Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Crane fly Haikus

I ran across some interesting poems today.  I thought I would share them here. 



Enjoy!

Monday, November 17, 2008

When a critter eats a critter


Thus far in all my searching I have found one larvae which may be Neophylidorea (the genus I am revising). When I dissected this larvae today to expose the mouthparts I found this! (right) within the digestive tract of the unknown limnophilini species. It's to be expected as these are likely predaceous. Any ideas on the identity of the prey? The predator was found living in cold water muck with emergent vegetation.



My other specimen clearing excitement today was attempting to understand how the male and female are attached in copula. I haven't fully cleared the pair, but I have been able to see some of the inter-workings (below) and the pair has stayed connected.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Neodarwinism

I am currently taking a class where were are discussing eye evolution (monophyletic or polyphyetic?) and the term neodarwinism came up in discussion. I recalled a discussion by Mayr on this term and its inappropriate use. So I googled it and found this lecture by Richard Dawkins. I thought I would share it here as I found it interesting and helpful as a review of the history of ideas of evolution by natural selection.

Monday, September 22, 2008

How to Describe My Research to the Average Joe or Jane




This is exactly how I felt at my recent 10 year high school reunion.  I need to work up a description of my research for people that could really care less about science and the scientific process.  This should help with my statement of "why/how my research pertains the greater good of society" for this NSF proposal.  My research certainly has implications for understanding the origin of biodiversity, but that is a pretty overwhelming and lofty goal and likely to get us nowhere with regards to progress in systematics.  People can generally understand the idea of identifying and describing new species to science, but this is only a means to the end game of my research which is asking questions about the modes of speciation, evolutionary relatedness, and phylogeography of groups of species. 

Friday, September 19, 2008

Writing the DDIG

The last question I was asked in my preliminary exam was "What is the scientific process?" and a follow-up question of "Do you follow the scientific process?" i.e. is my research hypothesis driven? I know it is, but it's difficult to express at times. So my plan for today is to attempt to incorporate into my DDIG the hypothesis-driven aspects of my research. Lofty goals.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008


Yesterday at lunch I sat down to read Felsenstein's chapter from the text Morphology, Shape and Phylogeny (2002). From his section entitled "Fossil and neontological data" is the idea that you can use molecular sequences of recent species to create a phylogeny which can then be used to transform quantitative characters to independence thus rendering them useful for phylogenetics. This same idea could be useful for me where I cannot collect molecular data from the hundreds of museum specimens I have, but that through this method, the morphometric data I have collected from those specimens is useful in recreating the evolutionary history through this process of accounting for the covariance matrix through the use of the molecular data I do have from fresh specimens. My modified version of Felsenstein's figure 3.2 (right) takes advantage of the covariance matrix produced from the phylogeny created using molecular data from fresh specimens and the morphometric data to create a "global" phylogeny from all data available.


Friday, September 12, 2008

Great Breakthrough

Right when you stop looking for characters they jump out at you. Yesterday, while trying to draw the lateral view of the male genitalia I found a second character to distinguish Euphylidorea olympica (we will call it this for now) which I now agree with Alexander that it is a valid species, from "Euphylidorea burdicki". I'm not sure what to call the structure (likely some sort of apodeme) so we'll have to wait on describing it. I can draw it though and it's consistent in those specimens where I can see the structure. Time will tell if the molecular data supports the morphological data. The unfortunate aspect is that I only have one specimen in alcohol of the E. olympica species. Back to drawing...

Monday, September 8, 2008

Still on the question of drawing

When a specimen is squished onto a slide, needless to say thing shift to accommodate being flattened. Most things shift in a consistent manner such that most slides have the same arrangement of structures. The same could be said for cleared, non-slide mounted specimens which all look similar to each other. The problem comes with drawing these structures. Do I draw them as if you are looking at a slide specimen (which is easier because everything is already flattened for me) or a cleared non mounted specimen? There likely isn't a correct way of doing this, but rather it should be specified in the drawing which way I chose. Lateral views will help with this problem as well, especially if the later option chosen. Consistency is likely important too which lends support to the slide mount option because many of these species are only available as slides.

Friday, September 5, 2008

Drawing difficulties

Sketching is relatively easy. I draw lines on the page where I see them on the specimen. Transferring those lines into something that my readers will understand through my interpretation is tricky. The difficulty lies in creating a 3-D image on a 2-D surface with a lack of any drawing skills what so ever. So little by little I will hope to make slight changes in my drawings so that they will be interpretable by researchers for years to come. Here goes...

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

What is a species, hmmmm?


In general this is a place where I can vent my frustrations, share the daily joys of being a graduate student and rejoice in my successes.  Enjoy and feel free to make comments of your own here. Thanks for reading!









So this is the "age old question" that continues to haunt me daily.  Aside from the somewhat rhetorical question, my problems are confounded by a lack of details in species descriptions, poorly slide mounted holotype genitalia, species described based on a single specimen (and even worse when it is a single female specimen), etc. etc.  My goal today is to now worry about this question, or the other associated difficulties and work on drawing the genitalia for the species I am considering to be "real".