My previous post on useful books for entomology students got a fair amount of social media attention. After posting it on Twitter, I got several messages and emails from entomologists with useful feedback and recommendations for more books that had helped and inspired them in their careers.

There were so many great suggestions that I wanted to do a follow-up post with more resources for graduate students and others studying entomology (there seem to be a lot of great beetle books out there!).

Brought to you by the entomologists of Twitter, here are some more useful books for entomology students to check out:

• Parasitoids: Behavioral and Evolutionary Ecology, by H. C. J. Godfray
• The Phylogenetic Handbook, edited by Philippe Lemey, Marco Salemi, and Anne-Mieke Vandamme
• Manual of Nearctic Diptera, edited by J. F. McAlpine (three volumes)
• The Bees of the World, by Charles D. Michener
• American Beetles, by Ross H. Arnett Jr. and Michael C. Thomas (two volumes)
• Beetles of Eastern North America, by Arthur V. Evans
• Australian Beetles Volume 1: Morphology, Classification and Keys, by Adam Slipinski and J. F. Lawrence
• Beetles: The Natural History and Diversity of Coleoptera, by Stephen Marshall

Thanks to everyone for their recommendations!

After five years at the Frost, I’ve now come to the end of my PhD. I laughed, I cried, I defended…now it’s time to return all of the specimens I’ve borrowed.

When I first started my revision of Conostigmus from the Nearctic (North American, north of Mexico), I reached out to museums and collections across the United States and Canada for specimens. I was even lucky enough to  to visit a few museums and sort through their collections myself. Because Conostigmus are so small and easily overlooked, it’s difficult to find large collections of specimens. To get enough specimens for my revision, I had to borrow specimens from over 20 different museums and institutions!

Thanks to all of the contributions and help from these museums and collections, I was able to successfully complete my revision, and I’m currently getting the manuscript ready to submit.

The only problem with borrowing specimens from +20 collections is making sure all of the specimens go back to where they belong. I have over 10,000 borrowed specimens, and that is a lot of tiny wasps to keep track of. Fortunately, I foresaw some potential challenges long ago when I first borrowed the specimens, and I’ve put some measures in place to help manage this enormous amount of specimens.

First, as soon as I got a loan in the mail, I checked the condition of the specimens and made sure that the information on the loan paperwork was correct. If anything was wrong (for example, if the loan was for 100 specimens and the box actually contained 99 specimens), I contacted the loan manager immediately to fix the paperwork. This saves hours of work later when you are ready to return the loan; you don’t want to get stuck trying to find specimens that weren’t actually part of the loan to begin with.

Next, I made scans of the loan paperwork and stored the electronic files in a Google Drive folder. Paper copies went into a folder in the file cabinet. I also made a spreadsheet of the loans I received, including the contact information of the curator or staff member who had facilitated the loan and the date when the specimens were due back at the collection. This especially came in handy when I found some loaned specimens I didn’t remember—I was able to check my spreadsheet and find out that the specimens were not from one of my loans.

Upon arrival in the mail, all loaned specimens immediately went into the -80°C freezer for a few days. While they were chilling, I made labels that had the museum coden and the number of the loan. Every specimen got a label as soon as they came out of the freezer and went into a specimen drawer. I color-coded the labels for ease—now I can take one look at a specimen and know that it’s from the American Museum of Natural History in New York if it has a blue label, or from the Canadian National Collection of Insects if it has a white label with a red stripe.

Having these measures in place already has made my life a lot easier now. I still have to add determination labels, prepare male genitalia mounts, and attend to other details, but I don’t have to worry about knowing which specimens were part of which loan.

To summarize what I’ve learned, here’s a short list of tips for managing loaned specimens:

• Inspect loans as soon as they arrive and make sure that there are no errors in the loan paperwork.
• Make electronic copies of the loan paperwork.
• Have a spreadsheet that lists your loans, the museum staff in charge of the loan, and the date that the specimens need to be returned by.
• Put the specimens in the -80°C freezer to kill any unwanted hitchhikers.
• Make color-coded labels with the loan number and museum coden. Put a label on each loaned specimen before they go into a drawer so you can easily tell which specimens were loaned from where.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to all of the museums and collections who have loaned me specimens. Thank you all so much! My work would not have been possible without your help.

And I promise, I’ll return your specimens!

I successfully defended my PhD a few short weeks ago, and have started wrapping up loose ends. One biggie on my to-do list is to return all of the books I’ve accumulated over the last five years of research. Currently, I have over 60 library books! Not to mention all the other books I borrowed from the Frost Museum. And some others I rescued from a lab clean-out…

Long story short, there are a lot of books.

While sorting through the piles and trying to figure out which books came from where, I started reflecting on which books were the most useful to me during my PhD, and which ones might be useful for other graduate students tackling their own degrees in entomology.

In case you’d like to take a peek at my shelf, here are the books I’ve used during my PhD, organized by category. I put stars next to the books that helped the most and left the greatest impression on me; I definitely recommend checking those out.

General Entomology

• Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity, by Stephen A. Marshall*
• The Insects: An Outline of Entomology, by Penny J. Gullan and Peter S. Cranston*
• Borror and Delong’s Introduction to the Study of Insects, 7th edition
• Evolution of the Insects, by David Grimaldi and Michael S. Engel
• A Textbook of Entomology, by Herbert H. Ross
• The Science of Entomology, by Romoser Stoffolano, 4th edition
• Introduction to Insect Biology and Diversity, by Howell V. Daly, John T. Doyen and Alexander H. Purcell III, 2nd edition
• National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Insects and Spiders & Related Species of North America, by Arthur V. Evans*
• Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America (Kaufman Field Guides), 1st Edition
• The Torre-Bueno Glossary of Entomology, revised by Stephen W. Nichols
• Arthropod Collection and Identification: Laboratory and Field Techniques, by Timothy J. Gibb and Christian Oseto*

Taxonomy and Systematics

• Describing Species, by Judith E. Winston*
• Defining Species: A Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today, by John S. Wilkins
• Species: A History of the Idea, by John S. Wilkins
• Principles and Techniques of Contemporary Taxonomy, by Donald L. J. Quicke
• The Insect and Spider Collections of the World, by Ross H. Arnett, Jr., G. Allan Samuelson, and Gordon M. Nishida

Phylogenetics

• Phylogenetic Systematics, by Willi Hennig
• Phylogenetic Trees Made Easy: A How-to Manual, by Barry G. Hall, 4th Edition
• Tree Thinking: An Introduction to Phylogenetic Biology, by David A. Baum and Stacey D. Smith

Morphology and Physiology

• Principles of Insect Morphology, by Robert Snodgrass*
• Biology of the Arthropod Cuticle, by Anthony C. Neville
• Microscopic Anatomy of Invertebrates, edited by Frederick W. Harrison and Arthur G. Humes
• The Physiology of Insect Senses, by Vincent G. Dethier

Hymenoptera

• Hymenoptera of the World: An Identification Guide to Families (Centre for Land and Biological Resources Research, Ottawa, Canada)*
• Hymenoptera and Biodiversity, edited by John LaSalle and Ian D. Gauld
• Parasitic Wasps, by Donald L. J. Quicke*

Classics

• History of Animals, by Aristotle
• On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin*
• Micrographia, by Robert Hooke
• The Sense of Wonder*, by Rachel Carson
• Genetics and the Origin of Species, by Theodosius Dobzhansky, 3rd edition
• Tempo and Mode in Evolution, by George G. Simpson
• Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, by Julian Huxley

Other Great Reads

• Letters to a Young Scientist, by E. O. Wilson*
• Field Notes for Science and Nature, edited by Michael R. Canfield*
• Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales from the Invertebrate World, by Richard Conniff*
• The Sting of the Wild, by Justin O. Schmidt
• Dry Storeroom No. 1, by Richard Fortey
• For Love of Insects, by Thomas Eisner
• Insects: Their Ways and Means of Living, by Robert Snodgrass
• Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures, by Carl Zimmer
• A Reason for Hope, by Jane Goodall

The one book that has impacted my entomological career the most is Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity, by Stephen A. Marshall*. I discovered this book early into my undergraduate research, and have many fond memories of pouring over the incredible photographs and working through the key to identify the insects I caught in the Long Island South Shore Estuary. This is the book that introduced me to the incredible biodiversity of insects and sparked my passion for taxonomic work.

What books have had the most impact on your graduate career? Are there any other important books not listed above that entomology graduate students should be aware of?

Leave your comments below!

On the twelfth day of Christmas, a museum donor gave to me….

Twelve giant moths,

Eleven giant-sized unit trays (dang, need one more for the moths),

Ten drawers of Halictidae,

Nine springtails a leaping,

Eight wrong IDs,

Seven diplopods a swimming (in ethanol),

Six empty cabinets,

FINE-TIP FORCEPS THAT AREN’T BENT!!!

Four calling visitors (“Do you know what this insect is?”),

Three French papers,

Two jugs of ethanol,

And a tiny fly for us to ID!

 

Seasons Greetings and a Happy New Year from all of us at the Frost Museum!