Spring visitor

Ruben Cordero, who recently finished his masters at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, has been visiting for the past couple weeks. Ruben has been helping to sort Dytiscids, his group of interest, in the general collection and for the Venezuela project. Welcome Ruben!

More collaboration...

As referenced before, Adriana Oliva from the Buenos Aires museum is also visiting for a few weeks. Adriana is the authority in Neotropical Berosini (a large group of hump-backed shaped beetles with well over 100 species in South America). She is working on reviewing some of the material we have here in the collection of this group. Not sure how many new species we will wind up with from this group, but I think so far it is 15 or so.

Mini-hydrophilid conclave begins....

The lab will be hosting two other hydrophilid workers for extended stays in the next couple months: Martin Fikacek from the Czech National Collection and Adriana Oliva from the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales in Buenos Aires. Each will be staying for 3-4 weeks to work on some collaborative projects. Martin arrived back on 17 August and has been busy sorting and describing all kinds of neat new terrestrial hydrophilids in our collection. Adriana arrives in early September. Will the museum be able to contain this much water scavenger beetle energy at one time? We shall see. Welcome Martin and Adriana!

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.

Visitors

Charles Bartlett and one of his graduate students, Lawrence, from the University of Delaware visited the collection for a couple days this week. Charles works mostly with Fulgoroid families (plant hoppers), notably Delphacidae. We have an excellent and globally important collection of these groups due to prior curatorial emphasis by Beamer and others. In addition to looking for material of note, they also did a good amount of basic sorting in our undetermined "Homoptera" section. Historical note: Charles was the one responsible for guiding me into aquatic beetles during my undergrad days at Delaware.