Okay, it’s been over a month since our last “weekly reads” post. Where does the time go?! Well, it goes into grant writing, teaching, administering candidacy exams, editing manuscripts, paperwork, peer reviews, workshops, international congresses, phone dropping and breaking (which I needed for Penn State’s 2-factor authentication … sigh), etc. Here are the updates I neglected to post until now —ARD

Carolyn: Recently I found a paper about wing shape in parasitoids and how it is affected by the quality of the host they develop in. Since an organism’s phenotype can be impacted by both its genotype and the environment the organism develops in, it is important to distinguish whether phenotypic differences are based on the genotype or the environment, especially when you are using phenotypes to distinguish between species. In this paper, they found that the wing shape in an aphiidine braconid species, Lysiphlebus fabarum, did not exhibit host-induced phenotypic plasticity, which means that wing shape factor is a stable character that could be used for distinguishing between different species of aphid parasitoids.

While sorting through my ICE notes and following up on connections, I also happened upon a paper by Norman Johnson about Lubomír Masner, written in appreciation of him for his 75th birthday. I am glad that I found this paper. I did not realize that yellow pan trapping was originally used for aphid sampling, and that Lubo is the one who discovered that it worked well for microhymenoptera and adjusted the technique for our purposes. This is one of our most successful sampling methods, and we wouldn’t have it if not for Lubo. I knew that Lubo is one of the greatest hymenopterists alive, and that he has changed how people study microhymenoptera, but I did not realize just how many different ways he has influenced the research I do now.

I also finished Books IV-VII of Aristotle’s History of Animals, and I have to say that it is an absolutely fascinating read! I think it is incredible that although the work is from 4th century BC, it contains an accurate description of how female octopi guard their eggs at the cost of maintaining their own body condition. He accurately describes the life cycle of cicadas as well as metamorphosis in butterflies. He even describes aquatic larvae and how adult flies emerge from the water. However, he believes that only some insects reproduce sexually, and that the rest are born from spontaneous generation, providing a long list of which materials spontaneously generate different insects. For example, he was not aware of pollination, and while he does mention that drones do not have stingers, he thought that flowers produced bee larvae, and that bees visited flowers to retrieve their young. He also thought that honey was produced from the sky in minuscule amounts, and that only bees were able to gather these droplets and store them in the hives.

Emily: This paper by Graham et al. (2004) explores the incorporation of phylogenetics and niche modeling to see where speciation is occurring and the geographic factors that are driving it. In looking at the distributions of species, it is possible to see if sister species are allopatric or sympatric in origin. By adding the niche model, it is possible to tease apart the environmental variables driving the speciation. They also added elevation layers into their models, which is definitely something that is underincorporated in modeling / georeferencing, but is likely very revealing for some taxa. A PCA was used to examine the overlap between the phylogenetic trees and the niche models. While this research focused on frogs, I could see how it could be useful to do something similar for winged insects-layering phylogenetic data with a niche model.

[Notes from the preceding week …] There is so much unknown about Odonata, even though over 6,000 species are described. Of particular potential for discovery include the relationship between odonate evolution and ecology, though there has not been huge emphasis on this work. Genetic resources are spotty for much of the diversity of this group, and there is known to be a tenfold difference in genomes between species. While there is relatively strong support for the phylogeny of the order, there is much more to dive into within families, particularly outside of tropical species. The 1KITE project aims to get transcriptomes for 107 species, but this will not cover all of the families.

The interplay between the habitats in which they live during their lives leads to myriad questions about their movements and interactions with a changing planet, something I am certainly interested in within my own research. The genetics underlying their sexual variation, physiology, and phenotypic plasticity are also areas of great potential. With their large size and dispersal around the globe, the possibilities are endless for research in this order. This paper by Bybee et al. (2016) definitely gives me hope that I will be able to make some awesome discoveries during my PhD, even if I am not exactly sure where to begin!

Andy: This time of year my reading is mostly focused on papers that are relevant to ENT 432, including the re-reading of some classics on insect diversity and evolution. There are too many to list, but the highlights for me include Hugh Glasgow’s work on Heteroptera guts (1914; I also read his dissertation from 1913) and Angela Douglas‘s review of mycetocytes (She was here this week as a seminar speaker!). I definitely could do a better job of addressing the importance of symbionts and mutualisms in the evolution of Insecta.

I also tried reading and synthesizing the evolution of Aculeata and of eusociality in Hymenoptera. As a hymenopterist (but a parasitoid person) I admit that I could/should know these stories better. The sting’s the thing (Starr (1985)), in my opinion, along with many, many, many other factors.

Okay, we … more like I … got off track a bit on our weekly reads (weakly reads?), so here’s a catch-up post.

Carolyn: A couple weeks ago I read up on Gondwanan species distributions. The general idea behind this is that the two supercontinents Laurasia and Gondwana joined to form Pangaea, then separated and drifted apart. Gondwana then separated into Antarctica, Africa, Madagascar, Australia, India and the Arabian Peninsula. When species are found in these areas but not on the landmasses that were a part of Laurasia (North America, Europe except the Balkans, and Asia except India), the species are said to have a Gondwanan distribution. It seems that there is a lot of discussion about whether species distributions are caused by this or not. Raxworthy et al. (2002) relied on molecular and morphological data, and found that chameleon radiation was facilitated by oceanic dispersal, not Gondwanan separation. Davis et al. (2002) also found that the distribution of angiosperms within the clade Malpighiaceae is due to patterns of migration through Laurasia onto Gondwanan continents after Gondwana broke apart. Upchurch (2008) gives a good overview of the topic, and points out that true Gondwanan species distributions can be distorted by factors including geodispersal and extinction events, as well as sampling error.

While trapped in the airport last month, I also read a book called Networking for Nerds. I heard the author speak a few months ago at the Voices conference hosted by the Penn State Graduate Women in Science (GWIS) , but I didn’t get to read the book until getting stuck with airplane travel and layovers. What makes this book great is that it’s a book for people in STEM fields, written by someone in a STEM field (the author has a PhD in mathematics). The author stresses that most jobs are not advertised, and that the best way to find jobs is by *gasp* talking to people, a simple thing that most people take for granted. The author shows the reader the skills that people in STEM disciplines have and how they can be applied to careers outside of academia. I’ve read other books about networking and finding jobs, but this is the only one I’ve found that is geared towards people in the sciences, as well as the only one that is actually helpful for people in the sciences. Its an encouraging, helpful and hopeful book, perfect for helping anxious grad students escape crushing self doubt about their future, at least for a while anyway.

Emily: After a week where I saw many Pantala flavescens attempting to oviposit on cars throughout the State College area, I decided to check into why that would be. Fortunately there is a paper by Kriska et al. (2006) in which they examined what is driving aquatic insects to be attracted to particular colors of vehicles. Using shiny test surfaces of different colors, they placed them close to water and sampled the species that were found at each surface over a 3-hour window. With videopolarimetry, the researchers were able to measure the polarized spectra that resulted from each surface, which varied in shininess. The reflectance of the cars draws the insects to it, as though it is water, particularly when there is a “sea” of cars. White and other lighter colored cars provide less of a draw for aquatic insects, as they are reflecting back a lower level of horizontal polarization. If one wants to prevent odonates from attempting to oviposit on one’s car, keeping a car dirty would reduce the reflectance that is drawing them in in the first place.

Andy: I spent a bit more than a week last month researching collection management policies (CMP) and writing our own CMP document. The first draft of our CMP is now available if you’re interested, as are two of our new Standard Operating Procedures (Collection environment and etiquette, Social media). We have a long way to go, with respect to discussing and modifying these policies and then getting them approved at various levels, but I learned a LOT from the process. See Malaro (2005) for a good overview of CMPs.

I’ve also worked feverishly on the materials for my Insect Biodiversity and Evolution course. My latest (dumb?) idea: incorporate a taphonomy experiment into the unit on fossils, which is currently quite thin on exercises. Well, really it would be a necrology / biostratinomy experiment. I read this paper by Martínez-Delclòs and Martinell (1993) [Update 16 Aug 2016: This paper by Duncan et al. (2003) was the one I was thinking of originally] ages ago and was inspired. Could something be set up a week or two ahead of time, so that my students could document the positions and dispositions of body parts? Could they toss live insects into aquaria and watch them float, sink, swim, … and die? I’d have to sort of the ethics of that one! But I like the idea of my students really coming to terms with biases and conditions of insects in the fossil record.