Fieldwork at La Selva, Costa Rica

Posted on June 7, 2014 by nannaria

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In search of millipedes, we’re dismantling this fantastically rotten log in La Selva, Costa Rica [left to right: Petra Sierwald, curator at the Field Museum; Jackson Means, grad student in the lab; Jason Bond, professor at Auburn University; Paul Marek, PI in the lab; Carlos Viquez, curator at the National Biodiversity Institute, INBio, Costa Rica] Photo by Bill Shear, professor at Hamden-Sydney College.

The decaying log held scores of millipedes, including sphaeriodesmids, siphonophorids, pyrgodesmids, spirostreptids, chelodesmids, polyxenids, and glomeridesmids.

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Bill and Jackson with a portion of the millipede collection at Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad, INBio. (Jackson is hatching up a plan to bring a 20 gallon bucket of unsorted Berlese samples back to Blacksburg with him.)

INBio is a national institute (funded privately) dedicated to making an inventory of Costa Rica’s natural heritage, promoting conservation and education, and identifying biological and chemical properties of plants and animals potentially useful for pharmaceuticals, industry, biomimicry, and other applications.

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Fieldwork in Costa Rica

Posted on June 6, 2014 by nannaria

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Sphaeriodesmid millipede from La Selva, Costa Rica (collected by J. Means)

Last week, Jackson Means and I were in Costa Rica collecting material for an NSF project. Overall the trip was successful and we collected lots of fresh material for RNA extraction and whole-body transcriptome sequencing. These data will be used to infer a phylogeny of millipedes, a group with ancient evolutionary relationships extending back at least 500 millions years ago!

The millipede pictured above is a member of the order Polydesmida (family Sphaeriodesmidae) that defends itself from predators by rolling up into a ball. This ability to roll into a protective ball, known as “volvation”, has evolved 4-5 times independently across the evolutionary tree of millipedes.

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When disturbed, Sphaeriodesmus tucks and rolls into a ball.

(Canon EOS 6D, MP-E 65 mm lens, 1x, 1/60s, f8.0)

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Myriapodologica, now online

Posted on June 6, 2014 by nannaria


With kind permission from the Virginia Museum of Natural History (Martinsville, Virginia) and special thanks to Tim McCoy for digitizing, we are proud to announce that the journal Myriapodologica is now available online and open access. Published from 1978 – 2008 by editor Richard Hoffman from the VMNH, Myriapodologica was a scientific journal devoted to the study of myriapods.

We’re working on scanning and OCR-ing the remaining issues, so stay tuned to download such classics as “Zoological results of the British Speleological Expedition to Papua New Guinea, 1975. A note on the characters and status of the genus Caloma Chamberlin, 1945 (Polydesmida: Paradoxosomatidae)” and “Ectopotremia: A new genus of prepodesmine millipeds from Mali (Polydesmida: Chelodesmidae)”!

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Snail-eating fly

Posted on May 2, 2014 by nannaria


The fly Poecilographa decora (Loew, 1864), a species of the molluscivorous dipteran family Sciomyzidae. One of two specimens in the Virginia Tech Insect Collection (collected by T. Bailey from Montgomery Co., Virginia, 1975).

Most species of the fly family Sciomyzidae, including P. decora, feed exclusively on non-operculate snails, slugs and clams. However, very little is known about the natural history of these enigmatic flies. For more details about this species and others, join Joe Keiper, an entomologist and fly expert at the VMNH, and other entomologists including scientists from Virginia Tech tomorrow at BugDaze at the Virginia Museum of Natural History (Martinsville, VA).

(Canon 6D, 65 mm lens, 3x, 1/60s, f5.6 – stack of 22 images)

  • Berg, C.O. (1953) Sciomyzid larvae (Diptera) that feed on snails. The Journal of parasitology, 39(6): 630-636. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/3274083]
  • Berg, C.O., & Knutson, L. (1978). Biology and systematics of the Sciomyzidae. Annual Review of Entomology, 23(1): 239-258. [DOI: 10.1146/annurev.en.23.010178.001323]
  • Barnes, J.K. (1988) Notes on the biology and immature stages of Poecilographa decora (Loew) (Diptera: Sciomyzidae). Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington, 90(4): 474-479. [http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/16144900]

 

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