A sense of place

(this is reposted from our Desert Ecology field course blog at desertecology.wordpress.com)

You have to make a basic decision on every road trip: spend a little time in lots of places, or spend more time in fewer places. Like any good democracy, our travelling village has reached a compromise on this trip. We’re spending 4 nights each in two of our destinations: Catalina Mountains State Park near Tucson, and Joshua Tree National Park. The nice thing about this is that it really lets us gain a “sense of place”.

Two key ingredients make you a good ecologist, a good naturalist. First, it’s important to understand the underlying principles that run through the science. They’re the thread that ties everything together. That’s the stuff we learn in classrooms. Out here in the sun and dust and wind and stars we’re getting the other key piece of the picture. A “sense of place” is something you only gain by sitting on a rock for a while watching life interact with wind and sand, watching cactus wrens bring grubs and tiny lizards back to their nestlings, seeing the scorpions glow in the night under our black lights, learning the smell and sounds of the place.

Spending a few hours at a place lets us make a list. Make a comparison. See differences and similarities. That’s important, but it’s not the whole picture. Here at Joshua Tree, and a few days ago at Catalina, we had the luxury of time and familiarity. We could wander at our own pace. And in that wandering, we started seeing changes in time, not just changes in space.

Something bigger has happened too. We started making connections out to other places, other times.

Some of us have done ecology in the arctic – a very different world on the surface of it, but also very similar in that life is laid out in simple patterns in front of our eyes. There’s a scramble of activity in a brief season of plenty to stock up for the rest of the lean year.

Some of us spent a semester studying in Africa last year. Halfway around the world, in another time, they saw how other plants, other animals, other people, deal with too much heat and not enough water. It’s been fascinating and exciting to see these connections to another place coming up in conversations as we wander through the southwestern US.

This is one of the great strengths of learning in the field. Of touching the rock and smelling the plants and tracking the lizards. Of wandering and wondering. This is the best way there is to forge links to the other places we’ve seen, and to the other times we’ve been out in the big world.

A sense of place, Joshua Tree

Pixels versus pages

After 17 years in the same office I was moved just before Christmas into a new office one floor up in my building. My initial annoyance at having to deal with moving soon gave way to the realization that I would have the opportunity to clean out my stuff. Big recycling bins were rolled in and filled (repeatedly) with the debris of courses and committees and research past; boxes of documents were sent off for shredding; stacks of unneeded books made some students very happy (“free books!”); old, creaky and now empty filing cabinets were abandoned. A much smaller pile of paper and books and files moved into my new office with me.

Once I had my new office more or less set up, colleagues and even some students began to wander by and drop little remarks abut my “clean”, “minimalist” office (translation: “hey! you’re a professor! where’s all your crap?”). There it was again, that stereotypical view that a professor works in a small area of desktop excavated out from beneath a teetering pile of  papers and books that spill off the desk and shelves and onto the floor. Somewhere in that pile is a computer. And an old typewriter. And a squash racket. And maybe some food. Now this is not to say that I don’t have colleagues whose offices look exactly like that. I’m not judging, I’ve just always realized that that’s not me. And here’s why: if I can’t see it, I forget about it.

That’s just the way my mind works. I need reminders – verbal or visual. So for me to juggle everything I have to juggle (reality check: academia is not so much about thinking as it is about time management and juggling) I have to see it all.

Computers, especially once they had desktops upon which icons and files could sprawl out row on row (yes, I started my grad student career in DOS-World), seemed like a brilliant solution. Little reminders right in front of me; all my files in one place; quick access to email. Plus, it was environmentally friendly — less paper equals more trees.

So now I have all my manuscripts on my computer, and a ton of related files, and hundreds of papers in PDF version at my fingertips. Great. The problem is that I now spend hours at a time staring at a small screen and there are only so many things I can spread out on that screen at a time. Plugging in a second monitor helps, but only up to a point.

The pendulum is starting to swing back. I never abandoned printed books, and just keep accumulating them. Never bought a Kindle or other eReader. Just couldn’t face it. I love books. But now I’m thinking it might be pleasant and easy on my eyes to go back to printing out a bunch of those individual papers and manuscripts like I used to. I can scribble in the margins and draw arrows and underline things. I can sit in a comfy chair without a Mac heating up my lap. I’ve started scribbling down new ideas in actual notebooks with a nice smooth feel to the heavy pages (thank you Moleskine!). Yes, editing a manuscript on a computer is certainly easier, but my love affair with paper-free scientific productivity may be losing some of its shine. Maybe its time for more hard copy reprints to join my giant pile of books.

Pixels or paper: I see the split in lab meetings and journal club discussions. When the paper or the manuscript shows up it’s on a screen for some of the people in the room, and on the page for the rest. And I find myself wondering if I’d “get it” more in one format or the other.

Or maybe I’m just overthinking this and thereby successfully putting off opening the file that is sitting right here on the corner of my screen. Reminding me that it needs to be edited.

Many ways forward: towards a Biota of Canada

In my last post I looked back at the history of an idea — documenting the biota of Canada. If we are going to embark on such an undertaking, a logical first step is to figure out how to get there, and what it will look like when we do. It’s probably good to get a couple of fairly important points out of the way first:

Fairly Important Point #1: we can’t make a catalog of all Canadian species yet, and we won’t be able to for a long time.

Fairly Important Point #2: fairly important point #1 does not mean we shouldn’t just start in and DO the thing. There are many things we know already, and just have to organize. There are many things we don’t yet know and have yet to discover. We can do the first without waiting for the second, so a logical first step is to compile the information we already have.

Names are the key to organizing information. Names of species are the labels on the filing system of life. Names are a portal to all other information about species, and are the central hub through which all information flows. So, they are the logical starting point for a project like this. There are, however, a few challenges in using names as the basis for the filing system. Specialists organize and communicate knowledge about species by using scientific names (those two-word, Latin-looking epithets that make some people roll their eyes when we ask them to learn a few). The great advantage of scientific names is that they are, ideally, universal and unambiguous. Contrast this with common names, which can vary from language to language and region to region. But the reality is that people do use common names to identify and communicate information about species (think about birds or butterflies, which have widely-known and widely accepted common names), so the system has to accommodate them. Note also that scientific names aren’t always as clear and unambiguous as we would like, because of synonyms and changes in the combinations of names over time (taxonomy is a dynamic and evolving science!). This is why, along with compiling information about species, we must continue to do the good fundamental taxonomic work to resolve remaining disagreements and confusion about scientific names.

Where do the data come from? Names are the key to organizing information, but that information comes from a range of sources: specimens in collections (the most reliable, because they can be verified, but also time-consuming and expensive to extract); records in literature (an enormous and valuable resource, which may or may not always be accurate, and not always supported by specimens); and observations (think: Christmas Bird Counts; butterfly days; citizen science initiatives. But observations aren’t always supported by specimens). All three provide useful and valuable data, just in different packages, and with different levels of verifiability.

What will it look like? Just as many different sources of information could go into a Biota of Canada, many different kinds of information can come out the other end. Different users want or need different things and, ideally, as many user groups as possible should be accommodated.

Canada and its Insect Fauna (Danks, 1979)

The last attempt to compile all the information about the terrestrial arthropods of Canada — 1979′s Canada and its Insect Fauna — was published as a hard copy volume. A printed book is a very useful tool. I connect with books in a way that I simply can’t with electronic resources. That being said, there are limitations to a book: it’s not easily updated without being reprinted; there are only three ways into it (front to back via the Table of Contents, back to front via the Index, and “browse”); and it tends to be aimed at a particular audience. The Biota of Canada, as I envision it, needs to be more like a multi-dimensional filing cabinet whose drawers can be opened from any direction.

Species databases. If the Biota of Canada were a house, this would be the foundation. Everything else rests on this. Traditionally, species databases grew out of efforts by individual specialists or groups working on particular taxa or in particular regions. They used to be on 3×5 file cards. Later on floppy disks, usually in word processor language. Sometimes in programs that people wrote themselves, but didn’t always share. Things have changed. Mostly. We now have internationally accepted standards (the Darwin Core) and an organization (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility) to help standardize, compile and connect databases. Here in Canada, the Canadensys initiative has made great strides in databasing and sharing specimen data of highly diverse groups (plants, fungi, insects) in selected large collections across the country. But we still have a long way to go. Initiatives such as GBIF and Canadensys must continue to be supported, our databases must grow as a community effort, and the structure must accommodate multiple inputs and be set up to allow (and encourage!) verifiability of records and quality control.

Published checklists and catalogs. A species database is big and powerful, but not always terribly user-friendly in day to day use. Published checklists or catalogs of selected taxa from selected regions are compilations extracted from the master database, and will likely be the most frequently used products. They sit on our desks and get scribbled in and annotated (and hopefully those annotations are eventually fed back into the main database). It’s nice to know I can turn on the computer and perform a customized search for taxon X in locality Z, but to be honest, my ancient and battered and annotated 1965 Catalogue of North American Diptera gets a lot of use on my desk. I just wish there were a more recent version . . .

Species pages. If a database is the link to a name, species pages are the clearing house for all the information attached to that name and that species. Several initiatives already underway have made great progress on building pages for individual species. Check out the fantastic virtual museum at the E.H. Strickland Entomological Museum for a great start on species pages for Canadian insects. These pages are user-friendly portals to taxonomic, ecological, geographic and other information about species. We simply need more of them. This is one of the primary goals of the Encyclopedia of Life.

Identification tools, field guides and popular books. We cannot underestimate the value of field guides and user-friendly identification tools in building interest across a wide range of users. As a research scientist, I use technical keys and taxonomic monographs a lot, but if I want to get a new student or a non-scientist excited about biodiversity, I’ll show them a field guide, or a picture key, or a beautifully illustrated book of diversity. Whether it’s a field guide to the birds, or the insects, or the lichens of North America is secondary. What matters most is that there is a lot of nature packed in there and all of it has names and natural history. Better knowledge of our biota facilitates these popular products and these products, in turn, encourage people to notice, appreciate, identify and document our biota.

Of course, all of the above is just one person’s vision of what the big project might look like. Others may have their own clear, and different, vision of the end product. That’s fine. It gives us something to talk about while we begin to assemble that enormous list.

Count all the things: towards a Biota of Canada

As the second anniversary of this blog approaches, I’ve been reading back through some of my older posts. In 2011, I talked about the fact that we don’t know how many species live here (“we” meaning “Canadians”; “here” meaning “in our own country”— a fairly large, scientifically-advanced, stable, well-off, not-terribly-biodiverse country). It would be great, for many reasons, to find out how many species live in Canada. That sounds simple enough. Except that it isn’t. Birds are easy. Mammals too. We’ve got a pretty good handle on most of our vertebrates. The community of vascular plant people has made some great strides towards documenting Canadian plant diversity. But not all taxa are going to be so easy. The great majority of our species are the small, diverse, similar-looking, hard to collect, hard to identify, mostly unnamed majority. That includes arthropods. Figuring out how many species of terrestrial arthropods live in Canada would colour in a huge slice of the big pie chart of our diversity. The main challenge is that we lack the crayons (as it were). It’s going to be a big job. Nevertheless, the Biological Survey of Canada has made colouring this big pie chart one of its main goals since it was founded more than 30 years ago.

The BSC was by no means the first group to come up with the idea to document the species living in Canada (it’s a logical idea; it’s just really difficult to translate it into reality). It’s a historical year for entomology in Canada (the 150th anniversary of the Entomological Society of Canada), so it seems like as good a year as any to talk about some history.

Materials for a Fauna Canadensis

The idea of a biological inventory of Canada is older than the country of Canada itself. Five years before Confederation, in September 1862, William Hincks published a small paper in The Canadian Journal proposing this very idea.

Professor Hincks’ big idea.

At the time, Hincks was a pretty influential figure in “Canadian” science. In 1853 he was appointed as the first Professor of Natural History at University College, Toronto, and was pretty well-connected throughout the scientific community.

(Historical trivia note 1: the other leading candidate for the Toronto position in 1853 was a far more qualified, and better known, English naturalist named Thomas Henry Huxley. Yes. That Thomas Henry Huxley. Hincks was offered the job instead. It was . . . political).

(Historical trivia note 2: in 1863, Hincks was the Chair at the first official meeting of the newly formed Entomological Society of Canada).

In his paper, Hincks noted:

The difficulties attending the study of every branch of Natural History in Canada, are greatly aggravated by the want of books fitted to afford the student, in a convenient and scientific form, such assistance as the present state of our knowledge renders practicable.

In modernspeak: “we know lots of things that live here, but there’s no easy way to identify them”.

Hincks felt that if a committed group of people started to assemble all that knowledge we did have about the animals of Canada (he had a whole separate plan for a Flora Canadensis), we could eventually assemble a complete compendium, with names, diagnostic information, geographic distributions, etc. for all our species. There was a key statement in Hincks’ overview of the project:

It has occurred to me that the publication in this Journal of fragmentary portions of a provisional Fauna Canadensis might contribute not a little both to assist the cultivators of Zoological Science and to accumulate  useful materials for future labourers who may be enabled to attempt what would now be premature,—a general systematic work on Canadian Zoology.

Hincks realized that the task of compiling a complete zoological inventory of Canada (a much smaller region in 1862 than it is today) was impossible at that time, but that we knew enough about some groups that we could at least make a start on components of the big catalog. Hincks went on in that paper, and subsequently, to present some examples of his proposed approach, with a synopsis of several groups of aquatic insects, perhaps to whet people’s appetites for getting on board with the project. Hincks, unfortunately, died a few years later and his grand vision never saw completion.

Fast forward just over a century.

Canada and its Insect Fauna

1979 was a pivotal year in documenting the diversity of Canadian terrestrial arthropods. The recently launched Biological Survey of Canada (Terrestrial Arthropods), headed by H.V. Danks, published Canada and its Insect Fauna. This 573-page compendium drew together the collective knowledge, wisdom and educated guesses of 60 specialists (mostly Canadian) to enumerate how many species of terrestrial and freshwater arthropods (insects, arachnids and others) we knew to exist in Canada and, perhaps just as importantly, to estimate how many species remained to be discovered. The final count was just over 33,000 recorded species and almost that many still undescribed or unrecorded in Canada. Canada and its Insect Fauna wasn’t meant to be the final word. It was a starting point.

And then?

One of the more frequently uttered phrases among my colleagues in Canadian arthropod biodiversity is “I still pull my Canada and its Insect Fauna off the shelf all the time!”. Well, that’s both high praise for this monumental volume, and a somewhat sobering realization that 34 years on, we haven’t replaced it with anything newer. Some major taxa and some regions have been completely updated quite recently, but for others (my own favorite group, the Diptera, for example) we still rely on numbers that are more than a generation out of date (and that’s a human generation, not an insect generation!). Clearly, we have some work to do.

Where to from here?

There are a lot of differences between the way we collect, package and share biodiversity information now compared to 1979. This work is no longer done only by specialists, and the products are used by a wide range of individuals and agencies. The digital revolution means that The Book is no longer the only method of presenting all this information.

If we hope to update our knowledge of the arthropods of Canada, and to move toward a complete understanding of our biota, and if we hope to make this knowledge accessible to a wide array of users, we’ll need to think outside the pages. And we’ll almost certainly need to do it a few pieces at a time, as William Hincks realized 151 years ago. But there are lots of ways to do that. That’s a topic for the next post.

One small collector, one big country (Windy Pass, YT)

Summarizing your research, with a catch

It’s important for scientists to be able to explain what we do to a broad audience, not just other scientists. After all, depending on the research we do and how we do it, those non-scientists are the people who pay for our work, and who potentially use it and benefit from it. But this kind of communication is also a skill that we don’t always practice enough as scientists.

It’s a worthwhile exercise to try to summarize your research in common language (no jargon!), or in 100 words or less, or in language that a ten-year old can understand. Today I discovered a new twist on this challenge: summarize your research using only the 1000 most commonly used words in the English language.

As it turns out, it’s pretty hard. Many of the words I’ve already used in this post aren’t on that list. Give it a try!

I decided to explain our ongoing research on the diversity and ecology of arctic flies. “arctic” isn’t on the list of 1000. Neither is “north”. No “flies” either. See what I mean?

Here’s what I came up with:

We want to see how many kinds of fly live way up where trees can’t. There are many more kinds of fly there than we thought, and we want to know how they share that little world. What do they eat there? What eats them?  Where do they live? How do they handle the cold and dark? We can’t understand or save those cold high places if we don’t know how all the pieces work. A fly is a small piece of a big world, but if there are lots and lots of small pieces, they can do a very big and important job to make that big world run the right way. This is really true in cold, dark and mean parts of the world where life is hard anyway. It seems like we should know a lot about the fly, but that’s not true. Not yet, anyway.

You know, I kind of like it . . .

Two new papers: insects in harsh places

Two new papers on insect ecology from the Lyman group appeared this week: one in print, and one new paper in press.

Amélie Grégoire Taillefer’s new paper in Restoration Ecology (see Grégoire Taillefer & Wheeler 2013 in Publications) is a follow-up study to her M.Sc. field work on community assembly of flies in restored peatlands. Amélie’s earlier work showed that fly diversity is high in restored bogs that had been previously mined for horticultural peat moss. These bogs are actively seeded with plant material, but not with animals. So the question was: Are insects reintroduced with this plant material? As it turns out, the answer is “not really”. We found low insect diversity and abundance in vegetation prepared for reintroduction to bogs, which means that most of the insects have to disperse in from somewhere else after restoration. But if there isn’t a suitable natural bog nearby, that could be a problem for peatland recovery.

Simple habitats can be complicated places, for insects

Postdoc Laura Timms’ paper in Ecography (just published on-line in early view, see Timms et al. 2013 in Publications) looks at 50 years of community change in parasitoid ichneumonid wasps on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut (one of the most northern places on earth). Laura compared specimens from our 2010 Northern Biodiversity Program collections at Lake Hazen, to three historical collections from the 1960s through the 1980s to assess changes in the community over time in response to a warming climate. The responses were not clear-cut. Although there weren’t major changes in the overall structure of the community, the ichneumonids that parasitize herbivorous host insects were less abundant in the 2010 samples, including some genera that were were completely absent. This means that some species, even within the same ecological or taxonomic group, may respond differently to climate change than others.

Neither of these papers is the last word from us on insect lives in these challenging habitats. Look for more papers from several members of the NBP group on the ecology, genetics and taxonomy of northern arthropods this year. And Amélie will continue to explore the community ecology of peatland flies in her Ph.D. work.

Natural history known, unknown, and assumed: a fly tale

My previous post was part of an exchange with Chris Buddle on whether taxonomists should describe new species without knowing their natural history. When many of the specimens upon which we base species descriptions are already long dead by the time we recognize them in a collection as something new, it’s sometimes difficult to say much about their habits and interactions. Of course, this lack of knowledge about a particular species can be offset by the predictive power of phylogeny.

One of the great revolutions in taxonomy was phylogenetic systematics, as articulated by Willi Hennig (why some taxonomists in 2013 still do not embrace the principles of phylogenetic systematics is beyond me, but that’s a rant for another post). One of the most significant implications of a phylogenetic approach is that if our classifications reflect the evolutionary history of a group, we can make predictions about unknown traits of species based on known traits of closely related species. So, if I describe a new species that fits into a genus in which all other known species are predators of snails, for example, it’s a good bet that my new species probably eats snails. But that doesn’t mean we’re always right. Most carabid beetles are predators. But not all. Most spiders are predators. But not all.

I think a lot about the limits of predictability, and the pitfalls of predicting incorrectly, in the context of the insects I know best — the fly family Chloropidae (also known as frit flies, grass flies, or eye gnats). Predictions about the natural history of poorly known species of chloropids are difficult for three reasons: 1) we only know the habits of a very small fraction of the described species; 2) many genera of chloropids are probably not monophyletic, or “natural groups”. In other words, they may include a set of species that are not each other’s closest relatives and thus don’t reflect shared history; and 3) chloropids are one of the most ecologically diverse families of insects on the planet.

Enderleiniella n. sp. (natural history unknown)

A lot of reference books, websites and other resources state that the larvae of most chloropids are phytophagous, feeding on living plant tissues. That statement is almost certainly wrong. Here’s why:

In most groups of insects, the species we know best are those that have an impact on human life. In Chloropidae, the larvae of a few species are pests of cereal crops. And the closely related species in genera such as Oscinella (the group that includes the actual “frit fly”), Meromyza and Chlorops are probably phytophagous too. And it’s tempting to generalize this habit across other genera in the family. That’s where problems arise because most chloropids aren’t in these genera. The family is divided into three subfamilies; let’s look at the known habits of each.

The subfamily Siphonellopsinae is dominated by the large, mostly tropical, genus Apotropina. The larvae of the few species that are known have been reared in association with nests of social or solitary Hymenoptera, where they are apparently scavengers, or have been reared from rotting plant material (scavengers or bacterial grazers). Apotropina is a big genus with lots of described species, but there are many more undescribed species. Phytophagous? Probably not.

A lot of the plant-feeding species fit into the subfamily Chloropinae. Chlorops and Meromyza are both in this subfamily, and multiple species have been reared from grasses and sedges. Several other genera in this subfamily also include species that feed in living plants. But Thaumatomyia is a chloropine too, and the few known larvae are predators of root aphids. Another chloropine genus, Pemphigonotus, includes at least one species with a fondness for rotting crabs on ocean beaches. For the subfamily overall: Mostly phytophagous (probably), but definitely not all.

I’ve saved the biggest mess for last — subfamily Oscinellinae. The most genera and species, and the greatest range of habits. Some genera (Oscinella, Lipara, Dicraeus and others) are phytophagous. Probably. Some other genera are often assumed to be phytophagous, and you can find references to that in the published literature. But groups such as Rhopalopterum and Anatrichus are apparently secondary invaders that scavenge (or may be predators) in feeding galleries made by moths or other flies. Other oscinellines are predators of spider egg sacs, or grasshopper or mantid egg masses. Some are subcutaneous parasites of frogs in Australasia. Some kleptoparasitic species steal meals from spiders and robber flies and assassin bugs. Some feed on frass and debris in bark beetle galleries in trees. Some are scavengers in bee nests. Many are scavengers in decaying plants. Some feed on fungi. A few have a  fondness for carrion. For the vast majority of species, and even genera, we simply do not know their natural history. We do know, though, that if there’s a dominant mode of life, it’s probably saprophagous, feeding in decaying organic material. Mostly phytophagous? Probably not.

There are two main obstacles to sorting out this tremendous ecological diversity in chloropid flies. The first is a taxonomic challenge — the phylogenetic relationships in this family are poorly resolved, which makes it almost impossible to construct a classification that reflects the evolutionary history (and therefore the ecological history) of the group. These flies are also so challenging to sort out morphologically that we have little hope of resolving their higher-level relationships without also incorporating DNA sequence data.

The second challenge is grounded in ecology and natural history. We need more basic observations on what these flies actually do. The habits of even our local species are still so poorly known that we could make great progress simply spending time in the field collecting likely food sources and rearing the flies. My former grad student Fred Beaulieu, now a mite specialist at the Canadian National Collection, reared several local species of chloropids and other flies from grasses, sedges and cattails, helping to document their natural history just a little bit more fully (see Beaulieu & Wheeler 2002 in Publications).

We often tend to think about research projects in terms of posing big questions and testing hypotheses or predictions and accumulating lots of data. But given how little we know about the natural history of many arthropods, we can also make significant advances in knowledge armed with a notebook, some empty pill bottles and a sunny afternoon.