Frost Curators' Blog

Musings and miscellanea from the Frost Entomological Museum

Killer spider at the Frost! And other observations from 2019 sort session #8

tiny beetle, about 2 mm long, glued to a pointy piece of card stock that is skewered on a pin
Chramesus hicoriae LeConte, 1868 collected during surveys by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

Finally a Wednesday without a snow/ice storm! Sort session #8 was dedicated to dealing with the huge volume of specimens from old (2014) Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture surveys. I’ve mounted about 200 specimens—in Hymenoptera, Hemiptera, and Coleoptera—and have been pleasantly surprised by the diversity. I’m sure we’ve added new taxa to the collection and definitely new occurrence data. The bark beetle specimen above is Chramesus hicoriae LeConte, 1868, a species known to feed on hickories. It is definitely the cutest insect I came across yesterday (or ever?), although that probably doesn’t come across in this crummy smart phone photo. It was so tiny!

I also spent a few minutes with a tarantula our volunteer, Justin, recently encountered while cataloging and digitizing our spiders. It’s in relatively poor shape:

a tarantula specimen sits in a Petri dish, completely de-articulated, almost unrecognizable as a spider. Its condition is the result of poor storage conditions
Tarantula specimen in our digitization rig. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

But check out that data label. E P I C.

small paper label that reads, in part,
Label that accompanies that poorly preserved tarantula above. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

Here is my best transcription:

Tarantula from Lurifico Peru. Said to have caused the death of 4 men. Brought on board alive after 6 mos. captivity {Mst?} Jones Pacasmayo Oct. 6 / 84

Ha ha ha. Wow. Well, I am highly skeptical that this spider caused the death of four men, but that is a great story. I love sort sessions precisely for this reason – opportunities to examine and learn about many taxa, to add our own high quality specimens and data, to dig deep into our historic collection, and to unearth compelling—if unbelievable—stories. What’ll happen next week!

2019 sort session #5

Sort session #5 kicked off with a nice surprise from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture:

one smallish plastic vial half filled with ethanol and with about a dozen tiny beetles in it
One of several hundred vials of specimens that resulted from insect surveys of our great commonwealth. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

One of our New Years resolutions was to grow the collection, in part by fostering a tighter connection with the PDA and to tap into their vast wealth of trap residues. It’s barely February, and this effort is already bearing fruit!

We received more than 1,200 vials like the one above, each filled with a smattering of Hymenoptera, Coleoptera, and Hemiptera – the taxa we are targeting initially. Yesterday I managed to mount about 5% of this new acquisition. Next step: databasing and labeling. No small task! This will probably be the focus of many of the next sort sessions.

In other HUGE news, a new member of the Frost Museum team starts today … our new assistant curator! More on that in another post. SO EXCITING. Needless to say, this is a game changer for our museum.

2019 sort session #4

Sort session #4 was disrupted a bit by an unstable and brutal polar vortex and also some requested repairs to our lighting. I spent time labeling specimens that were mounted and sorted a couple weeks ago, and I worked to migrate a newish and largish set of set of recently collected specimens from “receiving” into their proper places in the collection. These are mostly bees and other aculeates, collected during pollinator survey work by local colleagues. Altogether we increased the collection by about 2,700 fully digitized specimens, representing dozens of species. Not too shabby!

dozens of pinned insects with paper labels in cardboard trays in a wooden drawer
More bees for the Frost Museum. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

Watching our lighting get repaired was a good reminder that we need to replace these fluorescent tubes with something much more collection-friendly. Check out these bleached specimens taken from the fixture, a honey bee and a muscoid fly, fried by ultraviolet radiation:

two insects whose cuticle has been damaged extensively by ultraviolet radiation
Honey bee (left) and muscoid fly, bleached by fluorescent lights. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans

2019 sort session #3

Weather interrupted our sort session this week, and I had to duck out early for a meeting (despite saying I wouldn’t schedule anything for Wednesdays!).

I did spend an hour and a half sorting ensign wasps from the eastern U.S.A. It was a good reminder that this fauna needs to be revised, especially Hyptia spp. Townes (1949) has a reasonably good key to North American (north of Mexico) species, and he made an attempt to revise some of the less robust species concepts of Bradley (1908). See Smith (1998) for a more recent key of mid-Atlantic species. The differences between species are still … well … subtle and probably a bit plastic:

ink illustration of 6 abstract shapes, mesopleura, that represent different species. The differences between them, especially the three in the top row, are whether the shapes have more or less wrinkles or circular depressions
Line drawings of mesopleura of different Hyptia spp. in the US and Canada. Small textural differences are all that separate some species. Drawings (CC0) by Townes (1949). See scanned original via Biodiversity Heritage Library: https://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/7728374

It’s a project for another day and/or maybe another entomologist. We have a fairly sizable collection of North American specimens!

2019 sort session #2

Yesterday was sort session #2, and we’re picking up steam. I recruited Michael Skvarla to join me and a special guest(!) to sort through pan trap samples from New York, collected during our last meet-up with the Ware lab. Here’s the site:

disposable plastic bowls laid down in a meandering row around weeds and bushes; each bowl is filled with slightly soapy water. In the distance is a house with a metal roof and an old barn filled with spiders and wasp nests
Our yellow bowls laid out in a meandering line and catching lots of interesting insects. Photo (CC BY 2.0) by Andy Deans. Click for source

Diapriid city! There were tons of other Hymenoptera in these samples too. There weren’t as many adult spiders as I hoped, though, so I didn’t get to test my burgeoning ID skillz.

I made a lot more point mounts using that Tombow adhesive. I think I might be in love with polyvinyl alcohol. It makes such nice, grippy bonds and it a dream to work with. I don’t know yet how it holds up over the long term or how reversible it is, but it beats shellac by a mile.

I also labeled up a ton of ensign wasp specimens. I have SO MANY EVANIIDS—from Madagascar, Costa Rica, Thailand, Australia, you name it. Tens of thousands of specimens. It’s ridiculous, actually, and most are still filed away in our freezers, unmounted. Maybe 2019 is the year they enter the research stream.

We talk about a lot of things relevant to the Frost Museum, including our collective desire to organize some overnight expeditions. We’ll add that to our list of new years resolutions!

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

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