Tag Archives: ecology

A sense of place

Posted on May 1, 2013 by

(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 … Continue reading →

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Two new papers: insects in harsh places

Posted on January 28, 2013 by

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 … Continue reading →

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Drowning in Diptera

Posted on August 29, 2012 by

Sometimes I think there might be such a thing as too much data. I expanded my research program a few years ago from just taxonomy and systematics, into community ecology of insects. This meant I had to change the way … Continue reading →

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The languages of biology

Posted on April 4, 2012 by

I gave a lecture today in my first-year Evolution course about the importance of good taxonomy to other fields of biology. Tales of biocontrol successes and failure, and bioprospecting for new cancer drugs, and discovery of useful wild crop relatives, … Continue reading →

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More than ten reasons flies are great. Part III

Posted on March 17, 2012 by

Flies are in the news this week because of a newly published paper demonstrating that male Drosophila flies who fail to find a mate are more likely to consume more alcohol. This finding is not only scientifically interesting, it probably … Continue reading →

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Setting priorities – so many questions, so little time

Posted on March 3, 2012 by

My post a few days ago about my project on arctic flies generated an interesting question from my colleague Brian Brown. With so many possible projects, and so many unknown species, how do I prioritize? Brian and I specialize on … Continue reading →

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More than ten reasons flies are great. Part II

Posted on December 26, 2011 by

Diptera are fascinating insects – diverse, bizarre, economically and medically important – but underappreciated by most people other than dipterists. We launched this series in an earlier post with a selection of five randomly selected reasons flies are great. In … Continue reading →

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More than ten reasons flies are great

Posted on November 30, 2011 by

Our insect collection has its roots in an amateur collection. Predictably, that means our holdings are very strong in two orders popular with collectors – butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) and beetles (Coleoptera). We had, at last count, about 130,000 pinned … Continue reading →

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“why so many specimens?”

Posted on October 28, 2011 by

I was giving a tour of the museum last week to some alumni who were back on campus for Homecoming and somebody asked me that question. The Lyman Museum has in the neighborhood of three million specimens, but we have … Continue reading →

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High flies: arctic to alpine

Posted on October 3, 2011 by

It’s a widely known pattern in biology that higher latitudes are similar to higher elevations in many ways – as we go toward the poles or toward mountain summits we see similar changes in life zones, we cross a tree … Continue reading →

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