Field work!

Hi Everyone,
    Sorry for the late post. Last weekend I was in Colorado to collect some bugs and had a lot to catch up on for the rest of week, so this post got pushed back a bit. However, we're going to talk about what the field work was like and why its important for research.
     This past spring I got a grant from the Research Council of the University of Oklahoma to collect some bugs as part of my research. The bugs I did my PhD work on are native to Australia and the Indo-Pacific (Papua New Guinea, etc.), and most of my work concentrated on understanding how they were related, and why several of the species looked like ants. To understand how and why they evolved the way they did, and how ant-mimicry came about, I had to try to find the closest relative of my lineage of bugs (the Leucophoropterini).

One of the ant-mimics of Leucophoropterini

      Oddly enough, when I did the research to find the closest relatives, they weren't other Australian bugs or bugs from the Indo-Pacific, nor ant-mimics either. Instead, they were "regular" looking bugs from California, Japan and parts of Russia. This result, which is preliminary because I didn't have a lot of bugs to work with for the study, could mean several things. One, that ant-mimicry evolved independently for my group (other groups of unrelated bugs have ant-mimicry, too), and that the lineage of my bugs is very, very old. The last time that North America, Asia and Australia were united for them to share a common ancestor was Pangea, so very long ago.
      So, to learn more, I have to collect more of these related bugs from North America and Russia/Asia to see the relationships in more detail. Did the Californian lineage break off from the Russian/Japan/Australia one early on, or did they all split apart at the same time? What caused them to split? I have colleagues in Europe that are hopefully collecting some bugs for me over there, and I have to collect my bugs here to help find the answer.

Pines in California. Photo by Roxie Hites

       The bugs I'm looking for here in North America feed on evergreens, so different pines and spruces. So, earlier in May my colleague Roxie Hites and I went to the Tahoe region of California to try to get my bugs from the high-elevation pines. Unfortunately, though, May still proved to be a bit too cold in the higher elevations and we had to head to lower elevations to sample different bugs instead. The target bugs were not ready to come out yet that early! None the less we got some good stuff, and got to check out the habitats up there in the mountains of the Sierras.

The catch!

         So, this past weekend I tried again, this time in Colorado to reach higher elevations again but also to hopefully catch the bug season in full swing. And, at my first stop near Vail, I had some success! The bugs I am looking for are very small and black, and you can't really see them in this picture but there were one or two in there.
         Happy I got some bugs (finally!), I headed farther West and even higher in elevation to stay with my uncle and aunt in Carbondale, CO. Both my aunt and uncle are avid outdoorsmen, so the next day my uncle decided to take me on a hike up 10,000 feet to see if I could find even more bugs on the pines up there.

Sizing up the tree pointed out by my uncle. Photo by Doug Graybeal

Beating the tree. Photo by Doug Graybeal

      My uncle proved to be my lucky charm, since on the first tree he suggested I hit, I found more bugs. The way I collect bugs is by "beating", which is where I take a big stick and bang a branch over a net. The bugs fall off the branch, into the net, and then I suck them into a container called an aspirator. An aspirator allows you to suck the bugs into a container, but a filter prevents them from going into your mouth. When I started out in college and tried to make my own, lets just say I learned early on why the filter is really useful...
       After a long hike to Williams Lake and back, we called it a day. Even though I do a lot of running and swimming, I'm not nearly in shape enough to handle that kind of hiking after flat Oklahoma. My 60 year old uncle, who is admittedly a very serious athlete, kicked my butt!
      The next few days I continued to sample off of other pine/spruce trees and get more species, finding more neat bugs like Pilophorus, which lives on pine along with ants and is thought to mimic ants to steal their aphids. Ants in many parts of North America actually herd and tend aphid colonies like cows, trading off protection from predators for their honey dew. Its hypothesized that Pilophorus sneaks in by looking like an ant to steal the aphids, getting past their defenses. So, finding some of those bugs was another good find, and I can look into ant-mimicry evolving with them to compare to my Leucophoropterini.
         Next on the list, after coming back from Colorado with my bugs, is to do DNA sequencing to study the relatedness of their DNA to the species from Australia. Unfortunately the older a specimen is and the longer its been sitting around in a collection dead, the less likely it is that there is good DNA to work with. This is why I had to collect fresh specimens, to increase my changes of getting bug DNA and not dust or bacteria. So, next step: onto the lab! I'll keep you posted on how that goes.

Fieldwork Rules!! Photo by Roxie Hites