Frost Curators' Blog

Musings and miscellanea from the Frost Entomological Museum

Dragonflies Can be Awkward Teenagers Too

Do you know what a teenage dragonfly looks like? I will sheepishly admit that I did not know before starting at the Frost! The proper term for a young adult dragonfly that has just emerged is a teneral. The Latin root word of teneral, tener, means tender or young. After moulting, an insect is in the teneral stage. An arthropod in the teneral state is described as soft-bodied, as their new exoskeleton has not hardened yet. In addition, an Odonata teneral can often have a paler coloration than their mature adult counterpart. Therefore, one should be cautious about identifying species in the teneral stage, as the colorings can be very different and misleading. However, with an expert’s help in identification, we can see these extreme differences in the two pictures below of the Common Whitetail Dragonfly (Plathemis lydia, Drury, 1773).

A young dragonfly perches on a leaf.
A teneral male Common Whitetail Dragonfly (Plathemis lydia) not showing its true colors yet. Photo by Dan Mullen (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). Click for source.

Some might say that the dragonfly above is nothing special. But wait there’s more! In the picture below, do you see how the adult is so much more vibrant than its teneral counterpart? I guess the awkward teenage phase exists in dragonflies too!

Adult dragonfly perched on stick.
Aha! So that is what a Common Whitetail Dragonfly (Plathemis lydia) should look like. Photo by Jimmy Smith (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). Click for source.

After catching a teneral at Ten Acre Pond a few weekends ago I became very interested in this life stage of the dragonfly. You can see in the picture below that the dragonfly I caught had very shiny wings. It could not fly well and was an easy catch. Learning about the life stages of insects is fun, and I encourage budding entomologists to get out there, explore, and maybe find a few tenerals!

A young dragonfly sitting in a tupperware container after being caught.
A teneral I caught at Ten Acre pond. It was not a very good flier… and that is the only reason why I caught it. Photo by R. Davis (CC by 2.0). Click for source.

Ambiguous Localities & Cursive Make for Fun Transcribing!

During my undergraduate science courses, students were constantly reminded to be specific in their lab notebooks to the point that someone else could read the notebook years later and be capable of replicating the experiment. As I work on digitizing and transcribing the Beatty Collection I get to chuckle at some of the descriptions of localities.

Envelopes containing damselflies host localities that most likely do not exist anymore, making it difficult to locate certain areas in which these insects were caught.
“Hi, is this Mary Shannon’s creek?” Photo by R. Davis (CC by 2.0). Click for source.

In the collage of pictures above (specifically the top left picture), the descriptor of the location the damselfly was caught at is “Creek on Mary Shannon’s place”. Being that this damselfly was caught in 1941, we the researchers at Frost, might be hard-pressed to find both Mary Shannon of Dallas, Texas and the exact creek in question (as I show in my humorously futile Google Maps search in the top right). Just as well, it also may be difficult in 2016 to find “Miss Dunn’s” property in Port Arthur Texas of 1938 (bottom picture).

The two photos show the difficulty in reading localities on specimen envelopes when written in cursive.
Cursive is fun! Photo by R. Davis (CC by 2.0). Click for source.

I have also become a fantastic cursive reader during my time at the Frost. My teachers in the 2nd grade were not lying! Knowing cursive is useful! In the second collage of pictures above I showcase a few of the specimen envelopes that might have stumped me at the beginning of my time working here.  The second line in the top picture may appear difficult at first. With patience and time however, I uncovered that the locality of this damselfly was the Bonaventure River in Quebec, Canada. Do you easily see that in the second line? At this point in my blog post I would like to give a shout-out to Google and their search algorithm that gives me a lead even with my egregious misspellings. How about the bottom picture? Do you get, “Gravel pit, West Lafayette, Tippercanoe County, Ind.”? If not, no worries!

The Beatty Collection is full of fun challenges like these and I like waking up, going to work, and not knowing what I will uncover!

If only I was a sponge!

Albert Einstein has a famous, and probably over-quoted line in which he states, “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” As someone who has recently graduated with a science degree I must say this quote resonates more and more. Whether it be stumbling over how to pronounce a family within Odonata, or looking at the massive cabinets filled with species I have never heard of, the Frost Entomological Museum has proved to be a hotbed of discoveries for me.

In my short 2 weeks here, I have learned that taxonomy is a big world. The picture below is of one of the cabinets I was recommended to peruse. Filled to the brim with old, entomological publications filed by order you could easily sit down and get lost in the tan and weathered pages of scientists of the last two centuries.

Bookshelf displaying several papers and books on insect orders.
So many papers and books! Photo by R. Davis (CC by 2.0). Click for source.

I can confidently state that although I am slightly overwhelmed by all there is to know, I am very excited. How lucky am I to be surrounded by so many opportunities to learn? I look forward to continuing to document my discoveries through this medium with everyone.

New to the Frost: Rachel

Hello to all who are reading this! My name is Rachel Davis and I am a new intern here at the Frost Entomological Museum. I was born and raised in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago and a few weeks ago I graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Science in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. I am very happy now to be moving on to other exciting things! During college I was very fortunate to travel and pursue several scientific interests which have all lead me to where I am now. Although I was always the child who wanted to climb trees and catch squirrels, my professional interest in wildlife started when I studied abroad in Thailand to assist in tiger and avian conservation. From there I went on to travel to Australia and Belize for wildlife internships.

Rachel standing and smiling in a stream with an aerial net.
Ready to catch some odonates! Photo by R. Davis (CC BY 2.0). Click for source.

However, my love for entomology began just last summer in Northern Michigan where I studied the relationship between climate change and gregarine parasitism in the Caloptryx maculata  (Palisot, 1805) (Odonata: Calopterygidae). At the Frost, I am currently working on the digitization of the Beatty Collection. After digitizing, I will begin to georeference the localities of the collected specimens to create new species distribution maps for specific time periods. I love opening up a box of specimens and seeing that people were still catching damselflies during the Great Depression of the 30’s! I know that I will learn many valuable research skills while working in the Frost Museum and I greatly look forward to the next 10 weeks.

Department of Entomology, in the College of Agricultural Sciences, at Penn State

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