Crane fly Haikus

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



Enjoy!

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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...