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Author Archives: David Maddison
Discovering Insect Species: preparing beetle DNA
Over the last couple of weeks in our Discovering Insect Species course we have been processing samples from our Klamath Marsh trip, and worked with the DNA of the beetles. Here’s a bit of what we have done. Extracting the … Continue reading
Posted in Revising Bembidiina, Uncategorized, Z499 (Discovering Insect Species)
Tagged Bembidion, DNA, DNA taxonomy, Trepanedoris
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The Bembidion acutifrons story
There are a number of subgroups within Bembidion subgenus Trepanedoris whose structure of gene flow and species boundaries are not understood. The morphological data indicates several forms within these subgroups, but whether this variation is indicative of separate species is not yet … Continue reading
Discovering Insect Species: Klamath Marsh!
We had a great trip last weekend to the Klamath Marsh National Wildlife Refuge as part of our Discovering Insect Species course. One of our main goals was to see what species of Trepanedoris lived in the large marshland complexes of southern … Continue reading
Discovering Insect Species: state of the art in Trepanedoris
As mentioned in my previous post, I outlined the state of the art in Trepanedoris research to the students in my Discovering Insect Species course. Here’s the story I told them. (As the class will be focusing on Trepanedoris in … Continue reading
Discovering Insect Species: hands-on with Trepanedoris
I’m a bit behind in posts about the Discovering Insect Species course, because so much has happened so quickly. Last week we examined our catch from the local field trip and learned how to prepare specimens, and we learned the state of … Continue reading
The oak tree grows pretty close to where the acorns dropped
Here’s my mom, at age 82, collecting some of what will be the type series of a new species of Bembidion from Jasper National Park in Canada. This was in 2011, during a great trip she and I made around … Continue reading
Posted in Fieldwork, Revising Bembidiina
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Discovering Insect Species: taxonomic history of Trepanedoris
In the scientific literature, there are now considered to be 16 species of Bembidion subgenus Trepanedoris. What path of research in insect systematics has led us to this point? In 1758, when the tenth edition of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae was … Continue reading
Infer all the branches!!!!!
I’ve already sent this image out into the Twitterverse, but I thought I should record the thought here as well. Sometimes us phylogeneticists are rather obsessed about having a complete phylogeny. In one moment when I was dreaming of having all Bembidion … Continue reading
Discovering Insect Species, week 1: Introduction, and into the field
We had our first week in the Discovering Insect Species course (see this post for an introduction to the course), and it was a good start. Tuesday Tuesday’s session was a gentle introduction species delimitation. I wanted to get the students thinking about the … Continue reading
Sharing the joy of discovery
Nine undergraduate students, my graduate student John Sproul, and me. Over the next ten weeks we will go into the field, find beetles, look at them under the microscope, do dissections, photograph them, make predictions about species boundaries, extract their DNA, PCR … Continue reading
David Maddison