Frost Curators' Blog

Musings and miscellanea from the Frost Entomological Museum

Remains of the day

The wings and head of this darner (Aeshnidae) were all that remained from a recent bird feast (presumably) at 10-Acre Pond today. I found them under the power lines. I saw irony in this discovery, as several of the odonates I collected there today ended up with missing heads and wings. But these remains also got me thinking about insect ichnospecimens. Is there a huge collection of bird/bat/shrew/whatever turds, or fish guts, avian pellets, or even insect frass somewhere that would allow us to explore changes in diet over time? There must be. If not we’ll build it here at the Frost. We already have a small “insects from owl pellets” collection!

(Incidentally, my interest in insect remains—in bat guts—is what drew me into the world of systematic entomology.)

UPDATE: We’ve determined this specimen as the remains of a Spatterdock Darner (Rhionaschna mutata).

Of Wasps and Weevils: Learning the Ins and Outs of the Olympus Camera System

The last blog post I put up was wordy and philosophical. This one will (hopefully!) be a bit more light and airy.

I’ve spent most of my time this week hacking through the last of the loose Evaniidae, keying them to genus, and putting them away (woo!).

I’ve also had the opportunity to start learning to use the microscope mounted camera – the system we use here has its quirks, but I’m slowly  figuring them out. It is my hope to start tinkering with image stacking stuff to get better quality photos sometime within the next few days. I’ve included a number of the better photos I’ve taken in this post. You can find more on our flikr feed, along with other great shots taken by the folk at the Frost, here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/93467196@N02/.


Here are a few of the highlights from this week:

Parevania or Zeuxevania. Photo by Brian Reily (CC BY 2.0)

This Madagascan evaniid opened up an interesting can of worms: in the genus Zeuxevania the basal and first submarginal wing cells are combined into one tear-drop shaped vein; in Parevania the cells are separated by a vein. This specimen has one wing with the vein and one wing without the vein. What is it? Answer: I don’t know.

Zeuxevania sp. from Singapore Photo by Brian Reily (CC BY 2.0)

This female Zeuxevania caught my eye because of its particularly elongate petiole. This species probably preys on cockroaches which drag their oothecae behind them during germination. The long petiole helps it to inject its eggs into the side of the ootheca as it rides along.

Evania sp. from Ivory Coast. Photo by Brian Reily (CC BY 2.0)

This Evania was a rather striking orange color. Most evaniids fit the stereotype of small and completely black or brown, but there are exceptions ranging from white banded antennae and patches of shining silver setae to more exciting brick reds and tawny oranges.

I also ran into a number of non-evaniid wasps while working through the collection. Here are a few of the more interesting — at least to— me ones:

Chalcidid from Angkor in Cambodia. Photo by Brian Reily (CC BY 2.0)

This specimen was one of a few chalcidids that got mixed in with a loan of Evaniidae. Its legs are just fantastic.

Hymenoptera from Sulawesi Photo by Brian Reily (CC BY 2.0)

I’m unsure what this is, but it has an amusingly lumpy mesosoma and fabulously flabellate antennae.

Finally, I had the opportunity to go do some general collecting about the neighborhood this weekend and I’m happy to report that I picked up two pretty little weevils from Holmes Foster park:

Lechirops oculata. Photo by Brian Reily (CC BY 2.0)
Stethobaris ovata. Photo by Brian Reily (CC BY 2.0)

These guys are each about 3mm in length, but that’s just the right size if you ask me: tiny insects are usually the coolest ones!

What’s in the Frost Museum’s research collection?

A partial drawer of mosquito specimens. How many specimens can you see? Photo by Andy Deans (CC BY 2.0). Answer = 90.

Like most moderately sized insect collections, and certainly all LARGE collections, we don’t have an accurate count of the specimens stored in our cabinets. There are simply too many specimens, collected over too long a time span (oldest specimen I know of at the Frost was collected in 1880), with too many people involved and too much activity (loans, gifts, etc.), without having a system in place from the beginning. For example, we know we have 32,780 slide preparations with aphids on them, but each prep entombs one to six (or more) individuals. So maybe we have >100,000 aphids! Who knows? The latest numbers we have (from 1990), which are based on real counts for many taxa but only best guesses for others, suggest we have 1,880,351 specimens.

Retrospective inventorying is chronophagous, for sure, but what about simply cataloging our taxonomic coverage? How many families, genera, and species of arthropods are represented in the Frost’s research collection? That seems like a surmountable challenge and also an exceedingly useful dataset that could draw users and stakeholders in. The  numbers we do have (again, from 1990) indicate we have just under 15,000 species represented in the collection (actual numbers: 455 families, 5108 genera, 14,857 species). Not too shabby, but the collection has definitely grown in the 23 years since this last audit.

It’s time to update the inventory and to upgrade it from paper(!) to a proper database. We started the process a couple weeks ago, and early results can be viewed in this Google Docs spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/PSUCinventory

Check it out! And please feel free to add comments if you see misspellings or other inaccuracies (it’s as easy as right-clicking on a cell or range of cells). It’s not a proper database yet, but more on that later.

Nine-spotted lady beetles (Coccinella novemnotata) under glass. We extracted these specimens from a Riker mount, pointed them, and added them to the other 80 specimens we have in the research collection. Photo by Andy Deans (CC BY 2.0)

Coming to Terms with Taxonomy (with some notes from Bear Meadows)

I’ve spent most of my time this past week going through a veritable mountain of Evaniidae from all corners of the world and sorting them – to the best of my little mind’s ability – to genus level.

Holy inadequate insect storage, Batman! That’s a lot of Schmitt boxes.
Photo by Brian Reily (CC BY 2.0)

I’m finding that certain geographic regions are proving more difficult than others. Australasia/Malesia and continental southern Africa have proven to be the most challenging regions. This is probably due to high diversity of these areas combined with the “squishiness” of the key I’m using – for example: if it looks like a Micrevania, but it’s from South Africa, not Madagascar, is it still Micrevania?

It’s been quite the mental workout so far, but I’m finding that the more I toy with these specimens the more absorbed I become with the task of figuring these little beasties out. With every new wasp I learn a little bit more and become a little more comfortable with the taxonomy of this family.

There is, however, one question that only seems to nag me worse and worse as my understanding of Evaniidae grows. I feel it is a question that comes to live with most (if not all) taxonomists at some point in their career. Namely: what really is this taxonomic level we call genus?

This question, in turn, opens up a thousand more to be asked:

What makes one species a member of one genus, but another species a member of another genus?

Where do we draw lines to delimit genera?

Is a genus ranking just a place to stick species into some made up hierarchy so that we can toss names around easier, or is it intended to be a useful grouping to delimit some number of species into distinct chunks that describe actual relationships? If so, how closely do these species need to be related?

Can a genus contain only one species? Can it contain a billion? If so, did designating a genus actually help us to understand the world a bit better?

Et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum…

I don’t have answers to these questions yet. I don’t think anyone has answers to these questions yet. We have come up with numerous species concepts, each with their own set of failings, but it seems that no one has come up with a well structured genus concept. A monophyletic grouping of species seems to be the best joint consensus taxonomists can come to and any further criteria for classification appears to be largely in the hands of each taxon’s specialist. This muckiness of what makes something a genus has yielded a mottled patchwork of groups that are variably more or less useful and meaningful. To me, this is problematic.

Jumping off on a somewhat lighter, less philosophical note, a few observations from our recent trip to Bear Meadows:

Wading around in the stream was great fun, and I managed to net a number of Odonates while sloshing about up to my armpits in bog water. It should be mentioned that there are some rather deep spots in there. There were a couple times where I took a step and my foot never reached the bottom- use caution or bring a towel.

Mucking about in a bog. Photo by Andy Deans (CC BY 2.0).

I didn’t get much in terms of aquatic matures – lots of pupae and larvae but not much else.

I’d also like to report on the first pselaphine of my stay here in Pennsylvania: Thesium cavifrons.

Thesium cavifrons. Photo by Brian Reily (CC BY 2.0)

The genus Thesium is a largely neotropical group with two species found in the extreme southwest U.S. and one species (T. cavifrons) found throughout the eastern US. I must also report that, despite all my scratching around at rocks and logs, this specimen was taken from (of all places) a yellow pan trap.

Unfortunately, I managed to cut the poor little fellow in half while trying to get a better photo of it, so here’s a picture of Oxyporus quinquemaculatus, another interesting catch from the yellow pan traps:

Oxyporus quinquemaculatus (Staphylinidae) the five-spotted, cross-jawed rove beetle. Photo by Brian Reily (CC BY 2.0)

Loads of Odes: A report from Bear Meadows and notes on Odonata collecting

On Tuesday, June 4, the Frost Group went on a collecting adventure to Bear Meadows Natural Area. Collecting interests were broad, although some of us (myself included) were more odonatologically oriented. I never spent much time collecting odes (dragonflies and damselfies) before, and I must say, it was a blast! There’s nothing like standing thigh-deep in murky bogwater, with every swing of the net a threat to your tentative foothold in the mud! (not sarcasm, actually).

Collecting to mid-afternoon, we managed to net 48 specimens representing 8 of the 22 species that are reported to be denizens of Bear Meadows in early June (White et al. 1968). Our most abundant quarry proved to be Cordulia shurtleffii, the American Emerald, and Leucorrhinia hudsonica, the Hudsonian Whiteface, which together made up more than half of our ode bounty.

The day’s catch. Photo by Andy Deans (CC BY 2.0)

Some things I noticed:

  • In the morning, most of our success was on the trails – odes were landing on nearby branches to soak up some rays, and didn’t have as much maneuvering room to evade swings of the net. The difficulty: having enough room to swing the net.
  • In early afternoon, they seemed to move from the trails to the airspace above the water to hunt and patrol their territories. More species were seen here than on the trails.
  • The tragedy that is color loss. My interest in odes started last semester when I rummaged through the impressive Beatty Odonata Collection at the Frost.  Dead, discolored specimens are pretty great, but live specimens, with their vibrantly colored eyes and markings, are orders of magnitude more stunning than specimens become almost immediately after they are dispatched in acetone. (there’s has to be a better way, right?)
  • Two main strategies for netting odes: the ambush and, my personal favorite, the swing-as-hard-as-you-can approach. Taking cover next to an overhanging branch or a bridge worked great, but wasn’t nearly as satisfying as out-muscling the aerial acrobats on their own turf. The bad news: I probably looked ridiculous all day.
  • Their heads aren’t on too well. A few specimens, which were perfectly headed when spotted, were pulled out of the net with one tagma too few. The good news: if you are able to locate the head, it’s nothing a little glue can’t fix!

Other species captured include:

A few additional species were seen and managed to avoid capture. We’ll get ’em next time.

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

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