The 1060th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by club president Piotr Naskrecki at 7:37 pm on Tuesday, October 10, 2001. Nineteen members and guests were in attendance.
The minutes of the 1059th meeting were read. Upon a suggestion by Kathy Horton, the list of new officers was referred to as being "approved" rather than "read."
Under old business, Maria Aliberti was admitted as a member with no dissenting votes cast. Jonathan Rees asked the membership to examine the draft Entomological Club website at http://entclub.org to see if it should become the official site and to suggest changes. He distributed a sheet describing the site, which includes a directory of members. Mr. Rees asked for a vote on the site at the next meeting.
Under new business, Piotr Naskrecki and Kathy Horton proposed Jessica Gonynor of Northeastern University for membership. Ms. Gonynor is most interested in biodiversity and morphology.
President Naskrecki presented two new books on Orthoptera: Darryl and Gwynne's Katydids and Bush-Crickets: Reproductive behavior and evolution of the Tettigoniidae and Bellman and Luquet's Guide des Santerelles Grillons et Criquets d'Europe Occidente (4th ed.). The latter book is also available in English.
Past president Manda Jost requested an update on Psyche. President Naskrecki assured her that the topic would be addressed in a future meeting.
The evening's speaker, Manda Jost, a graduate student in OEB at Harvard, presented a talk on "Phylogeny of Ensifera (Hexapoda: Orthoptera) using molecular data from four genetic loci." She had recently presented this talk, co-authored with Kerry Shaw, at the Orthoptera Society meeting in France. Ensifera contains about 10,000 described species, including well-known groups such as crickets and katydids. Ms. Jost presented an overview of six previous taxonomic hypotheses for this group. Ms. Jost has sequenced the18S, 28S, 16S, and COI genes from 54 taxa, including three outgroups. Her taxa were broadly sampled within Ensifera. She performed maximum likelihood and parsimony analyses for individual genes and for various combinations of genes. She settled on a method of using 18S and 28S, the nuclear ribosomal DNA, to infer deep relationships and 16S, mitochondrial ribosomal DNA, to infer more recent relationships. Ms. Jost found COI to be of little utility at her levels of study.
One area of interest for Ms. Jost was using her phylogeny to provide information about the evolution of tegminal stridulation in Ensifera. According to Ms. Jost, parsimony with gains and losses counted equally optimizes the evolutiion of tegminal stridulation as two losses rather than three gains. However, while agreeing with this conclusion, Ms. Jost argued against using the approach of treating gains and losses as equally likely, since complex characters are more likely to be lost convergently than gained convergently. She also warned against using phylogeny alone to infer character evolution - morphology, developmental information, and more must be used to establish homology of structures.
The meeting adjourned for refreshments at 9:20 pm.
Respectfully submitted,
Brian O'Meara, secretary
The 1061st meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by club vice president Bruce Archibald at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, November 13, 2001. Twenty-one members and guests were in attendance.
The minutes of the 1060th meeting were read and approved.
Under old business, Jessica Gonyor was admitted as a member with no dissenting votes cast. The new club website, http://entclub.org, was approved upon a motion by Gary Alpert. The site will be maintained by Jonathan Rees under the oversight of the club president. There was concern that this might extend the president’s duties to working on the site, but the backers of the motion said their intention was to merely provide a mechanism for the president to replace the webmaster and establish some control over the site content.
Under new business, Geoff Morse and Bob Wilson proposed Joe Warfel of Billerica, MA, for membership. Mr. Warfel is interested in insects and arachnids and specializes in macrophotography.
The evening’s speaker, Andrea Sequeira, a postdoctoral researcher in the Farrell lab at Harvard, presented a talk on the "Evolution of associations between phytophagous insects and their host plants: distinguishing between ancient and recent associations in bark beetles (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae)." Dr. Sequeira’s broad interests in the studies were determining which factors promote/accompany host shifts and under which conditions a host shift can trigger a diversification event , as well as biogeography of the beetles. These beetles often carve galleries under bark, providing information on mating system and offspring number. Inbreeding, haplodiploidy, and dwarf males have evolved several times in the group. Many of the beetles are involved in a symbiosis with fungi, which help combat host plant defenses and in some cases provide food for the beetles. These beetles, while most commonly feeding on conifers, are nested in an angiosperm-feeding beetle clade, implying a switch from angiosperm feeding to conifer feeding, especially to Araucaria. Some beetles subsequently switched back to eating angiosperms, according to a phylogeny constructed using g 28S, 18S, and elongation factor 1-alpha by Dr. Sequeira and colleagues. Another tree, mostly of Tomicini, was used with a Bayesian molecular clock optimization to infer the time of a switch to Araucaria feeding and the biogeographical story (leaving unresolved whether the beetles followed their hosts into their current ranges or migrated through Antarctica). The talk’s conclusion was that associations with conifers in bark beetles was driven by a combination of geographic availability of the hosts, ecological opportunity, and restrictions imposed by the host phylogeny.
The meeting adjourned for refreshments at 8:37 pm.
Respectfully submitted,
Brian O’Meara, secretary
The one thousand sixty-second (1062nd) meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by club president Piotr Naskrecki at 7:45 PM on Tuesday, December 11, 2001, in Room 101 of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA. Seventeen members and guests were present.
The minutes of the 1061st meeting were approved as read.
Under old business, Joe Warfel was voted to membership. The new club website, http://entclub.org, is up and available for viewing.
Under new business, Piotr Naskrecki gave a short report on Psyche. He visited the Smithsonian Institution where there was to be a meeting concerning placing journals on the web with Psyche possibly being a prototype. But, the meeting was not held due to one person being unable to attend.
The speaker for the evening, Dr. Bob Edwards of Mashpee, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, was a student of Prof. Frank Carpenter. He has been a member of the Cambridge Entomological Club since 1947. Dr. Edwards gave his talk on "The Mating Behavior of Dwarf Spiders (Family Linyphiidae)." Five hundred species of spiders occur in the Falmouth area of which 20% are in the subfamily Erigoninae, the dwarf spiders. His son, Eric, presented the classic style of mating through the genus Neridae with the help of large plastic models. The spiders always present the left palp to the left palp; right to right. In the Linyphiidae the female is plugged. The spider builds a sheet web containing a bowl. The Edwards found raising the spiders to be easy and thought they could extend their study to other species. For further information one can contact the Edwards at the e-mail address: RLE@CAPE.COM.
The meeting adjourned for refreshments at 8:50 PM.
Respectfully submitted,
Kathleen Horton, secretary Pro Tem
The 1063rd meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by club president Piotr Naskrecki at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, January 15, 2002. Twenty-six members and guests were in attendance.
The minutes of the 1062nd meeting were read and approved.
There was no old business.
Stunning macrophotographs of insects and other arthropods were shown by Joe Warfel.
The evening’s lecture was on "Conserving tropical insect communiteis at the landscape scale" by Sacha Spector. According to Dr. Spector, the location of biodiversity must be known to conserve it, but distributional data is quite scarce, especially in the tropics. One approach to solving this problem is to use a few surrogate taxa to predict the distribution of species of concern. Dr. Spector chose dung beetles (Scarabaeidae) as this indicator taxon. He laid linear transects of baited pitfall traps, which allow easy quantification of collecting effort. His study site was in Parque Nacíonal Noel Kempf Mercado, a national park in Bolivia which has grasslands, shrubland, humid forest, and other environments. He looked at local scale questions by laying traps across a natural ecotone between savannah and forest, maintained by fire. The forest had more beetles per trap, larger beetle size, and larger beetle biomass. While the areas differed in observed species richness, they were identical in estimated species richness. Dr. Spector also looked at correspondance between vegetation type and dung beetle assemblages for a regional scale study. Beetle communities differed in different locations and vegetation types, but estimated diversity did not.
Dr. Spector then described a project undertaken with Conservation International and NASA. The project had four main components:
The satellite used in the project was the LandSat 7 Thematic Mapper, which can observe visible and infrared wavelengths. The team also used a radar satellite, which can measure how much water is present in different areas. Different vegetation types or landscape formations differ in spectral signatures. The ratios of reflected colors can be used to measure things like wetness, canopy geometry, and biomass of photosynthetic material. These measures can be analyzed and then used to predict biological parameters; for example, the red band predicts 51% of the variation in biomass, while combining three different measures can predict 53% of the variation in species richness. This work is now being expanded to more taxa, including birds, herps, fish, and other insects, as well as to other parks in Bolivia. Dr. Spector also warned the audience of the dangers of using raw species richness for conservation planning, as it is biased by sampling effort, ignores endemism, and can underestimate true richness, especially when there are many rare species.
After extensive friendly questioning of the speaker, the meeting adjourned at 9:05 pm.
The 1064th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological club was called to order by club president Piotr Nasckrecki at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2002. Twenty-two members and guests were in attendance.
The minutes of the 1063rd meeting were read and approved. There was no old or new business.
President Piotr Naskrecki reported on his visit to the Boston Malacological Club. He especially noted that the entire table was covered by specimens and books brought for show and tell. The club also frequently organizes field trips. He suggested that these ideas could serve as models for our club.
The speaker for the night was Chris Smith, a graduate student in the lab of Brian Farrell, at Harvard. Mr. Smith's talk was titled: "Have Pleistocene Climate Changes Driven the Differentiation of the Flightless Longhorn Cactus Beetles?"
The main question in the talk was, "Can we observe an effect of climate change in promoting genetic differentiation and speciation?" According to Mr. Smith, the North American deserts are good for answering such questions. Organisms there have a narrow window of ecological opportunity and thus are particularly sensitive to climate change. There is also a rich record of plant and insect fossils documenting range shift through time. One repository of ancient information is packrat middens. Using samples from these middens, researchers have discovered that as the climate has grown warmer and drier since the last ice age, forests have gradually moved uphill, being replaced by desert scrub communities. A once continuous forest habitat has been turned into an archipelago of "sky islands" separated by desert.
Mr. Smith chose to study Moneilema beetles (Cerambycidae). There are 16 North American species of Moneilema, all of them flightless and cactophagous. For a population-level study, Mr. Smith chose M. appressum, a species that specializes on cholla, which occurs in semi-desert grassland and oak woodlands on these "sky islands". Mr. Smith simulated this climate change using GIS data, modeling that desert gradually moved upward in altitude through time. This model was used to predict the order in which populations may have been broken up. Mr. Smith then predicted one phylogeny for the beetles based on this model and one based on an alternative model of isolation by distance. He then sequenced COI, a mitochondrial DNA gene, from individuals from 18 populations of M. appressum. Analyses of these data result in a tree with strong geographic structure, with older splits between taxa associated with river valleys of lower altitude (which would have been invaded by desert earlier). Reconciliation analysis finds significant levels of congruence between observed topology and topology predicted by habitat fragmentation (p = 0.006). The isolation by distance tree is not as similar to observed topology (p=0.06).
In the future, Mr. Smith wants to examine species boundaries and formation within M. apressum, noting that there are consistent morphological differences between individuals from different populations. He also wants to look at nuclear markers, coalescent methods, and potentially using a molecular clock. Mr. Smith also noted that the up to 7 percent intraspecific COI sequence divergence suggests that the oldest divergence in M. appressum is 3 million years old, which is much older than the most recent habitat fragmentation.
The meeting adjourned at 8:40 pm.
Respectfully submitted,
Brian O'Meara
Club secretary
The 1065th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by club secretary Brian O'Meara at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, March 12, 2002. Seventeen members and guests were in attendance.
The minutes of the 1064th meeting were read and approved. There was no old business.
Under new business, Ms. Randi Rotjan and Ms. Kristian Demary, both graduate students at Tufts University, were nominated for membership. Ms. Rotjan is interested in population genetics, while Ms. Demary is interested in fireflies, speciation, and population genetics.
The meeting featured two talks about photographing insects: one by club president Piotr Naskrecki (delivered in his absence by Dr. Dave Wagner) and one by Joe Warfel. Much of the talks focused on the use of a flash in photography. Dr. Naskrecki's presentation demonstrated that using a flash can result in strong shadows, color changes, issues with reflection, and problems with fine details. In Dr. Naskrecki's experience, an image taken using natural light better approximates the color the human eye sees in nature than a picture taken with a flash. A flash is very helpful when there is insect motion, such as movements for breathing or movements of the antenna. One technique Dr. Naskrecki uses to help keep an insect still is to put it inside a small clear cup. When the cup is removed, the insect tends to remain within the previous boundaries.
Joe Warfel described his techniques. He tends to bring two cameras with different magnification lenses on each to reduce the time spent changing lenses. He chooses to use two flashes, as one flash gives strong shadows while a ring flash gets rid of any shadow and creates circular reflections. A flash is useful in stopping motion and allowing more freedom in shooting locations (one can shoot in dark areas and the shadow cast by the photographer is less important). Mr. Warfel tries to get natural backgrounds for his images, sometimes moving vegetation or changing the angle of his shot to do so. A flash can be helpful in this in illuminating the background or in changing the contrast between the subject and background.
The meeting then adjourned for refreshments.
Respectfully submitted,
Brian O'Meara
Club Secretary
The minutes of the 1065th meeting were read and approved. Under old business, Ms. Randi Rotjan and Ms. Kristian Demary, graduate students at Tufts University, were approved for membership. Under new business, Mr. Michael Nelson was nominated for membership.
The candidates for election were announced. They were:
Dr. Albert announced that Dr. Jennifer Wintergreen at Woods Hole has two undergraduate research positions available.
President Naskrecki announced the discovery of a new order of insects, the Mantophasmotoidea, related to Embioptera and Grylloblatoidea. These insects had previously been known from Baltic amber. Recently some had been noticed in museum collections. An expedition went to the Brandberg Mountains in Namibia to try to find living members of this new order. The expedition found two species of this order. President Naskrecki, who was part of the expedition, said the insects were predaceous, probably using their thick front legs to crush spiders. The insects live at high elevation in cracks in rock where there is a slightly moister microclimate.
The evening's speaker was Professor Edward O. Wilson, an emeritus professor at Harvard, winner of two Pulitzer prizes, and member of the Cambridge Entomological Club for 51 years. Dr. Wilson discussed the need to identify all species on the earth. There are between 1.5 and 1.8 million described species on earth, half of which are insects. However, there are millions more species yet to discover. Canopies, with their dense concentrations of epiphytes and insects on tree branches, are only beginning to be penetrated with techniques like rope climbing and cranes. Leaf litter is another area with under-appreciated spatial complexity and species diversity.
Naming all species deserves to be one of science's main goals, according to Dr. Wilson. The effort is needed for bioprospecting, studies of impact of climate and humans, and studies of ecology, especially ecosystem assembly. This is also needed for genetics, evolutionary ecology, and for the tree of life. Natural history lags far behind descriptive taxonomy.
A complete census is now feasible. Technology is improving and can speed systematics by 100 times or more. The coleopterist of the future would be able to type in characters, find a species identification, and look at publications and types online. Sequences will become a standard tool of identification. Eventually, entire genomes will be sequenced in hours.
A global all taxon biotic inventory can be finished in the next 25 years, if it is made a scientific priority. There is an urgency to this: one quarter of animal and plant species will be extinct in 30 years - biology is the only subject whose subject area is disappearing.
Last October, all groups with the goal of identifying all species gathered at Harvard to talk about a timeline. A fundraising program was also started.
The effort to create biodiversity map will have these stages:
1) High resolution scanning of types and other specimens. Drawings
will be obsolete.
2) Then put these images and basic biobliographic info on the web.
Each species will have a page with all information known about it. Can
get clues about relationships, behaviour, etc. and prepare monographs
and field guides very quickly.
According to Dr. Wilson, Alpha taxonomy, phylogenetics, and hypertext will form a seamless web of science and technology and is the key to unified biology. This knowledge is necessary for the preservation of Earth's flora and fuana. In time, there will be a renaissance of university and systematic biologists.
After Dr. Wilson finished answering questions at the conclusion of his talk, President Naskrecki demonstrated the Pheidole CD, which will accompany Dr. Wilson's book revising the genus. The CD includes digital photos, locality labels, and more. The software on the CD can create comparison charts easily. Stefan Cover described using this CD to quickly identify a ant in the Dominican Republic, though the ant had been collected only once before.
The meeting then adjourned for refreshments.
Respecfully submitted,
Brian O'Meara
Club Secretary
The 1067th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, May 14, 2002. Twenty-seven members and guests were in attendance.
The minutes of the 1066th meeting were approved as read. Under old business, Mr. Michael Nelson was approved for membership. Under new business, two individuals were nominated for membership: Dr. Andrea Sequeira of Harvard University and Mr. Fred Saint-Ours of University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Elections were held for the upcoming year. Contested elections were for Vice President (candidates: Mr. Bruce Archibald and Dr. Andrea Sequiera) and Secretary (candidates: Mr. Derek Sikes and Mr. Chris Elzinga).
The final results from elections were:
Under announcements and items to share, Mr. Jay Shetterly announced the upcoming Mass BioDiversity Days (May 31–June 2) which have a goal of collecting 3000 species in one day. Anyone interested should contact Mr. Shetterly. Mr. Joe Warfel displayed some of his recent photographs. An article on scanning moths from the May National Geographic was also displayed (National Geographic , 2002. “Moths in the limelight” 201(5): 52-67). Excerpts from this article, including photographs, are available at http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0205/feature3/index.html.
The evening’s speaker was Dr. Dan Otte of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. He has published many high quality monographic treatments of groups such as North American grasshoppers, Australian crickets, and Hawaiian crickets; has edited a book on speciation and its consequences; and is also an artist, illustrating his own books and others, including a book about mammals.
Dr Otte’s topic was “From simple to complex and back again: The evolution of cricket songs, with emphasis on the Australian, Hawaiian and Hispaniolan faunas.” His talk also featured numerous quality recordings of cricket songs.
Dr. Otte described a history of cricket taxonomy of Eastern North America. A salient point was that using cricket songs was needed to accurately determine species.
Dr. Otte also described his field work with Richard Alexander in Australia. They would stay at a location for four months, trying to collect a cricket for every new song they heard, then move on. They had predicted they would find fifty new species, but this was a gross underestimate. The species turnover from site to site was very high, suggesting a very diverse fauna.
Dr. Otte also described his hypotheses of evolution of singing in crickets. The ancestral cricket song was probably a continuous series of pulses. This evolved in some species to songs with breaks, then to songs with trills. Then shortening to produce chirps. Then some species reduced the number of pulses, evolving back to trills as the time between pulses decreased. There are also more complex patterns in some species, such as pulses mixed with chirps, pairs of pulses pulled together, dropping of second pulse in every other pair, etc. It is possible to mistake frog calls for cricket songs, and vice versa, but frogs can do things with song that crickets cannot do. Dr. Otte, expanding on this point, played katydid, frog, bird, bat, and monkey calls, which can all have more complex calls than crickets. Dr. Otte commented that the crickets’ method of sound production does not allow great complexity, but one wonders why it did not get more complex.
Female choice plays a role in males choosing singing times. If females care about the space between pulses, males will synchronize their calling. If females care about structure within each pulse, males try to sing in times of silence between pulses of another male.
Hawaii has had a large radiation of crickets, starting with three to four founding species and now having 250 described species, perhaps 500 species total. In Hawaii, crickets with similar songs are often very unrelated to another. The model which best explains Hawaii situation is different songs being acquired as founders spread out.
Character displacement is rampant in acoustical insects, but this displacement is caused by many species in the environment, not only close relatives.
Africa has few crickets, a very different fauna from Australia. Some species in Africa use two different pulse rates, but none have songs like those in North America. Sounds in Africa can be more variable, differ from that common in the genus, where species are relatively isolated from others. Perhaps this is due to relaxed selection.
The most complicated sound environments are in Malaysia, with up to 80 species in a half mile of road and up to 17 layers (pitch regions) of sound simultaneously. Most of the differentiation you see in sounds is probably due to species trying to evolve into complex soundscapes
The meeting adjourned at 9 PM for refreshments. Governor Bradford’s punch was served, a tradition for the last meeting of the season.
Respectfully submitted,
Brian O’Meara, Secretary
Last modified: Tue Nov 25 23:00:07 EST 2003