Author Archives: David Maddison

Zephyr 2.0 and Mesquite 3.3 released

Yesterday, after about three years in gestation, we released Zephyr 2.0.  Zephyr is a Mesquite package that manages interactions with phylogeny inference packages including RAxML, GARLI, PAUP, and TNT. The most notable additions to Zephyr 2 include implementation of the … Continue reading

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Happiness is a Big Tree on the Wall

  In the hallway outside my lab, about 800 species of Bembidiina, together in one tree.  🙂

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A Stained Trepanedoris

I started learning how to do stained glass pieces over the summer, and for my first piece I decided to honor our Discovering Insect Species class by doing the head of an undescribed species of Bembidion (Trepanedoris) that we discovered.  I … Continue reading

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Flavor 100

Today we reached a milestone:  our 100th flavor in our approximately weekly Guess the Potato Chip Flavor event in my lab.  Today we decided to celebrate the event not only with our 100th flavor, but also with five other flavors to round … Continue reading

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Discovering Insect Species: the Trepaneleven Awards!

In the Discovering Insect Species course, the eleven of us (students Alex, Ana, Danielle, Elle, Julia, Mamo, Shannon, Tom, and Trevin, plus John and me) formed a great team, and we learned a lot together.  Over the course of the … Continue reading

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A nematode-filled Bembidion canadianum

Shannon, a student in the Discovering Insect Species course, went down to Eugene last weekend and looked for Trepanedoris. To say that she did well would be an understatement.  She caught all four species that I had seen from the … Continue reading

Posted in Revising Bembidiina, Z499 (Discovering Insect Species) | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

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 , , , | 2 Comments