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

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.

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.

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)

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 . . .

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.

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.

My short answer to Chris’s question is: No.

Here’s my long answer, from my (mostly) taxonomist’s perspective:

Big questions, small steps

Most new species of arthropods and other small organisms are recognized from specimens already preserved in natural history collections, not collected as part of focused hunting expeditions (Another nature documentary myth deflated. Sorry). This means that a taxonomist will often describe a new species based on a few dead specimens, and a very small label with minimal data. Here’s an example of the challenge that can create: I have a specimen of a (likely) new species of fly sitting by my microscope. The label reads: “CAN:YT: Dempster Hwy nr North Fork Pass 64.57942° -136.28212°, 1200m, Repl. 3 wet, sweep, 24.vi.2012, NBP field party”. And because I was the NBP field party member who did the sweep transects that day I have a little more detailed memory about the vegetation and topography along that transect. But I don’t know where along that transect I got that specimen. In a large scale study, with lots of field sites and sample grids and lots of data to collect in a very short time we simply do not have the ability to note each of those specimens when they’re alive and watch what they’re doing. It would be great fun to do so, but neither I, nor any of the students, would get enough data to finish any of our projects. This is the trade-off, especially when we’re working on small and obscure arthropods as part of a big and ambitious project.

I’ll almost certainly describe that new species because I think it’s an interesting little fly in a distinctive genus in a part of the world where I would not have expected to find it. And I know from the label where and when I collected it. But that’s hardly significant “natural history information”. I don’t know where along that gentle slope above a tundra pond I got that fly as I swept. The sedge hummocks? beside the Dryas? under the little shrub? out of mid-air? And I certainly don’t know what it eats, or where its larvae develop, or its preferred microhabitat, or its role in food webs. We may never know that. I can make a prediction based on what I do know about its related species, but even there I have some nagging questions. But if I describe this species and give it a name and mark a place for it in the Great Filing Cabinet of Life, it makes it easier for somebody with an affinity for small flies and some time to kill to know that there’s a neat little question waiting to be tackled the next time they venture up the Dempster Highway. If this fly has a name, and is placed in a classification, then at least we know that its natural history is a “known unknown” (it’s sublimely comforting to know that a silly catchphrase will likely be Donald Rumsfeld’s only lasting legacy to the world).

The way we collect

One of the biggest changes in recent decades in the way we accumulate biodiversity data about arthropods is the widespread adoption of high-yield, replicated, passive collecting methods such as Malaise traps, canopy fogging and large pan trap grids. This brings in a lot of new species and a lot of material in quantities suitable for rigorous statistical analyses. The downside is that such methods have the ability to separate the collector from the live specimen in a way that was quite uncommon a century ago. In most cases we don’t see the specimens until they’re already dead and preserved. Sometimes the taxonomic expert who recognizes the species wasn’t even in the field where the material was collected. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just a thing. But it means that natural history observations about living specimens don’t always make it into somebody’s field notebook.

I’m sometimes envious of colleagues who hand-collect their specimens and make notes on them as they go, and rear them out individually to associate larvae and substrates and adults. But on the other hand, oh boy do I ever have a mountain of data!

One impediment is enough

Much has been written about the “taxonomic impediment” — the realization that there are not enough active taxonomists, and not enough resources, to describe earth’s biodiversity anywhere near soon enough, at the rate we’re going. Just here in the cabinets in my lab I have at least 200 undescribed species of small flies that I already know are new species. How many of them do I have reasonable natural history information for, beyond simply where and when they were collected? About a half-dozen. Now, I feel I have a responsibility to the scientific community to execute my duty as a duly-apprenticed, trained and employed taxonomist to get some names on those species, and in doing so, make that taxonomic knowledge about those species available for other researchers who may or may not be taxonomists. But if I only describe the species for which I have decent natural history data, I will likely describe 6 or 8 species in the next few years and let the rest sit undescribed in the cabinets. If I do that, then I will, at the end of my career, consider myself a pretty poor taxonomist. I suppose this is the cost of specializing on a group of small, cryptic, poorly-known flies, whose ecological diversity is so high that it’s hard to even predict the habits of unknown species — natural history data is sometimes a luxury.

A losing battle?

Chris asks “whether seeking additional natural history information about species (when it is described) is a losing battle… and whether this task should be in the hands of the individuals who describe species.”

I think that no battle in which our goal is greater taxonomic resolution and more complete natural history knowledge is a losing battle. If it is, I’ll go down swinging. Granted, it’s not an easy battle and it’s going to be a long one and I think we have to be content with little gains of a few inches here and there rather than total victory. We can certainly seek additional natural history information about species, and there’s little I enjoy more on a field trip than spending time just watching insects live their lives and documenting that. But in this battle, I’m a taxonomic specialist, and I will often have to choose my targets. So I’ll charge into the lines of undescribed species and worry about cleaning up the rest later.

I certainly don’t think the task of documenting the natural history of new species should rest solely in the hands of the people who describe the species (although some of the most superb naturalists I know are taxonomists). If, when I describe a species, I have that information, then I’ll put some natural history notes into the paper (but that’s rare). I won’t likely have accumulated all that knowledge myself. The best example I can think of to illustrate the power of collaboration on documenting natural history of new species is my own experience with BugGuide, where I’ve contributed taxonomic expertise to put names on a few species of flies for which other contributors (mostly non-scientists, and not taxonomists) have provided fantastic natural history data. And I know that at least a couple of those species are as yet undescribed. The more collaborations we have like these, the better.

The elephant in the room

The critical topic we haven’t addressed is: where and how can we publish these critically important natural history observations so they are accessible?

That’s probably a rant for another post.

Four billion years of never-ending plot lines. Four billion years of character development. Four billion years of unexpected twists and turns — the Cambrian explosion! life on land! endosymbiosis! the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous! the rise of diversity in Hawaii or the Galápagos! Brilliant stuff.

I get the chance to tell stories about amazingly elegant mechanisms that drive evolution. The way DNA copies itself and builds new life, the great lottery of mutation and selection, the birth and death of species, the growth and pruning of branches on the tree of life. And once the students understand the processes that build the great tree of life, they learn methods to reconstruct and read that tree, and then to hang hypotheses and predictions on the framework that the tree provides to the rest of biology.

And it’s not just the processes and the patterns themselves that make great stories. Science is ultimately a human endeavor, so the history and development of evolutionary thought carries the baggage of human nature. The history of evolution is a story of philosophers trying to understand the world, a story of cultural institutions trying to maintain their hold on authority. It’s the story of poor old Lamarck being in the wrong place at the wrong time and coming up with an idea just a little too flawed and a half-century too early. It’s the story of Darwin and Wallace being in the right place at the right time to see a few key facts, and read a few key books, and to come up with a brilliantly simple yet powerful idea at exactly the same time. It’s the story of a group of geneticists and paleontologists and statisticians and botanists and ecologists coming together and filling in the missing pieces of the puzzle that Darwin and Wallace couldn’t solve in their lives. It’s a story of modern anti-scientists trying to force their own agendas on teachers and schoolchildren in the guise of “science”.

I spend four months every winter telling these stories to a hundred new students each year. Stories about stalk-eyed flies fighting on a log in the rainforest, and mutant plants that adapt to toxins dripping from a galvanized wire fence on the prairie, and parthenogenetic fish that live in the space between two “normal” species, and flowers or frogs that survive just fine with too many chromosomes, and one or two flies or birds or plants that were blown to a new and empty island and exploded into their own tree of life in that brand new world.

And I never get tired of it.

How can you get tired of telling the greatest story on earth?

One of the obstacles to using flies as a study group for ecological, evolutionary and conservation research is that a lot of the species are hard to identify, and many of them are undescribed and unnamed species. This means that a lot of knowledge about those species remains inaccessible to the broader scientific community as well as the general public. The need to overcome this so-called “taxonomic impediment” means that taxonomists have, and will continue to have, tons of relevant and important work to do. Among the many ongoing projects in the Lyman Museum, we continue to chip away at little corners of the big taxonomic impediment in the flies.

We described 15 new species in 2012. Their names have been validated according to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, published in refereed journals, and type specimens (the actual specimen that is chosen to be the name-bearer for each species name) deposited in recognized institutional collections. What that means, in a nutshell, is that somebody else who wishes to confirm what these species actually “are”, can find and read the original descriptions that outline the traits that distinguish these species from others, and if there is any doubt as to their identity, they can also locate and examine the actual pinned specimens that the names are based on.

We realize, of course, that there may be a slim chance some of you have not yet sat down to read these taxonomic papers (let’s face it, as crucially important as taxonomic revisions are, they’re not exactly The Hobbit or Harry Potter on the readability scale), so here’s a quick roll call of the new species that Lyman folks introduced to the world in 2012.

Three leaf-miner flies

Stéphanie Boucher is one of the world’s few taxonomic specialists on the diverse and ecologically important agromyzid leaf-miner flies. Stéphanie has been working on the taxonomy and diversity of these flies since 2000 and in 2012 she described three new North American species as part of a Festschrift in The Canadian Entomologist commemorating the editors of the monumental Manual of Nearctic Diptera:

Cerodontha (Icteromyza) griffonensis Boucher is so far known only from the Gaspé Peninsula in eastern Quebec (who says you have to go to the tropics to find new species?)

Cerodontha (Icteromyza) vockerothi Boucher. This species, known from eastern Ontario and Virginia (so far) was named in honour of our colleague, and one of the world’s great dipterists, Dick Vockeroth. Dick was a fountain of information to Stéphanie early in her career as a dipterist (Dick Vockeroth passed away late in 2012. Read more of our reminiscences about Dick here).

Cerodontha (Icteromyza) woodi Boucher is named in honour of another great colleague in Diptera, and a great mentor to students of flies, Monty Wood. The holotype specimen of this new leaf-miner was collected in Muir Woods, California, a redwood forest that is one of the most fantastic habitats on the continent. This species is also known from specimens collected elsewhere in California, near Mt Rainier in Washington, and, oddly enough, Michigan.

Two flies for Ottawa guys: C. (I.) vockerothi (left) and C. (I.) woodi (right)

In addition to these newly described species, Stéphanie also recorded three previously described species in the genus Amauromyza for the first time from Canada, increasing our own known agromyzid fauna. If we are eventually to understand the insect fauna of Canada we not only have to describe unknown species, we have to carry out inventories in order to discover the species that live here who already have names.

Twelve fungus gnats

Chris Borkent’s Ph.D. thesis included a revision of the mycetophilid genus Leptomorphus, a worldwide group of big, beautiful flies, often with spectacular colour patterns (and with some very cool behavior too). More than 30 species were already known in this genus and Chris described a dozen more in a monograph published in Zootaxa (one of our favorite journals!). Meet the new gnats:

Leptomorphus amorimi Borkent is so far known from two specimens collected in southern Brazil. This species was named for our colleague Dr. Dalton de Souza Amorin, one of the leaders of a fantastic and productive community of Brazilian dipterists.

Leptomorphus amorimi, a very fine fly

Leptomorphus brandiae Borkent. This wonderful fly (see a photo here) was named by Chris in honour of his even more wonderful wife Brandi. Leptomorphus brandiae lives in Costa Rica.

Leptomorphus crassipilus Borkent lives in Tucuman, northern Argentina.

Leptomorphus eberhardi Borkent, another Costa Rican species, was named in honour of Dr. W. G. Eberhard, who has made some great contributions to our knowledge of the fascinating behavior of Leptomorphus flies (yes, flies have fascinating behavior!)

Leptomorphus furcatus Borkent is a new North American species that lives in New Mexico, Arizona and northern Mexico.

Leptomorphus mandelai Borkent is known from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. You can probably guess who this species is named after.

Leptomorphus perplexus Borkent. This species, known only from female specimens collected in California, has a lot of primitive traits that made its placement in Leptomorphus a bit confusing at first, hence the species name. It’s sometimes difficult to place a species of Diptera when you have only females, because the male genitalia usually have the most obvious distinguishing characteristics.

Leptomorphus stigmatus Borkent is another African species, this time from Tanzania. stigmatus means “spots”, and this species has distinctive spots on its thorax.

Leptomorphus tabatius Borkent lives on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, one of Earth’s biodiversity hotspots. The name tabatius means “fat belly” in Tolaki, the language of the people who inhabit the region where the type specimen was collected.  It’s a fat little fly.

Leptomorphus tagbanua Borkent was collected on Coron Island in the Philippines. It’s named after the Tagbanua people, who have lived on this island, and others in the Philippines, for a very long time.

Leptomorphus titiwangsensis Borkent. Hold your giggles; this fly was named after the Titiwangsa Mountains in Malaysia, where the type specimens were collected.

Leptomorphus waodani Borkent is another South American species, known from Ecuador. The specimen was collected in a rainforest canopy-fogging project carried out on the traditional territories of the Waodani people.

That’s 15 species down, thousands to go. Look for some more new species from Team Lyman in 2013; there are a bunch of new things on the horizon and lots of new species waiting to see the light of day.