Frost Curators' Blog

Musings and miscellanea from the Frost Entomological Museum

2019 sort session #23 – new families, genera, species

The latest sort “session” stretched out piecemeal over several days, fitting specimen preparation in between lots of other tasks. I.e., we didn’t have much of a formal session, but I did manage to accession about 50 specimens plus a few lots that consisted of dozens more species. I managed to find 3 specimens of Megalyridae, including at least two that are Megalyra rufipes, that I collected in Australia many years ago. They were still in ethanol with a very uninformative label. Here’s one of the specimens in vivo:

tree bark section with a single small hole in the middle. a wasp peaks out of the hole, with its head cocked
Megalyrid wasp head, peaking out of a hole in a fallen eucalyptus tree. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

We also worked on good practices (striving for the best practices) for digitizing our gall wasp rearings, which are starting to add up quickly. What’s the best way to associate galls with wasps? I think we have a system now. We will implement it next week. In the meantime our collection has new specimens of Amphibolips quercusinanis Osten Sacken, 1862 and several of its parasitoids. W00t!

Until next time, here is a photo of Megalyra habitat in southeast Queensland:

farm field in front, rolling hills behind; stacked boxes on the right might be honey bee hives
Rolling hills covered in Eucalyptus. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans

New SOP on vouchering

Voucher specimens are essential to making science repeatable and verifiable. The importance of vouchers has been discussed repeatedly and recently—Yoshimoto (1978), Turney et al. (2015), Funk et al. (2018), and many, many others—but I can’t say that I’ve seen any changes in practice in my 12+ years as a professor. Maybe 20% of graduating students stop by the Frost with vouchers that represent their research? 🙁

Part of the problem is that research design is so heterogeneous it can difficult to know what a reasonable vouchering strategy would look like. If someone is doing broad sampling of multiple agroecosystems should every . single . specimen (which could be >>10,000 insects) be mounted, labeled, identified, and deposited? That seems like an unreasonable amount of time and resources (pins, paper, vials, collection space). What if your research is done using thousands of specimens of Anopheles that have been in culture for hundreds of generations? Do you need any vouchers at all? (I’d argue yes!)

With that in mind, I approached the Entomological Collections Network last February with a request to see what others propose as “best practices”. As always, my fellow ECNers were a wealth of information and opinions. Based on this dialog, we took a stab at writing our own vouchering SOP, and today we published the first draft. Check it out: https://doi.org/10.26207/mcnq-qr77 (or try the direct link to PDF)

It’s only two pages and includes a lot of “contact us for further discussion” statements, but at least it’s a start! What do you think? What would you change?

Newfoundland’s amazing insectarium

I wrote recently about my June vacation up north. Here’s another entomological experience from that trip: The Newfoundland Insectarium and Butterfly Garden.

I promised myself and my family I would detach from work during this vacation—no email, no talk about manuscripts, keep collecting to a minimum, etc. I pretty much kept that promise, too … until I saw the word “insectarium” on the map while looking at my phone in Deer Lake, NL. I’d never heard of the Newfoundland Insectarium and Butterfly Garden. How had this establishment escaped my attention until now?!

exterior of the building, an old dairy barn, of the Newfoundland Insectarium; the sky is filled with rain clouds
Newfoundland Insectarium and Butterfly Garden. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

We closed the public portion of the Frost Entomological Museum a few years ago so that we could focus on renovating both the collection and research space and also so that we could build an entirely new set of exhibits. I initially (naively) thought it would take about a year before we could reopen. Alas … Although I feel a bit guilty about staying closed for so long, this hiatus has given me myriad opportunities to see what other, similar museums get right and what I think they could do better. It’s also given us time to learn about effective exhibit design and to think about what is realistic given our tiny budget. I have scads of photos from the Smithsonian, the National Zoo, the Florida Museum of Natural History, the Pasto Agricultural Museum, and even the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. I thought I knew every relevant museum and zoo in the world.

To put it succinctly, this museum is so very much worth a visit. It’s incredible. The Insectarium occupies an old dairy barn, and the size of the exhibit space is HUGE, especially given the diminutive size of its focus – insects:

large room with a loft and many glass cases of insects
The great room of insect exhibits. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source
dead branch with pinned morpho butterflies on it in various poses. There is also a stuffed, taxidermied owl. The underside of the wing of this butterfly mimics an owl's face, which spooks predators
Diorama on Morpho butterflies and how they look like owls. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source
Terrarium with Rubus plant and insects that have same shape as stick insects, but they are grasshoppers (Orthoptera) not Phasmatodea
Terrarium with live jumping sticks (Proscopiidae), a first for me! Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source
boxes that once held crickets used for fighting; there are also some food and water dishes and a thin stick called a
Cricket culture objects from Asia. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

I was overwhelmed by the shear number of things to look at, and I spent most of my time taking pictures and not really admiring or studying the objects. A majority of the exhibits featured insect biology or the insects themselves, which probably is to be expected. A good lesson for me, though, was how much the cultural objects impacted me and made the visit so much more interesting. Cricket culture, bee keeping, and even the jewelry and other objects made from insect parts. I was overwhelmed in the best possible way.

5 necklaces made from beetle parts, especially the heads and elytra, from Peru
Necklaces made from beetle sclerites. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

If I dared wish for more it would be that the specimens and objects were accompanied by a bit more information and context. See, for example, these ladybird beetles of Newfoundland:

12 pinned ladybugs, arranged in 3 by 4 grid without any labels
Ladybird beetles of Newfoundland. Which one is which? How do they live? Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans

And small number of individual exhibits were outdated, like this one on insect evolution:

a small collection of fossils and extant
Exhibit on insect evolution that has some outdated or even incorrect information in it. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

These are very minor quibbles, though. The founders and their team clearly put a lot of time and effort into this museum and the accompanying butterfly garden. I’d argue it’s the largest and best-curated set of insect exhibits I’ve ever seen. Hopefully the Frost Museum will be even a tenth as interesting we when we open again!

2019 sort session #22 – new moths for the collection

Six years ago I created an account on iNaturalist, a fairly sophisticated app at the time but without much content of interest – at least for me. I submitted a handful of observations and then got distracted by other responsibilities.

I re-engaged the application this spring, in the hopes that I could get good data regarding gall phenology and localities. We need galls for our newly-funded NSF project, in part because we are growing our phylogeny data set for Cynipidae but also because we need fresh (i.e., living) material for transcriptomes and histology. iNaturalist is now a lot more sophisticated and includes thousands of observations that are relevant to my interests. Wow! What a difference a few years makes. Check out this search for spiders or this one for Cynipidae. And it’s not just the content that impresses me, it’s the communities, the projects, and the ability of the system to suggest an ID (often scarily accurate!) based on what occurs locally and how your photo compares to others. I’m hooked now and try to add observations daily.

My new routine is to leave my porch lights on and document what’s there in the morning. I’m hoping that this small-scale effort can serve as yet one more way of monitoring the dramatic insect declines I wrote about yesterday. Check out this beautiful Io moth I saw today and submitted to iNaturalist (observation 28210007):

large moth on a piece of decking. its hind wings are exposed revealing two false eyes it uses to spook predators
Female Io moth, Automeris io (Fabricius, 1775) (Saturniidae). Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

I’ve also been collecting exemplar specimens for the Frost and practicing my Lepidoptera preparations. Man, am I out of practice. I prepared something like 20 medium-sized moths during  this sort session, and it took me FOREVER. They look pretty darn good, though, I must say, and I found the process of pinning and spreading to be meditative … cathartic, even. I managed to add a new family to the collection—Depressariidae—with this bird turd-looking moth, unless we have some already in there under Gelechiidae. I’m also learning my Geometridae, which seems to be the dominant moth family at my house! Here’s a dark-banded geometer, which I failed to collect:

A moth that's about the size of US quarter, standing under a porch light on ugly vinyl siding.
Dark-banded Geometer, Ecliptopera atricolorata (Grote & Robinson, 1867) (Geometridae). Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

Sort session hiatus

We’re taking a break from our weekly sort sessions, at least for the next three weeks. Our gall project is taking off quickly, and we need to get organized about workflows, for one. We are especially interested in finding this character:

a sprig of weedy mint with ball-shaped galls on some leaves
Glechoma hederacea (creeping charlie) (Lamiaceae), with Liposthenes glechomae (Cynipidae) galls all over it. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

iNaturalist shows some local Glechoma gall wasps. We’d love to get a regular source of these for a project we have going. Let us know if you have some!

I also have an epic field trip coming up, which I hope to document here. It’s a mix of vacation and collecting. We’ll hit the sort sessions hard core in July.

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

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