Have you seen an arthropod like this before? There is no scale bar in the photo, but it’s a tiny organism – maybe about 1 mm long. It was found in a salamander’s gut contents. Check it out from a ventral view:
This specimen was discovered inside a salamander’s gut, among other arthropods that were, presumably, food – ants, mainly.
UPDATE: Mystery apparently solved! It’s a bloated coniopterygid larva. This is why I wish I had taken a class on larval insects! Thanks ArnoldTortoise, for the ID!
As I mentioned in my last post, we are busy developing new engagement opportunities and looking for ways to foster richer interactions. Some of these are real and ready, while others remain fun fantasies … at least for now. Check ’em out:
We posted several opportunities on the Penn State Undergraduate Research site, focused on training students in collections care and research. We focused these experiences of topics we predicted would be engaging for students (Spiders! Parasites! Aquatic insects! Collections care!) but which also overlap with ongoing conservation and research efforts at the Frost. These are primarily volunteer or research-for-credit experiences, although the parasitic arthropods digitization project is supported by a recent grant from the National Science Foundation. We can actually offer a paid position for that research area.
These are excellent opportunities for students to get experience in collections-based research, museum science, and data management. They’re not limited to people from the sciences either. We’ve had mutually rewarding interactions with students from Arts and Architecture (example!) and Liberal Arts. If feel like helping us advertise these opportunities in your presentations we made a Powerpoint slide just for you!
Several Penn State classes have visited the Frost in the last few years, and we really want to make our public space and collections useful for a diverse array of applications. Just a few examples:
Can you think of ways our or other natural history collections could be used by students? One visiting Penn State English professor proposed sending her students here to study the parallels between gall wasps’ manipulation of plants and the question of whether or not humans have free will. Opportunities abound!
Of course there are many, many other types of people that would want to visit the collection, observe our specimens, and/or and learn about entomology. Artists, scouts, school field trips, LifeLink PSU, Pennsylvania’s Summer Academy for Students who are Blind or Visually Impaired, to name a few recent and ongoing interactions. We’d love to add more groups to our list!
Watch this space for other programs as they get closer to reality.
This is gonna sound dumb, but my kids (ages 7 and 9) love to tease me about a magical place called “Kid City”, where children rule the land, every meal is dessert, and no grown-ups are allowed. This week I started referring to my yard, and really State College more generally, as “Gall City”, as I am finding numerous species for our newly-funded cynipid project. In Gall City, cecidologists rule the land, everything is botanically derived, and kids are encouraged to learn about plant-insect interactions. (Sadly, this has been my best counter so far to their taunts.)
This really is the right time of year to go gall hunting. The woolly catkin galls I collected a couple weeks ago are now yielding adults. I’ve also added dozens of galls of at least 6 or 7 other cynipid species to the rearing queue in our newly-christened Gall Room. More on that later, but it’s well past time to grow our tiny collection!
This week’s sort session focused on accessioning unprocessed galls and their causative insects. Many of the wasps above were prepared and accessioned as the first representatives of this species in the Frost Museum collection:
We also added galls collected a long time ago, like these Amphibolips acuminata galls I collected in New Jersey many months ago:
Stay tuned for so much more on gall wasps! In the meantime I will very much enjoy my new life in Gall City.
I used to post an annual list of New Year’s resolutions for the collection when I was director of the NC State Insect Museum, complete with an assessment of how we did with last year’s resolutions. Not sure why I dropped this habit when I moved to Penn State, but I think it’s time to resurrect it in some form. Here goes …
Overall I think we’re doing pretty well at the Frost, at least in terms of maintaining good policies and procedures, digitizing the collection, and making upgrades to storage infrastructure. We’ve come a long way since 2012, when we started a big effort to modernize the Museum. That said, here are two things I want to work on in 2019:
One activity where we are underperforming is collecting. Not just collecting but actually making proper specimens and accessioning them into the collection. I.e., we aren’t growing the collection at a sufficient rate. Here are the concrete steps I intend to take to make it happen for us this year:
Given the emerging reports on dramatic biodiversity declines — e.g., in Haiti, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Germany — it’s critical that we collect more data and specimens now.
This resolution is a bit more difficult to characterize and establish benchmarks for, but we need to relocate the collection and public space ASAP. The CAP assessment last June revealed serious deficiencies (none really surprising) in Headhouse III, a building that was not designed for natural history collections storage. The good news is that we appear to have our administration’s ear, and there is an active search for new space. The bad news is that we’ve put our re-opening on ice … indefinitely. Relocating a collection of this size is not a small undertaking — we could use your help! — and I still have a lot of lobbying to do. I’d like to see us make it into the next Penn State Capital Plan, maybe as a combined collections storage building? I think we all could use help!
Of course I have many other goals for 2019, including one to post more frequent updates here on this blog. We do have some big news already, but I will save that for later this month or maybe February, when it’s finalized. If had to add one more resolution it’d be this:
Pennsylvania hosts the only species of Atypus, a group of purseweb spiders, in the New World. It happens to live only in greater Philadelphia. Hmmmm … (looking up and stroking my invisible goatee) Anyway, it’s an incredible species, named after the late Bob Snetsinger, a former arachnologist and jack-of-all-trades, who was on faculty in our department. We just digitized and recurated our collection of paratypes (below). Now I need to see this critter in real life! This species has had me obsessed with spiders for the last nine months. Seriously. SO COOL.
While kayaking in Holland, Massachusetts, I paddled under the branches of a tree that had fallen into the river, and realized too late that it was completely covered in wasps. I made it through unstung, but paddled back for a second look.
There were several wasps, but no obvious nest. Something interesting was that there were several different kinds of wasps; not just vespids like yellow jackets (Vespula spp.) and bald-faced hornets (Dolichovespula maculata), but also some pompilids. What were they doing?
I watched one Vespula spp. crawl across the top of a leaf, buzz over to the next to repeat the process, then so on and so forth, working its way up the branch. It was systematic in its efforts, covering every single leaf on that branch before moving onto the next. The other wasps did the same, as if searching the leaves for something (see video below).
I later identified the tree as a red maple, Acer rubrum, also known as swamp or water maples (fitting for where I found it). A quick online search revealed that many others have seen wasps crawling on leaves of red maple that were infested with scales, psyllids, aphids, and other insects that produce honeydew, which attract wasps like vespids and pompilids.
Natural history observations tend to be underplayed in our research, but simple observations such as these can generate important questions about behavior, ecology, and more. The day I made these observations was cloudy and cool (about 70°F), and I observed this behavior around 3:00PM. I passed by the same branch again on a few sunnier, warmer days (about 80°F) but did not see as many wasps. Did the wasps forage until they exhausted the supply of honeydew? Did they have greater energetic needs on a cooler, cloudier day than on a sunnier one, and change their foraging behavior in response?
As a new fall semester starts and a new session of ENT 432: Insect Biodiversity and Evolution begins, we have our students do an activity called “Your Inner Darwin”. Students are instructed to watch a small patch of nature for an hour, record their observations and collect the insects they see. In doing this activity, we hope to show our students how much can be gained from observation, even if it’s something as simple as watching wasps on branch.