Exciting news since the last Weekly Flypaper: Piotr Naskrecki, orthopteroid taxonomist, photographer, and author (Relics and The Smaller Majority) has started a new blog — The Smaller Majority. So far Piotr has been killing this whole blogging business, with fascinating posts on tropical entomology and macrophotography tips. I’m pretty sure I bookmarked every post he made for future reference, but here are a few of my favourites:
Now onto the rest of the best from the last 2 weeks!
General Entomology
If you ever need a gift idea for the Dragonfly Woman, she’s got a nice wishlist of field guides that any nature nut would appreciate.
Speaking of gifts, we’re right in the midst of wedding season, and if you need nuptial gift ideas, why not take a page out of the insect world.
Erica McAlister, the Diptera curator at the Natural History Museum, London, takes you on a backstage tour of the NHM insect collection and shows off some spectacular specimens, including a grasshopper hugging a mouse. Seriously.
What’s the biggest bug? The North Carolina State University Insect Collection has a couple of options to answer that.
Entomology is a hobby all unto its own for some people, but it also happens to be a sub-hobby for some fly fisherman!
My wife and I had a date night this week and went to see The Amazing Spider-Man. I really enjoyed it, but was a little disappointed that Peter Parker didn’t snack on a fly or two at some point in the movie. Even if you’re not an arachnid-infused superhero, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t consider eating bugs as Doug Yanega explains to the University of California Food Blog. The Weird Bug Lady even has a tasty sounding recipe for entomological power bars to get you started!
Flies – Diptera
Apparently I missed the memo about Photo Bombing blogs, as Matt Bergeron, Dave Stone and Alex Wild all showed off gorgeous photos of bombyliid bee flies.
Brian Brown is having a pretty good month for publications, with his latest discussing phorid flies which are parasites of endangered ants.
Researchers have bred “super” smart fruit flies which can count. I for one, welcome our new Dipteran overlords.
Black flies take the majority of bad press for Northern pests, but don’t forget to watch out for moose flies while in Alaska.
Robber flies are popular with a lot of people, including devoted beetler Ted MacRae. And with their own special facial hair, the mystax, it’s no wonder.
The Geek demonstrates that sometimes when you’re photographing flies, you’re only able to snipe one photo before they take off.
Beetles – Coleoptera
Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis) has continued it’s inevitable march across eastern North America, this week being detected in Connecticut for the first time. What’s important about this is that Cerceris fumipennis, a solitary wasp which specializes on buprestid jewel beetles, was the first to detect it’s presence in the state. This is the sort of Bio-surveillance that Phil Careless and the rest of Team Cerceris had hoped for, and now hopefully more government agencies will invest in expanding this simple monitoring tool.
Cerceris fumipennis is also a useful tool for collecting other jewel beetles besides EAB as Ted MacRae recently found out.
Of course you don’t need to always rely on other species to find your jewel beetles for you, as the Geek reminds us to always look.
Some people can be picky eaters, but the same holds true for dung beetles, with species preferring different types of brown sauce, and Bug Girl is on it.
Why might it matter what type of dung a beetle prefers? Because places like Australia and New Zealand don’t have any native dung beetles, making agricultural waste a significant problem. Becky Crew has a nice feature on the work being done to bring dung beetles to New Zealand.
Not all scarab beetles like to feed on dung though, like these Green June Beetles that Derek Hennen found in his yard.
With summer comes the opportunity to watch fireflies flashing in the night. Check out this nice flash guide to see if you can recognize any of the species in your backyard, and contribute to a citizen science program.
Ants, Bees & Wasps – Hymenoptera
This photo of a flying bumblebee by Adrian Thysse might be the best of it’s kind that I’ve ever seen.
The Gratton Lab at the University of Wisconsin – Madison is working on an automated bee identification project.
Urban beekeepers in Edmonton are pushing for changes to bylaws that keep their hives in hiding.
Meanwhile in Edmonton, Matthias Buck has discovered 2 new species of paper wasps right under our noses.
The School of Ants is holding a student essay contest with a nice cash prize.
Eric Eaton shows that solitary wasps can be used for monitoring other insects, like stink bugs (potentially including the mega-pest Brown Marmorated Stink Bug) or membracids.
Moths & Butterflies – Lepidoptera
National Moth Week is coming up this week, so expect most of the bug-blogosphere to get a little scaley!
The Dragonfly Woman started a little earlier by announcing an event she’s helping with at her new job.
Other Insect Orders
Troy Bartlett thinks ants mite do a better job of taking care of their herds of membracids.
Ever wondered why your car attracts some insects like dragonflies and horse flies? The Dragonfly Woman has a great explanation.
It looks like the Cleveland Museum of Natural History is becoming ground zero for mantid research in North America.
The Neuroptera are an amazing group of insects with incredible diversity. Jonathan Wojcik provides a nice overview of that diversity, and introduced me to an amazing group called the Spoonwings (family Nemopteridae). Brian Cutting showed off a member of another one of my favourite groups, the Mantis flies, while Derek Hennen found a spectacular antlion adult.
Spiders – Arachnida
“Oh look at that lovely lady beetle! It looks so cute and cuddly and OH MY GOD!!!”
Next time I go to Chicago, I’m definitely rewarding the Chicago Hilton with my business for being so awesome with their natural history and outreach!
I hate when I get a spider web across my face while out walking in the woods, but I think I might have to learn more about spiders and their webbing from a book Bug Girl recently reviewed, Spider Silk by Leslie Brunetta and Catherine L. Craig.
Now if all spiders lived among the canopy of trees like this Hentzia mitrata that Chris Buddle and colleagues are studying, then I wouldn’t have to worry about silk wrapping my face…
Speaking of Chris, he went, he saw, he videoed; Beringian pseudoscorpions in the Yukon that is!
Taxonomy & Systematics
A parasitic isopod was recently described and named after Bob Marley. Too bad the authors messed up and published the name a few months earlier in an ecological paper before formally describing it. Everybody repeat after me — in taxonomy, the order in which you publish or publicize MATTERS.
Of course, because this species was named after somebody famous, the media took off with it and the BBC published a top 10 list of what I’m now going to start calling “Celebronyms”. Have I mentioned how much I hate these top 10 species lists lately? Because I do. With a passion. Ugh.
Where should money be invested to solve the taxonomic impediment? Quentin Wheeler of Arizona State University thinks technology leads the way (i.e. the University of Arizona’s new funding to revitalize and digitize their collection), while Bob Mesibov of the Queen Victoria Museum (Tasmania) argues that more taxonomists need to be hired first. Me? I think technology will be useless if there’s no one around to develop, maintain and actually use it. I’ll also need a job in 3-5 years, so I might be a bit biased here.
The Willi Hennig Society Meeting was held at the end of June, and Itsy Bitsy attended. So did Salva at Computer Cladistics, who has a fantastic detailed review of the conference.
Kevin Peterson is literally uprooting the mammal phylogeny with a new technique he’s developed. My question is what makes this new technique more accurate to the true evolutionary history of the mammals? Micro-RNA is also being used to study Diptera evolution, but I can’t understand why it’s considered more “accurate”. It’s a wonder I get any sleep at all with these types of questions rolling around in my head…
Does the way that we traditionally draw and think of phylogenies (i.e. a “tree” of life) block us from considering new ideas on relationships?
Academia
My post on Citations, Social Media & Science gathered some attention last week, including that of the researcher who’s improperly cited blog started the whole discussion. The author of the paper also stopped by and explained they tried to include the citation, but the publisher wouldn’t allow a blog to be cited like a journal. I’m not really sure why a publisher has so much control over the content of a journal rather than the editorial staff of said journal, but I find it troubling.
This is pretty handy for people just starting out in academia/grad school – Field Guide to Scientific Conferences: An Ecological Review.
Also handy, this complete walkthrough by Steve Hamblin on laying out and developing a poster for a conference. Many, many good tips here for balancing form and function. It’s also a pretty interesting view inside the head of a Post-Doc…
It’s good to remember that it matters how you write in academia, not just what you write.
Science Communication & Social Media
Bora Zivkovic (aka the Blogfather) drops a massive backgrounder on the history and rise of science blogging.
I’ve seen a bunch of people start blogs only to watch them peter out after a few weeks/months. As a blogger who has a relatively small (yet loyal) readership, I can sympathize with this post on Why Blogs Fail.
Here’s 10 Apps That Put Science In Your Pocket.
Dr. Olin Sander compares Twitter popularity during the recent Evolution meeting in Ottawa to a sage grouse lek. Awesome.
Photography
Ted MacRae demonstrates why the placement of your lighting sources and choice of background can have a dramatic effect on a photo’s feel.
Alex Wild has a nice flowchart of his digital darkroom workflow.
Adrian Thysse has a lovely interview with renowned nature photographer Heather Angel.
Other Fun Stuff
David Winter does a great job of explaining why red heads are here to stay. Looks like my wife won’t be getting rid of me that easily!
This fish grows ant-shaped appendages to get laid. I feel like there’s an inappropriate joke in here somewhere…
Who needs cable TV when you can get all kinds of drama & comedy from social media?
Aquaman makes a terrible marine mammal. He also makes a terrible superhero.
What would happen if a pitcher threw a baseball at 90% of the speed of light? I suspect he’d be investigated for Perfomance Enhancing Drug use and never make it into the Hall of Fame.
Video of the Week
Carl Zimmer was a plenary speaker at the annual meeting of the Society for the Presevation of Natural History Collections a few weeks ago, and they just posted his talk on YouTube. It’s long (more than an hour), but it’s an interesting talk and well delivered.
Further Reading
Bora Zivkovic – The Science Blogging Weekly, July 13th 2012 – (I made the Top 10 posts list! W00T!)
Ed Yong – Missing Links, July 14, 2012
Ed Yong – Missing Links, July 21, 2012
Awesome as usual – although the thumbnail for the video made me do a double take
-Brain Cuttings
The Bob Marley isopod sloppiness seems to be another Article 16.4 incident. I can’t get a copy of the paper so I can’t verify this. That would make the second time this year I am happy the ICZN added that failsafe to the 4th Edition.
Article 16.4 is quickly turning into one of the most important clauses for saving sloppy taxonomy!
Well, it turns out it /is/ a nomen nudum. It doesn’t conform to article 16, but more importantly it also doesn’t conform to article 12 or 13. A nomen nudum is by definition not available, so it can be used as is later. It’s a historical entity, but it doesn’t have any standing in zoological nomenclature. Which means that the name didn’t actually become available until the 2012 paper was published. Also, since nomen nuda include all sorts of names, both scientific and vernacular, and we certainly aren’t required to list vernacular nomen nuda when creating a new name, we also aren’t required to list nomen nuda that take the semblance of a binomial. There is no requirement in the ICZN to refer to such a nomen nudum before using the same spelling for a new species. Nor is there any requirement that a nomen nudum must be stated as such in a nomenclatural act to be considered as such. A name is a nomen nudum, not by virtue of any later statement, but by the fact that it doesn’t conform to the criteria of availability. Though, I almost feel like there should be a required statement just to punish people who aren’t careful about these things.
Therefore, Gnatha marleyi Farquharson et al 2012 is the available name, and is not a homonym of the 2011 name since nomen nuda cannot be considered for homonymy. Nor can any names that are not available, for that matter.
It was sloppy, and foolish, and I really hate that it happened, but these failsafes are in place for a reason. Otherwise we would be overrun with synonyms and homonyms published by people who really don’t know what they’re doing or jumped the gun. That is a huge waste of time, and the availability criteria cut that off at the root.
If the 2011 Marine Biology paper had been accompanied by any description at all, then this would not be a nomen nudum, but would still not be available. This is what happened with the press releases for that ‘avatar’ moth; it specifically did not conform to Article 16.1 and 4. A name must be explicitely intended as new, and this is generally indicated by puting ‘n. sp.’ after the name. Yet another failsafe is that of Article 10.1.1, where if a name is published but in an interrupted form (only part of the criteria for availability are fullfilled in one publication but fully completed in a later one), then it is considered available with date and authorship of the publication where the criteria are fully met. With the recommendation [10A] that editors should insure that they do not publish names where the conditions are not met all at once. Of course.
Believe me, I’ve spent the last day talking back and forth with involved parties and people on the ICZN listserv just to clarify what is meant by nomen nudum and what is necessary for a nomen nudum to be republished as a new, available name. I think I’m clear on the details now. I’m also clear on what to /avoid/ so not to be sloppy in my own endeavors.
Wow, this is excellent Kai, thanks! When you feel like joining the ICZN committee, I will fully back your application!
Well, let’s not jump the gun! I have a whole lot to learn until I am at that level of scholarship. I appreciate the thought, though. Every time I come up against one of these situations I come out with another level of understanding. Nothing to loose and everything to gain.