

"By people who don't need them for people who can't use them."

Recently, I discovered the long awaited revision of the North American black winged fungus gnats (Sciaridae) has finally been published (Note: link is only the first page). Studia Dipterologica is a relatively obscure publications for fly nuts, so it took some digging to get a copy. In my excitement upon arrival, I scanned through the entire text, looking for the thing I was really excited about. And it's not there, there's no genus key.

A bit of background: The Manual of Nearctic Diptera remains today a masterpiece, 30 years after publication. It includes generic keys to every family of Diptera in North America, for adults and sometimes for larvae as well. And it's freely available online, too, so all the better! But even in this continuing piece d'resistance of the Canadian National Collection of Insects, there are problems. Things have changed since 1983, there are new genera, synonyms of old genera, and elevated subgenera. And some keys simply don't work very well, or are not trustworthy. This is not true for all the keys, of course. Most of them still work perfectly fine. And even for some of the ones that don't work perfectly, that's just the nature of the game for those groups. I'm looking at you, Tachinidae. It doesn't matter how well a tachinid key is designed, they're the most difficult group of flies and they are going to be difficult until the end of time.

In other cases, however, it's more a matter of updating. Black winged fungus gnats are not the easiest group of flies to identify, but there have been changes since Volume 1 of the Manual was published. What's frustrating is, the Mohrig et al revision is a very nice catalog of all the described North American Sciaridae, with updated names, descriptions, and genitalic illustrations in many cases, but there is no revised genus key. Why? Not THAT much has changed since 1983, it wouldn't be that difficult. Why didn't they include an updated key to the genera in their revision?

This reminds me of another situation.

For about two years now, I have been sitting on this key. It's an updated genus key to the keroplatid fungus gnats of North America, meant to replace a section of the Mycetophilidae in the Manual of Nearctic Diptera. It's even available online, though not exactly pretty. Last week, my adviser said, you know, you should really publish that. Emphatically, he said it. And he's right, I should publish it. But I'm not going to, not now, anyway.

Why? Three reasons:

1. I can't verify it without more research. I've used a combination of several publications, the world checklist, and intuition to build it. But I've looked at very few specimens, and I have no collection to back it up. This was the preliminary work for what was going to be my dissertation, and when I ended up working on tachinid flies instead, well... The Orfeliini is the real problem, with the previous genus Orfelia split up into a large number of what used to be subgenera. Since I don't have a good collection, I don't know if species in the World Catalog are correctly placed. There may even be genera in North America not currently in my key. And I haven't had time to follow up.

2. It needs illustrations. I could quickly and easily format the thing for ZooKeys or the CJAI, but without illustrations it's not going to be easy to use. Especially for all the 'new' Orfeliini genera. I don't have illustrations because I need specimens from all the genera to make them. See item 1.

3. I feel like I'm going to be stepping on someone's toes. I don't think anyone is working on this right now, but I can't be sure. And the key is derived, it's a synthesis; there isn't really any new stuff there, it's a combination of the MND key PLUS Lane 1951 PLUS Vockeroth 1981 PLUS the Manual of Paelearctic Diptera and others. I'm afraid someone is going to accuse me of plagiarism, or of trying to inflate my publication number, or tell me the Manual is good enough as it is, just leave it.

The title alludes to a common saying about identification keys, that they're written by people who don't need them (experts), for people who can't use them (non-experts). Yet they are incredibly useful, even in this day and age when digital HD photographs are a click of a button. Keys are the technology side of our work, they're the tools we create to make our lives easier. Not every specimen is perfect, and not every taxonomic group is nicely defined by a single, specially shared character that no other group has (cf. Tachinidae, again), it's true. Digital identification keys such as Lucid Keys allow much greater flexibility, with multiple starting points, the ability to account for character variability (e.g. lengths), and overall more characters to work with. However, in most cases, a good dichotomous key is much faster to use, in spite of the learning period.

But there seems to be some barriers to publishing keys, especially updates of older works. There's only so many ways I can split up Keroplatidae. Since the parsimonious way is the best way, and since THAT way is the way the Manual is set up, why NOT use the Manual's key as the basis? Maybe my reasons are the same reasons for no updated Sciaridae key in Mohrig et al.

So, some general questions for ya'all:

Is the reworking and synthesizing of old keys into a single, updated key for publication plagiarism?

Is the publication of revisions without dicotomous keys a trend, or is this an isolated case?

How much extra work needs to be put into an update before it becomes worthwhile to publish? Half? One-fourth? The whole shebang?

Do any of you have any keys you're sitting on, not publishing, for the above reasons or others?

Caddisfly weirdos.

Previously on Trichopterology...about 5 years previously, I talked about some very cool caddisflies that live in tide pools. These marine caddisflies feed on soft corals, and also use it to construct their cases. And the females of at least one species, Philanisus plebeius, oviposit into the body cavity of sea stars. Now, I'm not quite sure you'd call this relationship parasitic, because I don't know if the sea stars are harmed at all by the oviposition or the eggs. As soon as the larvae hatch, they leave the sea star through its stomach and out its mouth, and start munching on coral. They seem to be more of a commensalist incubation chamber than a host in a parasitic relationship. It's unfortunate that there hasn't been any more recent research in the literature, nor photographs because I would really love to show you all one of their cases.

Out of the three main indicator aquatic insect groups (caddisflies, mayflies, and stoneflies or EPTs), Trichoptera seem to have the widest range of niche. They range from free moving predators to plant shredders, to filter feeders, to scrapers and grazers. You can find them in tiny spring seeps and large rivers, in temporary pools and the wind swept shores of the Great lakes, and in aquatic habitats ranging from fully freshwater to marine. This diversity of habitats and feeding guilds is a testament to their wondrous use of silk, building cases out of practically every kind of material that can be found in aquatic habitats, or spinning silk into webs and nets.

Marine caddisflies are pretty weird, they have a semi-parasitic lifestyle and they live in habitats that are avoided by all other insects. But, there are other weirdos.

I've talked previously about the tethered casemakers, Limnocentropodidae, which connect their cases to the substrate with a sturdy silk stalk, sometimes tethering to other cases in long aggregations during pupation.

Then there's the Atriplectidae, which really deserve a blog post of their own. They're sometimes called the 'vulture caddis' due to their specialized telescoping head. Much like a vulture, they feed on carrion, but in this case it's other arthropods. The long 'neck' allows them to stay outside the corpse and insert only their head for feeding.

There are several species of caddisflies which spend most of their lives out of the water, in moist habitats. This includes the Platte River caddisfly, Ironoquia plattensis, which undergoes a terrestrial estivation period as larvae during the summer. There's also a British species, Enoicyla pusilla the land caddis, which feeds on dead oak leaves in humid forests and spends most of it's lifecycle out of water. A stranger habit is that of the retreat maker Xiphocentron sturmi. Typical of it's family, it makes a network of tubes appressed to a substrate, in this case rotting wood. What's not so typical is the tunnels are out of water, and weirder yet is it's "chrysalis". When X. sturmi finish larval development, they build a hanging structure that looks sort of like a tiny lemon on a rope, and pupate inside of it.

But really, these are all sideshows compared to the main attractions, a caddisfly-sponge mutualism and an honest-to-god caddisfly parasitoid.


Ceraclea is a genus of caddisflies in the family Leptoceridae, the long horned caddisflies. As the name implies, most leptocerids have long antennae in both adults and larvae. Ceraclea is unusually for a number of reasons, first of which is that their antennae are much shorter than other leptocerids. Another reason is that several species feed on freshwater sponges. I wouldn't suggest trying sponge for yourself, though. It would be like eating fiberglass, since the sponge skeleton is made of tiny glass bars called spicules. These sponge feeding caddisflies are able to ingest both the soft tissues and the spicules without damaging their guts because they have a super tough midgut. They're really feeding on the zooanthellae, endosymbiotic algae that live within the sponge tissue.

The sponge outwardly seems to be the host in a parasitic relationship, since the caddis feeds on and damages host tissue but doesn't consume the whole colony. But according to research from 2003, the sponge benefits as well. Electron micrographs of Ceraclea fulva cases showed that they are composed of a tightly bound series of silk bridges attached to sponge spicules. Furthermore, pieces of living sponge attach to the cases, especially in the late larval instars. Since sponges often spread by fragmentation, the combination of larval integration of living sponge fragments into its case as well as fragmentation during feeding means that the sponge can spread to new habitats with help from the caddisfly larva. Mutualisms are rare enough in aquatic insects that this is the only example I know where both species benefit. There are other aquatic insects that feed on sponges, the spongillaflies for example. But these are parasites, and are not dispersal agents for the sponge like Ceraclea cases.

Case of C. fulva; 'S' indicates living sponge tissue (Corallini & Gaino 2003)

At the other end of the spectrum from mutualism, you have parasitoids. This life history includes many groups of terrestrial insects, like the tachinid flies on which I am currently working. Most aquatic parasitoids are not truly aquatic, since they have no special adaptations for the aquatic environment. There is at least one species of truly aquatic chironomid midge which is an ectoparasitoid of caddisfly pupae. And, there are at least a few species of microcaddisflies that do the same.

Orthotrichia species, like all members of the family Hydroptilidae (microcaddisflies), spend 4 out of five of their larval molts as free living. In the final instar, hydroptilid larvae undergo hypermetamorphosis, greatly inflating their abdomens and building a portable case. This is believed to be an evolutionary link between the free living habit and the true casemaking habit, not quite a casemaker but not completely free living either. Orthotrichia in particular builds a tiny purse shaped case out of sand grains. The case is open at both ends and unlike true casemakers can be used bidirectionally.

Orthotrichia spp. larvae; 1. in pillbox case; 2 & 3. with host pupae; note distended abdomen (Wells 2005)

In a few unusual Australian Orthotrichia, the initial case is much smaller and pillbox like. The larvae are swept by the current into the nets of filter feeding caddisflies, which they somehow escape and get enclosed within the pupal case of their host. From there, these Orthotrichia construct their normal case, and begin feeding on the caddisfly pupa. This continues until the Orthotrichia abdomen is big and swollen, and the host is no more than a pupal husk. Having taken over it's host's pupal case, the Orthotrichia larva spins it's own cocoon and pupates. The adults are apparently larger than non-parasitic Orthotrichia, which could be in part due to the easy and massive food supply provided by a net spinning caddisfly pupa.

Even the sea star ovipositing marine caddisflies don't seem too bizarre when I consider all the other Trichoptera oddities. Parasitoids bring to mind tachinid flies and brachonid wasps, not aquatic insects. But I guess that caddisflies prove once again that if there's an aquatic habit, they'll find some way of making it work.

Wait...who am I kidding? Marine insects, feeding on soft corals, ovipositing into sea star incubation chambers? Nothing can beat that level of weird.

Trichoptera to Tachinidae

Well, it has been a while, hasn't it? I just recently got back into the swing of posting regularly. Before that there was a long silence, a diapause (as Bug Girl recently characterized her absence from blogging). And to be honest, the things I was posting about weren't terribly interesting. Minutia of The Code is a technical activity at best, a lawyerly pursuit at worst (reading the backlog for the ICZN-listserv shows this), and not something for general audiences.

I started this blog in 2008 during the first semester of my Master's degree, in part inspired from Bug Girl's Blog and the few other insect blogs around at the time. I wanted to improve my writing, and I wanted to relate my interest in caddisflies, a group I had just begun to investigate. Caddisflies will forever be my first love, no doubt, but in the denouement of my master's thesis I became interested in other groups. It was both temporary burn out and lack of funding in that direction; I was without a "real" job, working in a restaurant, trying to pay back some of my student loans. I had a brief, unpaid internship at Chicago Field Museum (which has had it's own recent financial difficulties), still operating under the assumption that if I just got enough practical experiences in museums one would actually hire me.

It was half way through that valley year that I discovered I was really missing research, and I was missing universities and academia. The long term revision of the North American Keroplatidae that I had been planning seemed like the perfect project for a PhD thesis. Unfortunately, the programs I applied to didn't agree with me, or more likely they didn't have the space or money for that sort of research.

Cutting to the point: I finally found a PhD assistantship! But the work was in neither caddisflies nor fungus gnats. This was an entirely new to me group of insects, an important and diverse group of flies called tachinids. 

A Plethora of Tachinids: Most look like the gray and silver ones at the right side of the third row.

Tachinid flies (Family Tachinidae) are a worldwide distributed, ultra-diverse family of true flies with around 8,000 described species, and many more yet to be described. And we think that all this diversity is relatively recent, with the stem group branching out around 30 to 40 million years ago. The really special thing about tachinids is that they are all endoparasitoids of other arthropods. By which I mean, they all do the 'Aliens' thing. Yeah, that thing. The young get into their hosts by some means, and there the larvae grow and slowly eat the host out from the inside. When they pupate, they burst out and metamorphose inside their last larval skin (called a puparium), leaving behind the empty husk of their host. Endoparasitoids (or the techinical term, koinobionts) do not make a good bedtime children's story (The Very Hungry Caterpillar,  this is not), but they are a great platform for studying evolution and evolutionary interactions. Parasitoids can be ultra specialist, like many tiny braconid wasps that have only one host species, or super generalist like the tachinid Compsilura concinnata, which feeds on over 120 species and across several insect orders. Most tachinids are in the middle range, with a few to 10s of host species. Why they aren't particularly host limited like other groups will be the subject of a future post.

The majority of tachinids attack plant feeding insects, especially moth caterpillars, sawfly larvae, and beetle larvae, and are probably a significant factor in controlling agricultural pests. A few species have even been mass released as active biological controls. And there are some tachinids which are pests in their own right, including the Uzifly which attacks silkworms and causes millions in damages to sericulture every year. Some of the more unique tachinid groups have unusual hosts, like crickets or stick insects, or ant queens, or stink bugs. There is even a tachinid that attacks trapdoor spiders (Antrodiaetidae).

It's a little funny to me that as important and ubiquitous as tachinids are, they don't really have a common name. The family name, Tachinidae, comes from the Greek word tachys meaning 'swift', so I guess we could call them swift flies. Other names people have used include: parasitic flies, hairy parasitoid flies, hedgehog flies, and bristle flies. None of those names have really stuck, despite being wonderfully descriptive, so people continue to use the abreviated form of the family name. In general, tachinids are small to large sized dark colored, hairy house fly like insects, often with patches of silvery wax, and sometimes with bright orange, yellow or metallic coloration. The hairyness is probably the thing that stands out the most about tachinids, and many of the individual bristles are used in identifying and classifying these flies. A good number of tachinid adults are flower feeders, and some are striking bee and wasp mimics.

If you want to learn more about tachinids, the best place to start is the Homepage for Tachinid Resources. There's also the Tachinid Times, an annual newsletter for tachinid research. This year's issue just came out yesterday, and it's a particularly nice one. Dr. O'Hara (the editor) was kind enough to allow me a full page to describe my intended PhD research, which I will be outlining more in detail next week. There are also lots of pretty pictures, so go check it out!

The story behind "Range and Variation of Oecetis parva".

Disclaimer: The views, opinions, and judgements expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author. They are not intended to represent the views or opinions of Clemson University, the Department of Energy, or Savannah River Ecology Lab. Nor are they meant to represent the opinions of the other authors of the "Oecetis parva" article. Just to  cover all bases and my rear.

An Island of Green from Space: Savannah River Nat'l Laboratory is just right of center, a circle of green forest surrounded by agriculture and suburban development. (from Google Maps)

During my last two years at Clemson University, I was employed as a research assistant in conjunction with the Savannah River Ecology Lab (SREL) at Savannah River National Laboratory (SRS) in Aiken, South Carolina. The SREL had received a grant from the parent organization, the Department of Energy, to repeat a thirty year old aquatic insect survey of Upper Three Runs Creek and it's tributaries.

Upper Three Runs Creek and Tributaries. The four sampling sites marked are the same as the previous study, all of them located downstream from a bridge crossing. (from Google Maps)

These stream systems, located in the northern part of SRS, have among the richest levels of aquatic insect diversity in the world, with at least 575 species recorded, including some species endemic only to this location. In comparison, tropical streams surveyed thus far have an average of 400 species. You could chalk this up to sampling completeness, but Upper Three Runs is still a gem of aquatic insect diversity in North America. These numbers come from a year long study conducted from September 1976 to August 1977 (Morse et al. 1980), where a team of aquatic insect taxonomists, including my master's adviser Dr. John Morse, collected black light samples at 4 locations along the stream corridors. These collections were repeated every two weeks for the entire survey year, ending up with 51 total light trap samples and a massive amount of material to sort and identify. Since the majority of aquatic insects are nocturnal, including caddisflies, mayflies, and stoneflies, a year long black light survey will pull in most of the aquatic insect diversity in an area. And if that wasn't enough, the researchers also took two benthic net samples at each of the four locations every two weeks. (You might notice the 51 samples don't add up to a complete sampling regime. Not every location was surveyed every two weeks, either due to failures of traps to work, not enough traps, or other issues. But at least one site was sampled for that entire year, and the rest for at least half all the collection dates.)

Site A, Upper Three Runs Creek, looking downstream. No rocks, but plenty of woody debris and aquatic plants.

The really interesting thing about Upper Three Runs Creek and it's tributaries, Tinker and Mill Creeks, is they don't really look like biodiversity hotspots. Most aquatic entomologists associate high diversity with mountain streams, or at least with rocky riffle areas. Upper Three Runs Creek is located in the sandhills and coastal plain region of South Carolina, a black water stream with high tannic acids. It flows through southern pine forest and swamp. It has no rocks. So, when entomologists first look at the creek, it's kind of disappointing. No rocks, just shifting sand and silt substrate.

Upstream, at Site B. Those rocks are part of the bridge stabilization structure and are not naturally occurring.

What they soon find out is that all the tremendous diversity is tied up to these little pockets of heavy woody debris and submerged aquatic plants. These microzones of the stream are absolutely coated with aquatic insects. And so, Upper Three Runs Creek is sort of obscure in it's diversity, unless you happen to stick your D-net in the right place. Or, if you set up a black light and sit back as the sun goes down.

In Fall of 2008, I had the opportunity to see for myself. My adviser, Dr. Morse, was contacted by Dr. J Vaun McArthur of Savannah River Ecology lab about a repeat of the 1978 survey. In particular, they were interested in adult caddisfly diversity. I had plenty of prior experience identifying the larvae, but almost none identifying the adults, so I knew this would be a particularly challenging project. In the previous survey and subsequent work, nearly ~160 species were found at these locations, some of which were new to science. We were also hoping to have a more complete sampling regime, with traps running at all four locations for the entire year. Since SRS is a high security government facility with high safety standards, we had to plan ahead for each of the collecting trips and could not stay with the traps overnight.

Rube Goldberg Setup at Site A. This was taken in March, thus the early spring plant growth. By May they were as tall as the umbrella.

As for the traps themselves, they were a makeshift contraption. A pvc pipe tripod suspends a black light over a plastic pan filled with ethyl alcohol. The light is hooked up to a deep cycle battery, and the whole unit is placed under a tied and staked down umbrella in case of rain. But despite looking like a Rube Goldberg machine, they worked quite well for our purposes.

Less Rube Goldberg: This trap was under a bridge so it didn't need an umbrella.

When I returned from a collecting trip, I would sort the caddisflies out the samples.

Insect Cometary: This was an average night of sampling. I don't like killing so many insects at once, but when doing faunistics this is often necessary. We sort out what we need and save the rest for future research. The only thing that gets tossed are the moths, which we can't do much about.

I also picked out a goodly portion of the other orders of aquatic insects for identification at some point down the line.

A Really Good Day: This was the best (worst?) sample I ever sorted, and this is only the caddisflies, some of which had already been removed.

 The caddisflies were often very dense in the samples. Some of the spring collections had thousands of individuals.

Oodles of Caddis: There are at least 7 genera in this shot, probably twice that number. Everything in view is less than 15 mm in length, most around 10.

Identification was slow at first. Like I said, I had no experience with adult Trichoptera before this assistantship, and I was doing species level identifications of both males and females. For the males, we had an atlas of genitalia, but for the females I was working from primary literature and guesswork.

Largest and Smallest: Hydatophylax argus, the largest caddisfly in North America, and Neotrichia falca, one of the smallest. Note: H. argus is not found in Upper Three Runs Creek.

Some caddisflies are tiny, as shown in this picture of Neotrichia falca (Family Hydroptilidae) next to the massive Hydtatophylax argus (from the Clemson Arthropod collection). I was careful to pick out the hydroptilids along with the much larger species of other families.

Despite the previous work, I was finding species not previously known from Upper Three Runs. But it wasn't until I saw these guys that I was stumped.

Males of the mystery caddis, now known to be Oecetis parva Banks. Individuals are ~5 mm.

These are tiny caddisflies, only 5-6 mm in length, but they aren't hydroptilids. When I keyed them out, I found they were in the family Leptoceridae, the long horned caddisflies. Called such because usually they have long antennae. As you can see, these didn't. My identification placed them in the genus Oecetis, but they weren't in genitalia atlas. Eventually I checked the literature for every species of Oecetis in North America. Through a roundabout way I finally found illustrations of the last species, Oecetis parva. Nathan Banks, who originally described O. parva in 1907, didn't include an illustration in his publication. It took a trip to the British Museum by the late Herbert Ross to remedy this situation. And in 1938, Ross published an illustration of the lectotype. The illustration matched my specimens.

Or...they sort of matched.

The first law of Biology is "variation exists". This is something every taxonomist must keep in mind during his or her work, or enter the folly of unnecessary junior synonyms. My specimens had the same general look, the same clasper shape, the same size and color, but there was something off about the tenth tergite. This part of male caddisfly genitalia is the last dorsal plate of the abdomen, often modified into various shapes. The shape of the male genitalia fits that of the female like a key in a lock, and it's thought this is one of the reasons there are so many species of insects.

Left lateral view of O. parva male genitalia. Between the pad with hairs near the top is a long finger projection, and under that a pair of mebraneous hooks. Insect reproductive parts are complicated.

The tenth tergite was different. It had a long, fingerlike extension between the cerci, visible both from lateral and dorsal view. And just below the finger, there were a pair of membranous hooks, visible from lateral view. Ross's illustration didn't show these distinctive structures. So I became excited. I thought I had a new species. For two months I waffled back and forth: it was a new species, it wasn't a new species, it was a new species, it wasn't a new species. As if I was picking petals off a flower.

There was also another issue with Oecetis parva. The only places this species was known from were 14 sites in Florida and the southern tip of Alabama. It was thought to be a far southeastern endemic, found only in forest pools. Aiken SC was two hundred miles outside its known range.

But as I sent for specimens from the Florida State Arthropod Collection, I soon found out my excitement was hubris. Variation exists, and there was variation in the Florida and Alabama specimens as well. Nothing quite as extreme, but intermediates between the reduced and elongate finger of the tenth tergite. Needless to say, I was a little crushed. This would have been my first species discovery.

There were still some interesting issues. Namely, why was Oecetis parva found so far outside of it's known range? And why was it found now, and not in the previous survey?  Talking to other southeastern Trichopterists, I learned that O. parva had been collected recently at two other new sites, one in Georgia, and another near Columbia, South Carolina. So Dr Morse, Dr. McArthur, and I decided to publish this new information. This included new illustrations, of the variation seen in males from South Carolina, and of the female genitalia, which had not been previously illustrated.

More genitalia. These are, however, much prettier, as this was after I learned how to use a vector image program. (Burington et al 2011)

 Around the same time we were finding Oecetis parva in our traps, the Center for Biological Diversity presented a petition to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, with 404 southeastern aquatic species they felt warranted listing under the Endangered Species Act. Several months later, USFWS released a slightly shorter list of 374 species which were slated for a 90 day finding, and Oecetis parva was on this list. Yes, this is the caddisfly I mentioned rather cryptically in a post way back in 2011. However, my publication may have had an effect on the listing process, because I don't believe O. parva is any longer being considered. Which would mean that I as a taxonomist publishing basic natural history research has somehow influence government policy. Regardless of your opinion about whether it should have been or should not have been listed, that is kind of cool.

Recently, I gave a presentation on my master's research, including a segment on Upper Three Runs Creek and it's diversity.  I was looking at my range map for Oecetis parva, and a little hypothesis started to form, and over a few days it got bigger and bigger, until I felt like I had to share it. So, please allow me a little speculation.

Range map of Oecetis parva. Gray dots are those localities known previously. Black dots are new records. Red dot indicates unpublished previously unknown locality. Modified from Burington et al 2011

On the map, the grey dots represent all the prior localities for O. parva. The black dots are new localities in our paper. The red dot indicates a new location I recently heard about, in northeast South Carolina. And the first thing to notice is, it really does seem O. parva is limited to the sandhils and coastal plains of the Southeast United States, and particularly to well protected pine forest habitat. I also have word that Cheumatopsyche richardsoni has been collected at that red dot location, a species that we thought was endemic to Upper Three Runs Creek.

So, back to the big question: Why Savannah River Site? Why the massive diversity at Upper Three Runs Creek? Savannah River Site is known locally as the "bomb shop", because it was used for weapons grade plutonium manufacture during World War II and the Cold War. During presentations about the original 1976 survey, some wise-cracker would get up and ask "Maybe it's the radiation?" And we laugh at that joke, except, we didn't really know why there was this high diversity just here, not in the surrounding stream systems.

But it now seems that there are few if any true site endemics. Nearly all the species of Upper Three Runs Creek have been found elsewhere, and some of them widely separated, like Cheumatopsyche richardsoni. This suggests an answer, and that is: Yes, Upper Three Runs Creek is a beautiful diverse gem, but it is not unique. The southern pine forests and their stream systems used to stretch in an unbroken chain across the entire sandhills and coastal plain region of the southeast US. This diversity was probably all over the place. When industrial agriculture arrived in the early 20th century, almost all these original forests were plowed into farm fields. And now, this original diversity only remains in a few well managed pockets with protected headwater streams. We could test whether this is isolation or recent dispersal by the methods of population genetics. Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to do this currently.

This also suggests a second idea. When aquatic entomologists and aquatic ecologists just look at blackwater streams like Upper Three Runs Creek, we expect them to be of low diversity. But the natural state of these streams is HIGH diversity, and it's only because of widespread agricultural impacts that we are inclined to think differently. We need to turn the idea of blackwater streams as species poor on it's head. There are species new to science still being found in these pockets, indicative of what was lost and what treasures still are left.

Afterword: This project is in no way finished. Identifications are ongoing, and the material left is huge. I am no longer directly associated with this project and I hope it will be completed. During a recent conversation with Dr. Morse, he told me he was working through a sample from May of our collecting year. So far, that single black light trap sample has yielded over 5000 individuals and 57 different species of caddisflies. I remember that night. That was a good night.

Burington, Z. L., Morse, J. C., & McArthur, J. V. (2011). Distribution and variation of Oecetis parva (Trichoptera: Leptoceridae). Entomological News, 122(1), 100–106. [ed.: unfortunately, this is not open access. Entomological News does not yet have this option, despite being one of the few publications which will publish these sorts of articles.]

Morse, J. C., Chapin, J. W., Herlong, D. D., & Harvey, R. S. (1980). Aquatic insects of upper Three Runs Creek, Savannah River plant, South Carolina. I. Orders other than Diptera. Journal of the Georgia Entomological Society, 15(1), 73-101. 

THIS is how you do a scratchpads site.

Behold the organized glory of Mosquito Taxonomic Inventory (MTI).

Scratchpads, if you aren't familiar with the platform, is a biodiversity networking tool created by ViBRANT, an EU funded project. The intent is to provide open-access, creative commons licensed software for a global community of taxonomists, natural historians, and other comparative biologists to draw together their knowledge in web-based format. As MTI shows, scratchpads can be an excellent tool, on level with the software behind AntWEB. This is clear with the preliminary information already hosted there.

I am quite impressed. But the reason I am impressed is sad. Until today I thought scratchpads was a flawed platform, a messy pooled slew of overwhelming, hard to navigate options that lead to either a sloppy mess or a webpage never updated. I admit, the majority of my exposure to this software has been through Fungus Gnats Online (FGO). Eventually my frustration with the search engine, poor organization and lack of control lead me to create Keroplatiwiki, I now have more control, but it is not nearly as slick as scratchpads can be if used properly.

Here is what makes MTI such a great example:

• The front page is clean and clear: There are no unnecessary animations, no eye candy. In other words, it's not killing my eyes to look at the format. The header is a simple icon and the name of the network, all in those same cool, unobtrusive colors. Equally important is the content. The page explains not only what Mosquito Taxonomic Inventory is, but also exactly how to navigate the site's resources. Two small, clear photographs highlight the right side of the text, and that is all that is necessary. There is no extra clutter; the news tab and other messages are on a separate page.


• Simple taxonomic navigation on the left bar: The left side has two expandable taxonomic hierarchies, and aside from a two sentence contact statement and a visitor map, that's it. One is for extant species, the other for fossils. The front page explains how to use these with relative ease. Above these is a search box, which is really not even necessary, a couple seconds faster retrieval of pages far down the hierarchy, if that.


• Useful links (only!) on the right hand side: One of the things that absolutely drives me nuts about FGO are the huge number of categories listed in the sidebar. This is where my sense of organization and will to improve starts to go numb. Where do I even start? What's the difference between 'annotated bibliography' and 'biblio'? What is the 'character project'? What is 'page'? When are each of these necessary? How should I use them individually? Even clicking on the categories doesn't make that especially clear. And there's no indication on the home page, only a short blurb and 'recent' updates.
  MTI, on the other hand, has perfectly clear categories, all explained on the home page. There is a short hierarchy leading to individual morphology pages (e.g. head, thorax, and abdomen), links to individual parts of the Anatomical Glossary, the single, alphabetic by author bibliography, and four links to some general resources on classification and a list of valid names. No 'biblio', no 'page' and no clutter.


• The individual pages are wiki-style: I know the claims of the scratchpads hub page. "Your data [images of different online databases, including Google] builds your site [!]" In theory this is a good idea. Why wouldn't you want to quickly gather as much information from as varied sources as possible and just insert it all, and voila! You have your complete network, ready to 'use'. In practice, it looks just about like what you would expect a hacked together site to look like, that is, a messy pile of useless crap. This is another one of those things that drives me nuts about FGO. The species pages are mostly populated by empty boxes, making them pretty much a copy of Encyclopedia of Life's relevant (or irrelevant, maybe) species pages. You can get the same information in the same format through Google, so why even have a network? The glory of MTI's chosen page format is that it filters down all the relevant information into a clear, written summary. If GBIF had a relevant piece of media, you could easily insert it later, but the initial choice of simplicity means that future clean up projects will not be necessary. More work initially, but more useful in the long run.
  


• The Anatomical Glossary: I wanted to talk about this individually because it is absolute genius. The overview page explains the navigation of the glossary, but it is in about the clearest format I could want. Nine categories link to an alphabetic listing (by first letter) of all anatomical terms relevant to an individual life stage or structure type. Just as the rest of the site, the structure pages are wiki-style, with links to adjacent and similar anatomy, and a list of synonyms at the bottom. If every family of insects had one of these, we would be light years in distance ahead of the taxonomic problems we are now facing. This. Makes. Me. Giddy.

There is a lot of good quality information at MTI. One general flaw I can see is that, as of now, it is much more of a personal project than a network. But, please go check it out and compliment Ralph Harbach on his fine work. And if you are planning on making your own or are already hosting a scratchpads network, please shoot for this level of excellence!

The fly with the feathery antennae.

In 2009, my mentor was part of an ecosystem survey project at Lago Copa, a recently created national park in Chile. He was using Townes traps to collect adult caddisflies, but he also kept representatives from other groups, including Diptera. When he returned I volunteered to sort out the caddisflies (these were alcohol-preserved samples he hand picked in the field), and I also sorted out any fungus gnats I found. The gestalt for many fungus gnats is easy enough to pick them out around other flies, even without magnification. They tend to have long antennae, long coxae and legs, multiple tibial spurs, a thin, curving abdomen that widens towards the tip, and often have patterned wings. They also tend to be laterally flattened, which sets them off from the boxy muscoid flies. In particular, I was looking for members of the family Keroplatidae, some of which have stout, flattened antennae as well as the above characters. If I had to describe the over all shape in simple terms, they look like two arches joined by three pillars, with wings outstretched behind.

Imagine my surprise when I found this critter among the mix.

The mystery fly, semi-left habitus. CHILE: PROVINCIA AYSEN: Municipalidad Cisnes, Parque Nacional Lago Copa, S. side of E. Lago Copa, unnamed 1st order stream, from cascade 200 m E. of Cliffs Lodge, S44.89155, W072.62070, 15-18.xii.2009.

If this was a fungus gnat, it was the strangest individual I had ever seen. First of all, the antennae are pectinate (feather-like), and there are few Diptera which have this character. This wouldn't eliminate Sciaroidea from the search, since there are genera in Ditomyiidae, Mycetophilidae, and Keroplatidae with species bearing pectinate antennae (Matile 1981). But then there are the other unusual characters.

The hindlegs are like nothing I had seen before. The tibiae are bowed and pressed forward in a grove against the femurs, so the tarsi lay close to the coxae. They resembled those of chalcid parasitoid wasps, which use those strong hind legs to capture prey for their young. The abdomen is short and conic. And the wings confuse the rest.

The wing veination looks as if it could have come from a fungus gnat, but the thick apical stigma and just how strong the veins are, how dark and heavy, reminds me more of a wasp wing. The halters mean it is obviously a true fly, but it looks like someone has glued on parts from other insect orders. I sent some pictures to Sciaroidea experts but the identity of this chimera continued to be a mystery.

I finally sent the above photos to Dalton de Souza Amorim, a South American fly expert, and he replied with a diagnosis he was nearly 100% sure of. But this was not a fungus gnat. It wasn't even in the Sciaroidea superfamily. This was a Canthyloscelidae.

Wing of male Exiliscelis californiensis from the Synneuridae chapter of Manual of Nearctic Diptera. (Via DrawWing) If I didn't know better, I would say this came from a keroplatid.

The family Canthyloscelidae is a small family of flies in the "lower" Diptera, with ~15 extant species in 4 genera, found native in all faunal regions except the East Palearctic and Afrotropics. There is disagreement as to whether it should be placed with the Bibiomorpha or Psychodomorpha; larval structures suggest the latter (Amorim 2008) while adult characters alone suggest the former. Canthyloscelidae used to be split into two or more families, the Synneuridae and Canthyloscelidae (sometimes previously combined under Hyperoscelidae (Hutson 1977)), but these were joined by the time of Haenii's canthyloscelid chapter in Contributions to a Manual of Palearctic Diptera (1997).

This particular species is Canthyloscelis pectinata, the only species in this family with the males bearing strongly pectinate antennae. It has been recorded from Argentina and Chile in very low numbers (Hutson 1977), which means this may be one of less than 20 specimens ever collected, a rare find (Amorim pers. com.).

Exiscelis californiensis gathering on Potentilla flowers, Lowder Mountain, Oregon. (© 2011 Jake Hurlbert)

In North America, there are two species of Canthyloscelidae in two genera, Synneuron decepiens and Exiscelis californiensis. S. decepiens is found at Northern latitudes across the continent, while E. californiensis is only found on the Northwest Coast. Both are found in "ancient forests" (Triplehorn and Johnson 2004). Very little is known about their biology; larvae live in decaying wood "permeated by [fungal] mycelia" (Peterson and Cook 1981), and this family's close relationship with Scatopsidae suggests they feed on the fungi and microorganisms associated with such habitats.

In all, it was a nice little treasure hunt. I think taking time to jump outside my comfort zone and identify something so strange to my experience is an excellent exercise. It improves my skill as a taxonomist and teaches me about groups beyond my research. But most of all, identifying something weird is /fun/. Finding something strange and new, even if it's just new to you, is one of the greatest pleasures of natural history research.


References
Haenni, J.-P. 1997. Family Canthyloscelidae. In Papp L. & Darvas B. (eds): Contributions to a Manual of Palaearctic Diptera. Nematocera and Lower Brachycera.. Vol. 2. Budapest: Science Herald. pp. 273–279.

Hutson, A. M. 1977. A revision of the families Synneuridae and Canthyloscelidae (Diptera). Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) Entomology 35(3):67-100.

Johnson, N. F., and C. A. Triplehorn. 2004. Borror and Delong's Introduction to the Study of Insects, 7th ed. Brooks Cole, St. Paul, MN.

Matile, L. 1981. A new Austrailian genus of Keroplatidae with pectinate antennae (Diptera: Mycetophiloidea). Journal of the Austrailian Entomological Society 20: 207-212.

Peterson, B. V., and E. F. Cook. 1981. Chapter 21. Synneuridae. Manual of Nearctic Diptera 1: 321-324.

Limnocentropodidae: The Tethered Casemakers.

Limnocentropodidae is a small family of case making caddisflies distributed throughout the East Palearctic, from Nepal to Japan, to India and Indonesia in the South. The family consists of a single genus, Limnocentropus, containing 15 described species (Trichoptera World Checklist, 2012). Larvae are filter feeders in streams and rivers (sometimes torrential currents), facing head and legs first into the current much like the common Nearctic genus Brachycentrus (Brachycentridae), but it is there that any similarities to other casemaking caddisfly families end.

A Limnocentropus insolitus larva, from Haiya, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. The photographer calls it a "kita gami", the Japanese name for the group. (© 2011 hir**amiyam*)

Both the larvae and adults are aberrant among other casemaking caddisfly families in their morphology and the odd architecture of the cases. As can be seen partially in the photo above, the case is a tapered tube of rock and leaf fragments, tethered to the substrate via a tough, silken stalk nearly as long as the case, and coated in tiny silk denticles. These predatory larvae extend their stout, hairy legs into the current like a net, snagging drifting insect larvae and other aquatic invertebrates. When it comes time to pupate, the larvae narrow the posterior end of the case, shorten the stalk, and build a wide collar around the anterior opening, possibly to help funnel water through the case. Some species will form their pupal houses in long chain like aggregations, with the stalks attached to the preceding cases (Wiggins 2004). Adult limnocentropodids are unique in retaining hardened mandibles; most caddisflies have only a sponge-like haustellum (Latin for "little suck") much like that of a house fly. (Kjer 2010).

A Limnocentropus himalayanus male. Despite being present, the mandibles are quite small and nearly undetectable in this photo. (Kjer 2006, Public Domain)

Because these stalk-casemakers are so weird, trichopterologists have had a hard time classifying this family. Glen Wiggins and Henry Frania (1997) placed Limnocentropodidae as a sister family to the rest of the case making caddisflies based in not possessing characters placing them in either the Brevitentoria (Herbert Ross's "long-horned-caddis-like" group) or the Plenitentoria ("northern-casemaker-like" group). More recent work using molecular characters (Kjer et al. 2002) and combined molecular and morphological characters (Holzenthal et al. 2007) supports placement within Brevitentoria, but any deeper classification has been unstable (Kjer 2010).

References

Frania, H. E., and G. B. Wiggins. 1997. Analysis of morphological and behavioural evidence for the phylogeny and higher classification of Trichoptera (Insecta). Life Sciences Contributions, Royal Ontario Museum, 160, 1–67.

Holzenthal, R. W., R. J. Blahnik, K. M. Kjer, and A. L. Prather. 2007. An update on the phylogeny of Caddisflies (Trichoptera). Proceedings of the XIIth International Symposium on Trichoptera. Bueno-Soria, R. Barba-Alvearz and B. Armitage (Eds). pp. 143-153. The Caddis Press.

Kjer, K. M. 2010. Limnocentropodidae. Limnocentropus. Version 20 July 2010 (under construction). http://tolweb.org/Limnocentropus/14593/2010.07.20 in The Tree of Life Web Project, http://tolweb.org/ [Accessed 17 February 2012].

Kjer, K. M., R. J. Blahnik, and R. W. Holzenthal. 2002. Phylogeny of Caddisflies (Insecta, Trichoptera), Zoologica Scripta 31(1) :83-91.

Morse, J. C. (ed.) 2012. Trichoptera World Checklist http://entweb.clemson.edu/database/trichopt/index.htm [Accessed 17 February 2012]

Wiggins, G. B. 2004. Caddisflies: The Underwater Architects. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON. [ed: includes detailed drawings of larval and case morphology]

Entomological Museums: Little progress in 60 years.

At the 1949 meeting of the Pacific Coast Entomological Society, retiring president Edward S. Ross gave an address on the role of entomological museums. He outlined six major functions which can be applied to natural history collections in general.

1. To preserve specimens: "In thus preserving and making available for use the specimens upon which the literature is is based the museum performs one of its most important functions; namely, that of being a place where collections can be received curated, and preserved for future reference."

2. To serve as gathering point for newly collected and unstudied specimens: "When a museum fails to gather new material it is as dead and as unproductive as a machine without fuel."

3. To provide facilities and loan material for specialists:

All museums, of course, attempt to have table space and equipment for visiting scientists...Obviously, however, it is impossible for a specialist personally to visit each museum in the course of a given taxonomic project...Curators, because of pressure of other work, or a fewar of losing specimens, unfortunately are not always eager to fill loan requests. They should realize, however, that it is one of their primary duties to honor any loan request made by a worker in good standing, or who is properly recommended. Unstudied specimens lying idle in museums at a time when revisionary work is being done might just as well be back in the field if they are not utilized during such fleeting periods of activity.

4. To specialize (to some extent) in a particular group or region: "The resultant development of outstanding collections in a taxonomic group is a desirable and an essential step towards making real published conclusions."

5. To provide representative sets of specimens for major groups around the world: "In many orders higher categories have been very incompletely correlated from a world standpoint. There is a need for first hand examination, not a mere literature knowledge, of the type species upon which these categories are based."

6. To educate the public: "Very often [the museum] is the only place where youth, the post-university-age amateur, and the professional entomologist can find the means for pursuing his work...Avocational entomology can add to the fullness of many a life and this fact alone could well justify the place of museums in our society."


The major problem with meeting these functions, he said, "is financial support of the activity is more in proportion to the size of the organisms, than to the size of the job." Charismatic megafauna such as birds and mammals often receive greater funding, despite smaller amounts of taxonomic work needed in those groups. And in the eyes of the public, these tasks lack the shiny, new appeal of other sciences based in high technology. Shortages in staffing, space and organizing materials are due to museum work being "like that of a library...very unspectacular."

To Dr. Ross, the single most important progressive change needed was freer loaning of type specimens between institutions, with a central filing system containing information on the types for all names of insects worldwide. The most controversial aspect of his proposal was a central type depository, perhaps at the Smithsonian, where all holotype specimens collected in the United States would be located.

I am sure the immediate reaction of many curators to this proposal will be one of horror, but most of this horror I believe would be based on unscientific selfish reasons. it is not the purpose of types to make an institutional or private collection valuable or indispensable. Admittedly it would mean that some museums would give up more than others. As matters stand, however, no institution is self-sufficient in regard to types and all stand to gain in the long run. What is really important is that our ponderous science would advance more rapidly with unwavering, steady steps. [emphasis his]

It is clear after 60 years that this dream is far from being realized. The problems of staff and funding shortages are the same today as they were then, if not worse. And central type depositories aside, there is still no central database of names and types for insects. This is in spite of the ubiquity of Internet, and many independent attempts by taxonomists in their groups of specialization. Many museums are digitizing their collections, but these catalogs are institutional and seldom connected to each other. Despite technological progress, natural history collections have a long way to go before name and type information is completely available. The problems of today are the same as then.

Thanks to Doug Yanega of the Entomological Collections Network listserv for the tip-up to this article.

Reference:
Ross, E. 1950. The Role of the Entomological Museum. Pan-Pacific Entomologist 26: 1-10.