My Worst Collecting Trip EVER

Thirty years ago today, on 19 May 1983, I embarked on an extraordinarily ill-fated collecting trip with Jim O’Hara, fellow graduate student at the U of Alberta in Edmonton.  It is perhaps most memorable for the discovery of a body.  In the space of less than two days the expedition packed in a lot of misery.

It started out promisingly enough, as we drove in Jim’s van east to the North Saskatchewan River near Maidstone, Saskatchewan, in particular to the Paynton Ferry crossing.  The primary goal was to acquire adult females of the rare beetle species Bembidion balli, so that I could raise larvae from them.  I had collected Bembidion balli from that site the fall before, so I was very hopeful.

Bembidion balli

Follow-up to “What should I name this beetle?”

In my post “What should I name this beetle?”, I discussed a pretty, spotted beetle species that lives in the Sierra Nevadas of California and which lacks a name.

I’ve recently been in discussion with Don Cameron,  an arachnologist and friend of my brother Wayne. Don is a scholar of Greek and Latin, and has been tremendously helpful in my search for a name.   Here are the options he suggested that I like the best:

Bembidion oreoastron, from the Greek “oreos” (= “mountain”, genitive singular) and “astron” (= “star”, neuter noun).  Thus, oreoastron is “mountain star”.

Bembidion orolampron, from the Greek “oros” (=”mountain”, nominative neuter), and lampron (= “gleaming”).  Thus, orolampron is “mountain gleaming”.

I’m strongly leaning toward Bembidion oreoastron.  I’ll sleep on it a few days, and decide.

What do you folks think?

The Bembidion ulkei mystery: solved

In an earlier post, I discussed the mystery of Bembidion ulkei.  Here’s a quick summary:  according to Lindroth’s (1963) study, Bembidion obscuripenne is a widespread species in the west,  from California north to Washington. In contrast, Lindroth knew B. ulkei only  from the type series of five specimens labelled “Nevada”. However, every single male that I have examined from Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington has male genitalia that match Lindroth’s drawing of the male genitalia of B. ulkei, and none match B. obscuripenne.  Lindroth’s drawing of B. obscuripenne is of a male from Dallas, Oregon, in the coastal range, and I have not seen any specimens of this group from the coastal range.  There seemed to be only two viable explanations for these observations:  either (1) B. obscuripenne is a rare species restricted to the Coast Range of Oregon, and B. ulkei is the widespread species, or (2) Lindroth mislabelled the figures in his publication.

I have borrowed the holotype specimens of B. obscuripenne and B. ulkei, and today I know the answer.  

Musings #1

I have a question for the Tiffanys of the world.  Does your partner call you by the shorter name Tiff?  Does your partner wear glasses? If they are not wearing their glasses, do they call you Jpeg?

BotW: Dyschirioides sellatus

Dyschirioides sellatus

Dyschiriina is a subtribe of carabids that include small, fossorial (they live in tunnels in the soil) members.  I found the one above on a river shore in Missouri.  I love the interesting  form of the beetle, and the delicate amber of the elytra.

Dyschiriines are unusual in that they have odd plate-like sensory structures on the palps (appendages around the mouth).  These sensilla differ between males and females, and their function is unknown.

Port and Roses

In late January 2012, my daughter, Julia, and I were dining at Luc, having a typically excellent meal. At one point, Julia went to the restroom, and then returned to the table. The following conversation ensued.

Julia: “David, I think you should go to the bathroom. The first one.”

David, skeptical: “Okaaay…” (He goes to the bathroom, then comes back)

Julia: “Did you notice the glass cabinet?”

David: “I did notice.”

Julia: “Well. It’s unlocked, and quite empty, don’t you think?”

David: “Yes indeed. How interesting…”

Julia: “We need to put something in it! Something artistic!”

We brainstormed about it, one thing led to another, and the next thing you know we had decided to put on a multi-act play in the glass cabinet in the washroom.  We named the play “Port and Roses”.

Julia wrote the screen play, and made wire sculptured figures, and props.  The next time we went in, Julia snuck into the washroom with a full backpack, set up Act I, Scene I, and so began the adventure.

Act I, Scene I

That first scene was simple, with a man (holding a large rose) descending down a ladder attached to a bottle of Kopke port, and a woman sitting on top of her Grand Marnier bottle.

For the next several months, whenever one of us went to Luc, we would sneak into the washroom and set up the next scene.  We felt like criminals doing this, as we never told them what we were doing.

What should I name this beetle?

Along some creek and pond shores in the Sierra Nevada of California there lives a pretty, spotted Bembidion, and this Bembidion has no name.  It belongs to the subgenus Liocosmius, a group of Bembidion that range from BC to Baja California, east to New Mexico.  There are three described species in the subgenus (B. mundum, B. horni, and B. festivum), and three undescribed (one species in western California, one in Arizona and New Mexico, and the one in the Sierra Nevadas).  I have names figured out for two of the undescribed species, but the third one (the one that lives in the Sierra Nevada) eludes me.  Here’s what a male of that one looks like.  The spots look brighter when it is alive.

This species is restricted to the Sierra Nevada of California, and it is unusual within the subgenus in its restriction to mountainous areas.   Below is a picture of one of its habitats in the Sierras.  At this site it was found along with Bembidion iridescens, B. wickhami, Lionepha pseudoerasa, L. osculans, L. sequoiae, L. erasa, and other species of Bembidiina.

Strawberry Creek at Sciots Camp, El Dorado Co., California

What should I call this species?  I’ve thought about several possibilities.

Changing of the guard

In 1985, my brother Wayne wrote the first version of MacClade, a graphical program for studying branches of a phylogeny (“clades”) and phylogenies more generally.  It was a very small program, that did just a few things, but was notable in introducing graphic manipulations of phylogenies on the screen.  I started working on the MacClade code a few months later, when I acquired my first Macintosh Plus computer.

MacClade’s icon

By about 1989 I had more or less taken over MacClade development; version 3.0 came out in 1992, and the last release was version 4.08 in 2005.   MacClade celebrated its 25 anniversary in 2010, and was still being widely used and cited.  However, in July of 2011, Apple released a new operating system, and removed from it compatibility with older code such as that contained in MacClade, and MacClade could no longer function.

In 1997, while I was working on version 4 of MacClade, Wayne started a rewrite of the whole program, and Mesquite was born.  We have been developing Mesquite ever since.  Mesquite is modular, and very flexible, and it now does much more than MacClade ever did.  That comes with a downside, however – Mesquite’s interface is much more complex than MacClade’s, and so it has taken people a bit longer to get used to it.

Mesquite’s icon

Wayne and I abandoned MacClade for our own empirical work quite a few years ago, but the community has continued to use it.  Even though MacClade’s development stopped in 2005, as late as 2008 there were twice as many citations that year for MacClade as for Mesquite.

Yesterday, as I was looking up some statistics for a report, I realized that the changing of the guard had been completed: for the first time, Mesquite’s citations for a year topped MacClade’s.  In fact, in 2012 Mesquite was cited more times than MacClade had ever been cited:

Number of citations each year

This is both good, and a bit sad… sometimes I miss MacClade.

Names approved!

In two earlier posts, I wrote about the dangers of naming species after the name of the first peoples of an area, as well as the concerns about using a word from a native language.

In the first of those posts, I mentioned that I was hoping to name a species “Bembidion mimbres”, after the Mimbres people who lived in that area and made pottery depicting many insects.  The Mimbres represent an extinct culture, but apparently the Hopi include their descendants.  Last week I received word from a legal representative of the Hopi, and he said there would be no objections to my using that name.  He pointed out that “mimbres” was not a native word – and, in fact, it is a Spanish word that means “willows”.  It couldn’t be more ideal, as this species lives under willow trees along the banks of rivers; in the picture below, the beetles can be found at night up under the willows walking on willow leaf litter.  I am delighted both by the permission to use the name, and by this added meaning.

Gila River at Billings Vista, NM

In the second post, I talked about wanting to name a Lionepha from Marys Peak, Oregon, which lives along the edges of waterfalls and seeps, “Lionepha tuulukwa”, as “tuulukwa” means “waterfall” in the local (now extinct) native language.  The habitat of this species is shown below; one night, 12 specimens were found in moss in the circled area.  I’ve been talking to some friendly people associated with the local tribes, and they have generously given me permission to use that name; they also provided more detailed linguistic information about the word, which is very helpful.

Alder Creek Falls, Marys Peak, OR

How to collect beetles for DNA studies

Preserving beetles for DNA studies is easy, but a few rules need to be followed.

You will first need to decide which specimens to preserve. It is ideal to have two or more specimens of a species preserved, so that the extra specimens can serve as backups in case the first specimen fails to yield good DNA.  Also, because the specimen from which DNA sequences will be obtained serves as the voucher, it is important to choose the gender that contains the key morphological characters for distinguishing species.  This will allow the DNA data to be properly associated with the morphological data, type specimens, etc. For Bembidion, males contain the most diagnostic characters, and so males should be preferentially preserved for DNA. The general rule of thumb is that whatever gender is best for a holotype is the gender you should choose for DNA preservation.

Exactly how a specimen should be preserved depends upon the materials you have available.  I use one of two preservation methods:  in 95-100% ethanol, or in silica gel.  One of the most important things that both of these do is to remove water from the beetle’s tissue, which prevents nasty enzymes from destroying the DNA.  Here are some procedures I use to ensure high-quality DNA.

Ethanol preservation
95-100% ethanol is ideal; lower concentration doesn’t work as well.  Drop the live beetles into ethanol.  Make sure there aren’t too many beetles in the vial; ideally there is at least four times as much ethanol as there is beetle mass.  The vial on the left below will have well-preserved DNA; the vial on the right is too tightly packed with beetles, and the DNA won’t be as high quality.

Once the beetles have all died, it is ideal to pour off the ethanol and replace it with fresh ethanol.  If you can’t do that right away, that’s OK; but you should change the ethanol in the next day or two.  If you can change the ethanol again a few weeks later, that would be even better.