Carolyn: This week I did some reading on the cephalic pits in Ceraphronoidea, mainly a paper by Bin and Dessart (1983). There are three kinds of pits that have associated internal apodemes: the interocellar pit, the preoccipital pit, and the facial pit. Megaspilinae have both the preoccipital pit and the facial pit present, but they are different between Conostigmus and Dendrocerus (in Conostigmus, the facial pit is much more developed). The authors propose that the pits might have some sort of sensory function, especially in Conostigmus triangularis, where the pit is more developed and associated with a facial chamber.

The full reference is:
Bin, F. Dessart, P. 1983. Cephalic pits in Proctotrupoidea Scelionidae and Ceraphronoidea (Hymenoptera). Redia, 66: 563-575

Emily: Erythemis, a genus of libellulids, has a great deal of intraspecific variability in the morphological characters. Rodríguez et al. (2015) sought to examine the 53 characters in the original description as well as proposed 81 in the hopes of generating a key with greater diagnostic potential. The original key for this genus was written in 1928 by Fraser and seems to have a large amount of qualitative characters (i.e. proposing that the abdominal segments are different between species, but not providing measurements). Examining 3,300 Erythemis specimens, a subsample was taken of both sexes in order to evaluate morphometry. They ran statistics on the characters to determine if they were delineating species in the key, determining that 23 characters from the original description were not varying between species or were redundant. Using a ratio between some characters, the researchers were able to eliminate the overlapping tendency of characters between species that was in the original description. In reading the key, I realized the intraspecific variability in color within Erythemis—from brown to green to red to blue—was something that I missed in looking at the specimens that have been sitting in our collection for decades and have mostly dried to brown.

Andy: It was a busy week, in which I focused on administrative duties and our ongoing exhibit development. That means I entered a rabbit hole of papers that are mostly irrelevant to my current research but which nevertheless were exhilarating.

My first distraction: One of the species we’re highlighting in an exhibit about parasites is a Nearctic rabbit flea. In doing research for our narrative about this species, I was reminded of Dame Miriam Rothschild‘s work on the close physiological relationship between the reproductive state of the host (two rabbit spp.) and parasite (a couple flea spp.)—work that resulted in no less than four Nature papers (Rothschild and Ford (1964a), Rothschild and Ford (1964b), Rothschild and Ford (1966), Rothschild and Ford (1969)) and one Science paper (Rothschild and Ford (1972)), all of which I read. Amazing! But did this research by Rothschild and Ford, which was obviously groundbreaking, lead to similar research on other parasitic arthropods, like lice (the focus of our exhibit), ticks, and flies? Not so much, as far as I can tell, but I have plenty of fodder for an exhibit narrative.

Distraction number two: One of our highlighted specimens in this parasite exhibit is a chewing louse that was collected off of a Snowy Owl (Bubo scandiacus) but which was identified as a louse (Strigiphilus oculatus (Rudow, 1870)) that exclusively parasitizes Great Horned Owls (Bubo virginianus). Is this a host-switching event? Was our specimen misidentified? I read papers about owl phylogeny (mainly Wink et al. 2009; is there really nothing more recent nor any pubs based on more than two genes? I am shocked!) and owl lice (mainly Clayton and Price 1984) to sort this one out. I think I have an answer … stay tuned.

Other discussions we had based on recent readings: Should I share the letters I write with the subjects of those letters? Maybe I should … but man, does that make me self-conscious. Why, though?! We had an interesting deliberation on the subject, including stories of advisors who make their students write their own letters of rec. SRSLY?! How lazy can you be?!

In light of recent #psubreakingnews and a political science pub in PLoS ONE—two more readings of mine last week—our lab meeting discussion touched on the roles/perils of social media and professionalism more generally in science.

István: It is good to see where tissue (gland / fat body) specific transcriptomics is and how far can/should we go with our conclusions. Two of our present projects, characterizing fat body like structures in the gasteruptiid hind tibia and evaluating the role of larval/female Cynipini glands in gall induction, are really closely related to this paper. Plus, it is also exciting to witness the birth of a new model system (Bombus spp.), especially that one of the main architects of this transformation works in the next door (Hines lab!).

Jonah: The paper I read (Buechel and Schmid-Hempel 2016) discusses colony pace as a way of granting further social immunity. Social hymenopterans will alter their life history pace such as death/birth rate in order to combat spreads of parasites within a colony. There are advantages and disadvantages to high pace (high death/birth rate) and low pace (low death/birth rate) and a steady balance must be made to match resource input into the colony and have a high enough concentration of mature workers to maintain daughter queens through over wintering. While high pace colonies were found to be more effective at resisting colony wide infections low pace colonies have a greater fitness level with longer lived workers that are provided with more nutrients to fully develop on a singular scale. The colony in these kinds of socio studies can be treated much in the way a single organism could be when fighting an infection with apoptosis occurring in cells to prevent development of viral or parasitic intruders.

Kyle read the paper by Marshall and Evenhuis (2015), in which a species is described sans specimen, and a recent response by Santos et al. (2016). After a short but stimulating conversation about the issues and the ICZN, we decided the topic (and other, related nomenclatural issues) warrants its own journal club.