In 2015, I ran a course called Discovering Insect Species. The nine undergraduate students, graduate teaching assistant John Sproul, and I formed a research team investigating beetles in the genus Bembidion, subgenus Trepanedoris. Our goal was to explore this group of beetles, to uncover the species that lived in Oregon – in the end we discovered more than one new species. I’ve blogged about the class before, but haven’t said anything in a while. Here’s a drawing Arden Smith created showing us in the field as a group:

From left to right, there’s Danielle, Tom, Ana, Elle, Trevin, Alex, Mamo, Julia, Shannon, John, and me.

Since I last wrote about the class, we’ve been working toward publishing our results. It has been a complex process, and took much longer than hoped. There were many reasons for this. We made additional discoveries along that way that needed to be documented, there were many data that needed to be presented, I wanted to use some of the novel and complex species delimitation methods, and I had other things to do along the way. It was also a very long paper to write and illustrate.

Trepanedoris is what we call a “difficult” group, in that it is hard to tell species apart, and so I wanted to create good identification tools, including diagnostic figures:

Very long story short, the research paper documenting our discoveries was finally published last month, in the Bulletin of the Society of Systematic Biologists. You can read it in all of its 58-page, 44-figure glory, here.

But that’s not the end of the story. There are plans for at least three more publications. One will be to document the additional five new species I’ve discovered since the class’s research team finished its work; three of these new species are restricted to California, one to California and southernmost Oregon, and one in Oregon and Idaho. Another project will be about a particularly difficult group of Trepanedoris that we didn’t resolve in class, centered around Bembidion fortestriatum. That complex of forms will require genomic data to understand. In addition to these two planned projects, there is a project that is even more exciting to me right now.

Arden Smith and I have been working on a graphic novel, The Joy of Discovery, which tells the story of the Discovering Insect Species class. The story begins with the class looking for Bembidion, at night, in Klamath Marsh:

I’ll have much more to say about the graphic novel in the future, but for now, you can get a hint of what it will be like in this preview, also published by the Bulletin of the Society of Systematic Biologists.