Hydrophilid/Hydradephaga mingling

Kelly Miller (University of New Mexico) has been visiting the lab for the last three days to help make some sense of all the diving beetles that we've been prepping from Venezuela and flesh out some other water beetle collaborations. Kelly is CoPI on our Venezuela Aquatics survey project, focusing mostly on the Adephagan families (Dytiscidae, Gyrinidae, Noteridae, etc.). We've now got almost all the specimens we've prepared so far (15,000 plus) sorted to at least genus. Looks like Kelly has uncovered a few (or more than a few) unexpected gems. I was also very pleased to learn that my quick and dirty attempt to pull out a synoptic set of Noteridae was successful (or, at least all my morphospecies were good). Our Venezuelan noterid diversity so far is at about 30 species.