Tonight I’m looking for the ordinal scientific name (5), and the common name (2). There are bonus points available here, but because people have been doing so well I’m not giving any hints about how to get them. You’ll just have to give me more information and hope it’s what I’m looking for! I’ll award points and give the answers once I’m back in Canada next week. Have fun!
Today started good and early while we got our gear repacked to head to the northwestern region of the country to spend a few days in the Guanacaste Conservation Area. The tour bus picked the people from our hotel up shortly before 8, and after a minor detour back to pick up the forgotten, we were on our way north! Unfortunately I slept most of the way up, and when I wasn’t sleeping I was writing blog posts, but there were some rather remarkable landscapes and sections of habitat that we drove through. The most impressive was probably Rincon de la Vieja, an active volcano that reached high into the clouds and had some fantastic secondary outcroppings in the foreground. We stopped for lunch in Liberia, and fended off the honey bees (Africanized perhaps?) throughout the course of our buffet meal. We arrived at the Guanacaste Conservation Area around 2:30 and quickly got ourselves set up in our rooms and ready to jump into the jungle. Within minutes of leaving the main station we had seen 2 troops of white-faced spider monkeys, and a lone howler monkey hanging out in the tree tops. Although the clouds had rolled in and the tropical sun was starting to go down, we still had a number of interesting insect finds, if not flies. Dinner was pretty good, better than predicted at least, and we then sat down and introduced ourselves and pointed out which families we work on and which we’d like material, it was pinning any insects we may have found and some cards before bed. The station and habitat around here looks great, so it should be a really exciting week of collecting.
On the way back to the lodge we ran into Dan Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, two big-time ecologists who are currently trying to identify every moth, skipper and butterfly within the conservation area using DNA barcoding. They had just run across a boa, which we couldn’t refind unfortunately, but hopefully we’ll see more in the next few days!
It wouldn’t be ACG without a heavily parasitized caterpillar:
And everybody likes monkeys!
MTC…
Today’s the final day of the congress, and I’ll certainly miss the full days of fly talks. It’s been a much different atmosphere here than at the other entomological meetings as everyone is focused on flies. There were no periods where I was fading in and out of focus, or times where I sat outside wasting time during a few hours of IPM talks (sorry to those that work in IPM, just not my thing). This is probably why I was so drained everyday, from the constant intellectual stimulation of keeping up with all these different families of flies. Most of the methods are the same, but keeping track of the proposed relationships and how they may or may not have differed from previous hypotheses can take its toll. The sheer volume of work being discussed at this meeting was amazing, although there were some areas of the tree of life missing any taxonomic respect. Despite three full day symposia on the lower Brachycera (Syrphoidea, Tabanomorpha, Stratiomyomorpha, Empidoidea, etc) there were only a handful of talks on the systematics of the Acalyptratae, with the symposium devoted to them made up of 7 talks by 6 systematists (I gave 2 of the talks). Considering how hyper-diverse the acalyptrates are (a point made this morning by several of the higher-level systematics speakers) and the absolutely amazing morphological diversity within the (paraphyletic) group, its surprising how few people have decided to work on them. Sure they’re small, hard to see, hard to collect, and full of undescribed species that need attention, but the available niches for new students or researchers are limitless. Perhaps there are a number of acalyptrate workers who decided not to make the journey to Costa Rica this year, but of all the locations for a major international congress I’d think that a place where you can bookend your trip with a few days of collecting in some diverse habitats (as we are) would be all the impetus required to get people out of their collections and into the world. Maybe I’m still naïve.
Sorry there wasn’t a bug of the day yesterday, I ran out of steam and couldn’t get an image edited before I fell asleep! Here’s today’s:
What’s this you say? A graphical representation of a fly? Well today I’m looking for one of the families that this fly could be based on the head morphology (I’m giving you a break since the wing veination isn’t really visible). I’ll give 5 points to each correct family name (scientific or common). Have fun, and spelling counts!
The long days and late nights finally caught up with me this morning, so I slept in until a little after 8. I know, pretty adventurous of me! I felt much better this morning than the last few mornings however, and refreshed for the last 2 days of the conference and the field work following. The plenary session this morning was by Marty Condon, an ecologist/evolutionary biologist who works on the speciation patterns of a tropical genus of fruit flies (Tephritidae). Her research shows that 3 closely related but distinct species of fruit flies utilize 3 different regions of the same species of plant (one laying eggs in the flowers, one in the seed heads, and one in the stems I believe), a phenomenon that is relatively unheard of elsewhere in nature. When we think of niche partitioning, we generally think of one species as parasite and one species as host, so to have 3 species on the same plant at the same time and not getting confused over which of the other species they should be mating with (they look very, very similar until you look very closely at wing patterns and female ovipositor shape) or where to insert their eggs is pretty remarkable. Further proof that evolution is amazing and that assumptions can never be made about the natural world!
The rest of the day I spent in a symposium on using new technologies to increase the efficiency of Diptera taxonomy. There is a large push in the systematics community in general to develop and implement database systems at various stages of the taxonomic process, from species capture and curation, through to description and analysis of species, and finally to dissemination through resources such as keys or resources like the Encyclopedia of Life. The symposium today highlighted several models of these databases and briefly explained how each is being used, and highlighted the utility of each and where improvements might need to be made. This area of research (bioinformatics) really resonates with me, and I’m hoping to help implement and develop some of these programs during the course of my Ph.D. (eventually…). I signed up to participate in a half-day workshop learning how to use one of these systems, ScratchPads, and I’ll report back tomorrow night how that goes and my initial impressions. At the end of the day myself and most of the rest of the Ottawa and Guelph student crew caught a cab to downtown San Jose to have a nice dinner out at a restaurant that was recommended to us as the best restaurant in Costa Rica (Tin Jo Asian Restaurant)! The food fully lived up to the hype, with some fantastic appetizers and the very best curry I’ve ever had, and all at reasonable prices! I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the sorbet sampler we had for dessert, with the passionfruit being my favourite of 5 unique flavours. Add in an extremely friendly front house manager recalling his stories of Canadians and our use of the word “eh” and it was quite the evening. One more day of the congress left, and then back into the wilds for some more collecting and shooting before heading home!
Most of this morning’s new digital tools talks were recorded and posted online, including my advisor Steve Marshall’s talk (although it seems the messed up and only recorded the audio, plus I can’t get it to work at the moment…). Additionally, all of the Powerpoint presentations themselves will be uploaded to The Diptera Site (they will probably be listed under the attachments link, although there are only 2 up there as of now)
Another buzz-worthy talk today was on the potential utility of the reflective properties of wings as thin films as identification and taxonomic characters. What this complicated sentence means is that when you shine a light on fly wings and have a black background behind them, a full spectrum of colours will shine off the wings (much like the rainbow you see on the outside of a bubble) and that there is evidence that these patterns might be species specific! Some really amazing photographs of these patterns. I’ll definitely be checking out the wings of my micropezids as soon as I get back to Canada!
Stores close really early down here (like 7pm at the latest for most it seems).
We saw a surprising number of “ladies of the night” openly working the corners of downtown San Jose on our cab ride back to the hotel. Definitely didn’t expect that profession to be so easily spotted!
I’ve included some (mostly poor) photos of some familiar faces giving their talks. I’ve also put in a few of the other people who have been doing talks:
Andrew giving his talk on Platycheirus
Gil introducing one of his 3 talks at this congress
Me, presenting my work (thanks Joel for snapping the shot!)
Joel Gibson, a friend from Ottawa presenting his work on Conopidae
Michelle Locke, another friend from Ottawa discussing Dasysyrphus
Dr. Monty Wood, one of the preeminent Canadian dipterists, talking about Tachinids on Wednesday
Dr. Marty Condon giving her Plenary Address on Tephritidae speciation
I think the long days of intellectually stimulating talks are starting to stack up against me, so I slept in an extra half hour today! I know, I know, lazy! I still made it to the plenary session on time, and I’m certainly glad that I did! William Eberhard was today’s speaker, and he was discussing several mechanisms of sexual selection. He showed some fantastic SEM (scanning electron microscopy) shots of weird Sepsidae fore legs modified to hold female’s wings during copulation, a short clip of X-ray video showing the internal structure and function of Tsetse fly mating (Glossinidae) and discussed the different ways in which female and male insects are constantly competing to increase their own reproductive fitness. A very informative talk, and one that I learned quite a bit of relevant information from. After the morning coffee break I sat in on some tachinid talks, and then headed over to the Syrphidae symposium to watch a streak of Ontarians give their talks. Gil, Andrew and Michelle all did a great job with their presentations, and I think each received some nice feedback from those in the audience. Lunch was a little different today, with lots of seafood and some Costa Rican dishes. Not as good as yesterday, but still ok since it was free! The early afternoon brought more Syrphidae talks, including Gil’s discussion of affordable technology for imaging fly genitalia, a talk which I was a co-author. Again he did well, and there were a lot of people who stopped in to see the talk. I believe we’ll be putting a note out detailing some of our methods in Fly Times, the newsletter for the North American Dipterists Society, in the near future. The best symposium of the entire conference followed the afternoon coffee break, with the Acalyptratae being on display! Of course I may be biased since I gave 2 out of the 7 talks, but I think it was still the best symposium. I presented my work on the Tephritidae of Ontario, the paper I submitted a few weeks back, as well as an overview of my Master’s thesis work. Both were well received, with several questions after each, and I had a couple of people come up to me afterwards to discuss some points further. I’m definitely glad to be done with my talks now, although I wasn’t too worried about either.
I had a bit of a rushed evening however when I realized that I hadn’t received a ticket to the banquet with my registration package. I ended up running back up the road to our hotel to find my receipt and make sure I had indeed paid for it, then scooping someone’s cab and getting back to the conference centre, only to find out it was no big deal and that they had a full checklist anyways! Oh well, at least I didn’t miss the bus at least. The banquet was a bit different than other conference banquets I’ve been to. The guest speaker was Dan Janzen, who is in the process of trying to identify every caterpillar, host plant, and parasitoid within the national park that I’ll be traveling to this weekend. Unfortunately he takes a fairly strong stance that DNA barcoding is the way of the future and that everyone else is stupid for not realizing it, almost reaching a crazy old man status. Not to mention his 30 minute talk ended up being 75 minutes, so there were a lot of hungry, cranky dipterists by the end of it! The dinner itself was pretty good, but the live Caribbean band had a very limited playlist, so we heard the same 3 or 4 songs over and over again. An open bar did create some rather funny moments however when a large group of researchers decided to get up and dance! Lets just say that perhaps some should stick to reserach… The only other unfortunate thing was the party ended at 11, only about an hour after the guest speaker finished, making for not a lot of time to socialize and even less time to take advantage of the bar! Only 2 more days of the congress left, and tomorrow should be a good one with a symposium on developing new technologies to help in the study of flies.
The X-ray video of mating flies was expanded upon by another researcher this afternoon. What a fantastic methodology and some fantastic footage of what goes on during copulation! Too bad they needed a large nuclear facility to carry it out…
I think that the entire Calyptrate symposium was recorded today, and there were some really good talks featured, so make sure to check out the videos of the congress today!
I think there is more that happened today, but I’m just too tired to remember right now, I’ll post an update tomorrow morning if I think of anything else.
MTC…
Another day, another few dozen fly talks! Today started a little later than yesterday so I took the opportunity to sleep in a bit and get caught up on my sleep. This morning’s plenary was by Dalton Amorim on fossil Diptera and the process of establishing origins for old fly lineages and the role of the Gondwanian split in speciation. I’ll be honest, a lot of his talk went straight over my head, until the 3rd last slide when I finally understood what he was getting at! At least I didn’t regret breakfast like yesterday. Pretty well the rest of the day I spent in a symposium discussing the Orthorrhaphorous Diptera (Stratiomyidae, Tabanidae, Bombyliidae, etc). Seeing all the work that still needs to be done on the soldier flies (Stratiomyidae) certainly rekindled my interest in these flies (I did my undergraduate honour’s thesis on the Stratiomyidae of Ontario). After talking to the Stratiomyidae presenter later in the day, I’m hoping to collaborate on some work in the future (as another side project; I like to be busy). Besides that, hearing about all the advanced taxonomic studies being undertaken around the world kept me on my toes and like usual, made me want to get back to the lab and do some more work! Today’s lunch was the Costa Rican version of Italian, which went surprisingly well, including the brandy-spiked tiramisu for dessert. After lunch were a large number of talks from Brazil, where the fauna appears to be starting to get some much needed attention. The Brazilian insect fauna has essentially been inaccessible to foreign systematists because of multiple layers of paperwork, permits, and legislation that over eagerly attempted to thwart biopiracy, and which only served to isolate Brazil from the entomological community in many ways. Hopefully these obstacles will begin to decrease and more collaboration and collecting can be accomplished in the near future! A quick walk through the poster session, and today ended a little earlier than usual. A little extra time to do some last minute work on my talks and a call home made for an excellent evening, topped off with more PB & Nutella! It’s good being a student!
I met the student presenting his work on Neriidae tomorrow and had a good chat with him about his work (the Neriidae are the sister group to the Micropezidae).
I’ve noticed a number of people head-bobbing through some of the more, lets say technical, talks. Pretty funny to watch professors doing what their students get in trouble for!
One of the scientific posters on display today was on the Tephritidae of the Netherlands, and after talking with the author and looking through his book, the similarity between his work and my Tephritidae of Ontario project was amazing! Pretty serendipitous really, so I invited him to come see my talk on the project tomorrow.
Likely the most exciting poster on display was on the use of infra-red spectrometry for species identification! Apparently the author can make not only species identifications simply by analyzing the infra-red light reflected off the molecular composition of insect cuticle, but can even distinguish between populations. Pretty amazing work, but unfortunately his talk is at the exact same time as mine is tomorrow. I guess I’ll just have to wait to learn more when his work is published, but it certainly sounds exciting and created a buzz in the community.
MTC…
Today’s bug of the day is a little easier I think, so I’ll give 5 BioPoints for the family name, 2 for the common family name, and I’ll put a total of 20 BioPoints up for grabs to anyone who can come up with a creative/evolutionary solution to why these insects look the way they do (these will be split between people if there are multiple good answers). Good luck, and I’ll award points and provide the answers in a week or so when I get back to Canada!
With all these stories flying around, I figured it’d be a good time to introduce my travel companions for the trip.
Gil Goncalves Miranda
Gil is a PhD. candidate in our lab who works on the systematics of Neotropical (Central and South America) Syrphidae, specifically the genus Ocyptamus. As you might be able to tell, Gil does everything the heavy metal way, including pinning insects! He’s also been our translator this trip, and the butt of plenty of jokes (all in good fun of course)!
Joel Kits
Joel is the other PhD. candidate in the lab, and works on the systematics of the Archiborborini, a basal tribe of lesser dung flies (Sphaeroceridae). Joel is also an avid birder and naturalist, and makes sure to keep fastidious notes of his sightings each day.
Nichelle Lomas
This is Nichelle’s first time collecting flies, as she comes to dipterology from the agricultural sector. She’s researching the utility of Musca domestica, amoung other flies, to efficiently break down chicken manure into dried fertilizer. Here, she’s decided to stick around a little longer, mostly because the vine has grabbed hold of her head!
Andrew Young
Finally, we have Andrew Young, who you technically met the other day. Andrew is working on the genus Platycheirus (Syrphidae) in North America, writing a key to species and matching the males and females of each species to one another for the first time.
