Year 3 Therevid NSF PEET Report: Training

Progress including results obtained to date and their relationship to the general goals of the grant

1B) Training at three collaborating institutions

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
North Carolina State University
University of Queensland

1B Training. The training component of this PEET is primarily through the education of graduate students. Our proposal stated that we intended to train five graduate students in the science of Diptera taxonomy. All of the graduate students are actively monographing important therevid genera from around the world. We have added the training of a scientific illustrator to our program since the last report.

University of Illinois. At the Irwin lab, three graduate students are being trained in systematics and taxonomy, and one in scientific illustration. Matching contributions from the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS) funded a research assistantship for Mr. Stephen Gaimari, which began in September 1995. Mr. Mark Metz and Mr. Kevin Holston began their NSF-PEET supported assistantships in April and May 1996, respectively. The scientific illustrator, Ms. Jill Mullett, is supported by Schlinger Foundation/NSF PEET matching funds.

Mr. Stephen Gaimari will have completed his Ph.D. by 15 August 1998, and has accepted a position as Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois to teach insect systematics and taxonomy in the fall of 1998. Mr. Gaimari has also accepted a Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellowship, with a starting date of 15 January 1999.

Mr. Gaimari has expanded his dissertation project to define the larger monophyletic group (given tribal status) including the genus Ozodiceromyia. This grouping is based on an hypothesized relationship between Ozodiceromyia and Cyclotelus, and has been expanded to include an additional 8 genera, including Breviperna, Ammothereva, Procyclotelus, and 5 new genera. Their phylogenetic relationships have been estimated using parsimony, and biogeographical relationships have been hypothesized using component analysis. All species for all new genera in this new tribe are being described, and all genera are fully diagnosed, including keys. The large genus Ozodiceromyia is being most fully treated at the species level, with over 100 species delineated and under description. The molecular work in conjunction with Brian Wiegmann's lab deals with the relationships among distinct groups within Ozodiceromyia to relate to the in-progress morphological study.
Mr. Mark Metz has finished two years of course work towards the requirements of the Ph.D. in the Department of Entomology. He will satisfy his course requirements in the Fall 1998 semester with the completion of one seminar course and take both written and oral preliminary examinations for the Entomology Department shortly thereafter. In addition, Mr. Metz has taken coursework ranging in subjects from evolutionary ecology to mathematical modeling to supplement his formal academic training. Informal aspects of training have included, but have not been limited to, field collecting techniques, insect identification, grant proposal composition, and meeting presentation skills. Computer skills have been emphasized and both coursework and on hand experience in databasing, GIS, HTML construction, and other basic computer programs have been acquired. In addition, Mr. Metz has translated 38 species descriptions from the original German texts and is improving his proficiency in German by taking coursework at UIUC.
Mr. Kevin Holston will complete the last of the required Entomology courses in December 1998. He is expanding his background in foreign languages, specifically German, which will aid in his survey of taxonomic and systematic literature related to this project. He has focused considerable attention on nomenclature challenges presented by the genus Thereva by finding and compiling all species names used in combination with Thereva. He is working closely with F. C. Thompson (PEET consultant) and G. E. Kampmeier (PEET collaborator) to develop a systematic database of Thereva names. Under the guidance of Thompson, Mr. Holston spent a week in January 1998 going through literature to develop and improve the database of Thereva names and their associated references. Mr. Holston has worked extensively with Kampmeier on the names.fp3 file of the therevid database system, MANDALA, to improve its ability to handle nomenclatural concerns.

Ms. Jill Mullett is working towards a degree in Art Education at UIUC, where she also has a teaching assistantship. Since joining our lab group in August 1996, she has worked part-time during the school year and full-time during the summers as a scientific illustrator. In training to become a scientific illustrator, Ms. Mullett has had to work closely with the taxonomists and learn to see and interpret structures so their representation is clearer than a mere photograph. Although UIUC does not offer a formal program in scientific illustration, Ms. Mullett has pursued training in this area by using biological models (most often therevids) for many of her class projects and teaching demonstrations, by becoming a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, building a network of contacts within the Guild via email, attending the GNSI annual meeting in Santa Cruz, CA in August 1997, and persuading the Illinois Natural History Survey to sponsor a visit and seminar by GNSI member, Scott Rawlins on in situ scientific illustration. Whereas her initial illustrations were pen and ink, at the GNSI conference she received training from Elaine Hodges on using the carbon dust technique, which speeds up the production of high quality drawings and has superseded pen and ink for most of her work. Ms. Mullett has completed over 100 illustrations of the genus Anabarhynchus, which have been sent off to Lyneborg (collaborator) for publication in the revision of that genus. Nearly all the illustrations (ca. 165) for the Ozodiceromyia (Cylotelus-group) project are complete for a manuscript being prepared by Gaimari and Irwin.

In April 1998, Ms. Mullett led a 3 h workshop at UIUC designed to teach scientists how to render scientific illustrations professionally and accurately. Those attending the workshop (Gaimari, Holston, Irwin, Kampmeier, and Metz from UIUC and Winterton from UQld) were able to complete and understand a tonal scale and to take a sketch of a fly and begin a carbon dust drawing.

North Carolina State University.

Mr. Longlong Yang is continuing his investigation of the higher level phylogenetic relationships of Therevidae based on nucleotide sequence data. Mr. Yang's training has involved both coursework and laboratory experiments in molecular systematics, genetics, statistics and evolutionary biology. During May 1997, Mr. Yang traveled to Guatemala to collect and observe in nature Therevidae with PI Irwin, collaborator Webb, and graduate students from the Irwin and Yeates labs. Yang also traveled to meetings of the North American Dipterists Society and the Entomological Society of America. He prepared poster presentations for the NCSU Entomology departmental retreat and the NSF PEET meeting in Woods Hole, MA. A graduate committee at NCSU consisting of 4 faculty members (3 Entomology, 1 Genetics) has met and approved an official "Plan of Work" and Ph.D. thesis proposal entitled: Higher-level Molecular Systematics of the Family Therevidae (Diptera).

UIUC graduate student, Stephen Gaimari, visited PI Wiegmann's lab for 4 weeks in March 1997. Gaimari completed a laboratory rotation project involving amplification and sequencing of the mitochondrial cyctochrome oxidase genes of the genus Ozodiceromyia. Gaimari was trained in PCR techniques, agarose gel fractionation, PCR purification, automated DNA sequencing, and DNA sequence analysis using STADEN package software and GDE 2.2. Nucleotide data was collected for nine Ozodiceromyia species and several outgroup species.

University of Queensland. Mr. Shaun Winterton began his training on 1 July 1996 at UQ supported by Schlinger Foundation funds.

Mr. Shaun Winterton began his studies by monographing a new genus [Australian genus A] with 20 species (Winterton, Irwin, & Yeates, in press), for which he was conferred his Post-Graduate Diploma in Science (Entomology) in July 1997. Shaun started his Ph.D. in August 1997, and has begun monographing the large and complex genus Agapophytus from that same region.

Honours student Ms. Narelle Power has begun a study under the supervision of Co-PI David Yeates at the University of Queensland. Ms. Power will document the spatial and temporal distributions of therevids in three different habitats in south east Queensland. Habitats include coastal heath, open forest and montane rainforest. Malaise trap samples have been collected since August 1997, and this project will continue until August 1998.

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