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Every Friday we meet as a lab, to catch up on news, discuss early results and bottlenecks, and celebrate our accomplishments. We also use this opportunity to share the papers we’ve read since our last get-together . Our lab group started this habit several years ago, at first as a way to ensure participation by all in lab meeting but also to nudge students into the literature—hopefully creating a healthy habit that facilitates hypothesis generation and testing.
Our group’s been on a bit of a hot streak lately, bringing an increasingly impressive portfolio of literature to the table each week. It seemed to me that we should summarize our weekly list in a regular blog series. I thought about calling <clears throat, channels Michael Scott> “That’s what we read”, but … ummm … yeaaah …
Anyway, here is my first attempt to summarize our weekly reads, with a few thoughts about relevance from the people who read them:
Carolyn: Teratology is the study of abnormal development, and Dessart (1993) describes and provides illustrations of physical abnormalities he found in some Ceraphronoidea specimens. Along with malformed antennomeres, he also provides a drawing of a Dendrocerus carpenteri specimen with one fused eye that takes up most of the frons. This paper was relevant to me because I have been finding specimens with malformed antennae, and even found one male that had one complete eye and one missing eye, a different kind of cyclops than the one Dessart found. It inspired me to know that I am finding some of the same things that Dessart, the master of Ceraphronoidea, also found and described.
- Dessart, P. (1993). Un Conostigmus et un Ceraphron a antennes teratologiques (Hymenoptera: Ceraphronoidea). Bulletin de l’Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique. Entomologie 63: 51–58.
Kyle: I chose this paper because I’m interested in gasteruptiid wasps, primarily for their really cool morphology.
- Engel, M. S. and B. Wang (2016) A plesiomorphic gasteruptiid wasp in Cenomanian amber from Myanmar (Hymenoptera: Gasteruptiidae) Cretaceous Research. DOI: 10.1016/j.cretres.2016.03.011
Emily: Smith et al.’s study, involving the lichen fungus Usnea longissima, used niche modeling on the occurrence records for this species on GBIF to verify the identification. Followed by a Principal Component Analysis, the researchers visualized the locations in which the specimens identified as U. longissima were collected as well as where the revisions of the species would predict it to be collected. This method showed that the records of the species in the tropics and Southern Hemisphere could not be correct and that the specimens need to be reexamined in order to accurately identify them. As this is considered an indicator species for humid/temperate ecosystems, it is a great species to examine, but I question the ability to really apply this over a large scale, i.e., there are MANY species that are questionable, but examining revisions and all records would be difficult to carry out.
- Smith BE, Johnston MK, Lücking R (2016) From GenBank to GBIF: Phylogeny-based predictive niche modeling tests accuracy of taxonomic identifications in large occurrence data repositories. PLoS ONE 11(3): e0151232. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0151232
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Andy: I’m guest lecturing this week in our department’s professional development class, and the topic is “outreach”. What is outreach, and what makes for an effective outreach program? I reread several papers that I thought would help me shape the discussion. My thoughts after reading these papers probably deserve their own blog post, but the Ecklund et al. (2012) paper had the most surprises in it. I wonder what (if anything) has changed since 2012! Brownell et al. (2013) gave me great ideas for class exercises. Komoroske et al. (2015) will be discussed as a group, but it seems very useful as a starting place for outreach. The Laursen et al. (2007) article is a bit old, maybe, but it gave me lots of ideas for assessment.
- Brownell, Sara E., Jordan V. Price, and Lawrence Steinman (2013) Science communication to the general public: Why we need to teach undergraduate and graduate students this skill as part of their formal scientific training. J Undergrad Neurosci Educ 12(1): E6–E10. PMC3852879
- Ecklund EH, James SA, Lincoln AE (2012) How academic biologists and physicists view science outreach. PLoS ONE 7(5): e36240. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036240
- Komoroske, Lisa M., Sarah O. Hameed, Amber I. Szoboszlai, Amanda J. Newsom, and Susan L. Williams (2015) A scientist’s guide to achieving broader impacts through K–12 STEM collaboration. BioScience 65 (3): 313–322 DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biu222
- Laursen, Sandra, Carrie Liston, Heather Thiry, and Julie Graf (2007) What good is a scientist in the classroom? Participant outcomes and program design features for a short-duration science outreach intervention in K–12 classrooms. CBE Life Sci Educ 6: 49–64; DOI: 10.1187/cbe.06-05-0165
István read lots of articles that are relevant to our in prep. manuscript about Malagasy Ceraphronoidea (it’s a doozy of a paper!), and Jonah read a very cool one about ant behavior that I neglected to secure the details of.
That’s our first weekly reading report. I hope you find it interesting!
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