Encyclopedia of Life Blog

Happy New Year and welcome to the Year of Science! This year, scientists from every discipline are getting together to celebrate and promote public understanding of science. The theme this month is The Process and Nature of Science. The first, and sometimes most difficult, step in that process is inspiration. Where do scientific ideas come from? Often, just from observation of the natural world around us.My post today is about how nature has inspired breakthroughs in fields as diverse as materials science, renewable power generation, robotics and computer science.

One of the tough things about being an engineer is that you don’t have an infinite amount of time or resources to design anything. Evolution, on the other hand, very nearly does. It’s building and testing billions of prototypes of millions of products at any given time. Not surprisingly, this has lead to some weird and wonderful results. Throughout history, man has looked to the natural world for technological inspiration. Now, with the Encyclopedia of Life, everything we’ve learned about life on earth will be gathered in one place, more accessible than ever before.

A design for a flying machine by Leonardo da Vinci, ca. 1488	A Mexican free-tailed bat

For most of human history, many animals have been faster than us, stronger, more numerous, more resilient and often much more deadly. We’ve taken direct advantage of these adaptations for a long time, but lately we’ve really started to tap into nature’s R&D lab and use individual biological adaptations in technology, engineering and materials science. Here are a few examples:

• Squid Beaks and Soft/Hard Interfaces:Study of the gradation from hard chitin in the squid’s beak to the softer material that connects it to the mouth could lead to better prostheses.
• Abalone Shell Composite:Composite materials based on the structure of the abalone shell are both stronger and less brittle than existing man-made composites.
• Gecko’s Foot Adhesive:Researchers have discovered that the complex nanoscale structure of the gecko’s foot uses the Van der Waals force and capillarity to stick to almost any surface, and have begun to develop strong, reusable adhesives based on this structure.
• Termite Mound Air-Conditioning:Termite mounds are kept in a very narrow temperature range by a natural air-conditioning system. When the same principles were applied in a Zimbabwe office building, the cooling cost was reduced by 90% over conventional systems.
• Whale Flipper Turbine Blades:The leading edge of a humpback whale’s flipper isn’t smooth, but has regularly spaced bumps. When engineers used a similar bump pattern on wind turbine blades, they found that it significantly increased lift, decreased drag, and improved the stalling behavior, leading to more efficient renewable power generation.
• Tuna Tail Tidal Power Generation:The swimming motion of a bluefin tuna is being put to work for efficient tidal power generation.
• Artificial Intelligence:The study of the structure of the brain and the process of biological evolution has led to computer software that can learn and adapt to solve problems.

TED talk: 12 sustainable design ideas from nature (Janine Benyus)

TED talk: How engineers learn from evolution (Robert Full)

The celebration of our annual journey around the sun does not have to end on the closing note of Auld Lang Syne. Instead 2009 brings many opportunities to celebrate, recognize, and improve countless aspects of life on earth.  We hope that those of you who visit our species pages might also be interested in additional science-related themes that pertain to 2009:

The Natural History Museum, London, UK has organized the Darwin200 to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200^th birthday. The Darwin: Big Idea, Big Exhibition will be at the NHM through April 2009.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has declared 2009 as the International Year of Natural Fibres and offers a multilingual celebration of these renewable materials.

Considering the 400^th anniversary of Galileo’s first astronomical use of the telescope, The International Year of Astronomy 2009 is an initiative of the International Astronomical Union and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The United Nations has also recognized 2009 as the UN International Year of the Gorilla. This press release notes the alarming fact that the number of eastern lowland gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo has plummeted from 17,000 to about 5,000 in the last 10 years.

The Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) is the driving force behind the Year of Science 2009, based in the United States. Each month of the year-long celebration has a different theme, with related events and resources. Upcoming themes: Process and Nature of Science (January) and Evolution (February).

This list of events is by no means complete. If you know of other opportunities to celebrate science or biodiversity, please share them with the EOL community by leaving a comment. Thanks and Happy New Year (whenever your year begins)!

Rapid access to current information crucial for understanding and conserving biodiversity. As a biologist working to solve problems facing wild turtles (I am currently a postdoc at the Biodiversity Synthesis Group Component of the EOL), I am excited to share some new online resources of the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC) Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group (TFTSG). The TFTSG is a group of 238 specialists from 42 nations that works together to develop the IUCN Red List for turtles (see also my blog post about the Red List), assist the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), as well as help fund and organize turtle conservation efforts around the world (see here).

The TFTSG has recently started creating species accounts for all of the world’s freshwater turtles and tortoises (~300 species and ~150 additional subspecies). These species accounts include new photographs, new maps, revised descriptions, as well as sections on taxonomy, ecology, and conservation status/measures. Each account is created by a collaboration of leading experts and published online as soon as they are reviewed (see this example of a full PDF account and a much shorter HTML summary). At the end of each year the accounts will be published as part of a monograph entitled Conservation Biology of Freshwater Turtles and Tortoises. 2008 saw the publication of the first 21 accounts, but many more are slated for 2009.

As part of this annual effort, my colleagues and I have started tracking changes in turtle scientific names. Our first effort was a checklist of turtle species and subspecies published by the Turtle Taxonomy Working Group in 2007. Since then, the chairs of the TFTSG and I have updated the checklist and plan to do so every year (see our 2008 update here). This checklist is different from most others because, in addition to listing all species, it also highlights areas of disagreement and controversy about scientific names. By adopting this non-dogmatic approach we hope to direct research and discussions towards the key issues and ultimately help achieve a more stable classification for turtles.

The new species accounts and checklists published by the TFTSG are useful resources for turtle biologists and conservationists. Because the accounts are “open access” and written in such a way that non-specialists can understand them, these resources also serve to communicate current information to the general public about the nomenclature, biology, and conservation of freshwater turtles and tortoises.

Josh Drew with the Field Musem of Natural History’s Atlantic Sturgeon Specimen.

 This post is about two organisms, but more about a cultural phenomenon that I think is very important to consider when observing the natural world around us. There is a collective amnesia in our culture in which people hold their first impression of a place as “how it is”, without considering its past. This is deemed the shifting baseline syndrome (www.shiftingbaselines.org). Recognizing shifting baselines is important because not only does it impact our ability to set conservation goals, but masks the general dulling of our world that extinction brings. Museums like where I work (The Field Museum of Natural History, home to the Biodiversity Synthesis Component of the EOL) are important in combating shifting baselines because of their extensive historical records; in some cases they are the last depository of a species, and the last place where people remember that this diversity ever existed.

My own personal example, is that my first impression of the aquatic life of the Hudson and of Cape Cod, where I grew up, did not include Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrhynchus oxyrhynchus)  or the sea mink (Neovison macrodon), two species that were once hugely prevelant in those areas. Most of my life has been spent either on the Atlantic Ocean on Cape Cod or on the Hudson River (I moved to Chicago this August and it is the furthest west and second furthest south I’ve ever lived) Growing up, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what those ecosystems looked like. However, when I started doing research on ecosystem change in Fiji, I found that scrutinizing my own old back yard in New England revealed some almost equally exotic discoveries. Even though I know that these areas represent two places where large scale resource exploitation got their start in North America I was still very surprised to find that two organisms, the Sea Mink and the Atlantic Sturgeon were once major components in my native ecosystems yet I had never heard of them.

The Sea Mink (Neovison macrodon) was driven to extinction by about 1880 even before it was formally described. All we do know is that it was a frequent component of Native American middens, meaning it was once hunted for fur (like most mink) by Native New Englanders. Although we don’t have much information on the species, based on its teeth, we do know it was an active predator of seabirds, eggs and intertidal invertebrates.

The Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrhynchus oxyrhynchus) is still hanging on, although its current numbers are but a fraction of what they once were.  This fish, growing up to 14’ in length and weighing over 800 lbs once swam in the Hudson river in such numbers that they destroyed the nets of fisherman.  Their catch was so great that it was illegal for people to serve sturgeon meat (known locally as “Albany Beef”) to their servants more than three times a week.  Additionally the salted eggs, processed into caviar, which now sells for up to $80-$100 an ounce, were served in bars like beer nuts, the salty taste having the same purpose of keeping people thirsty. Today the numbers of this fish are miniscule compared to their former abundance and it is no longer the king fish of the Hudson.

The Atlantic Sturgeon Specimen at the Field Museum of Natural History

The Atlantic sturgeon in the Hudson is now making a comeback, thanks to improvements in the health of the river, and increased protection measures which are reducing fisheries pressure.  The idea of these massive fish once again patrolling the waters of my childhood is encouraging, and hopefully through efforts like the EOL they will return to the consciousness of the millions of people living on the Hudson River.

It is my pleasure to introduce to you my favorite fish species; the sling-jaw wrasse, Epibulus insidiator.  The sling-jaw is a coral reef fish in the family Labridae (the wrasses) which  lives on coral reefs throughout the tropical Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Red Sea.  It is an attractive species, showing a wide range of color patterns, with different color patterns for mature males, females and juveniles.  The EOL has some detailed information on the sling-jaw wrasse, including many photographs by Jack Randall, one of the foremost ichthyologists and underwater photographers in the world.  This content comes to us from FishBase (www.fishbase.org), one of EOL’s first partners.  FishBase was also my first effort in bioinformatics online (and part of the reason I became involved in EOL), as I helped to coordinate information for several fish families for the FishBase team as the project was growing back in 1995.  Many thanks to the FishBase project for their collaboration with EOL!

But the real reason that the sling-jaw is my favorite fish is because of its awesome jaws! This crazy fish exhibits an extraordinary ability to protrude its jaws during feeding.  Check out this video-

As part of my Ph.D. thesis work at Duke University I took these high speed movies of feeding by sling-jaws, and figured out the intricate jaw mechanism, which involves new ligaments and lots of rotation in bones that are anchored in most fish species.  Since then I have worked on the evolution of the sling-jaw and its close relatives, and continue to be interested in broad patterns of biodiversity and evolution in coral reef fishes, particularly of their myriad feeding mechanisms.
The scientific history of the sling-jaw is interesting, as the extreme protrusion of the mouth of this fish was noted by several early ichthyologists.  Renard (1719) referred to Epibulus as “Bedreiger” (the deceiver) and “Passer” (the thief) and stated that this fish “has a long snout hidden in the mouth that it throws out with great agility to capture any prey that comes too close.” Bleeker (1862) refered to Epibulus as “ikan kakatua sumpit” (the parrot wrasse with the pea shooter), and Delsman (’25) cited a Malayan name “tagi utang” (the dunning creditor).  These early references reflect interest in the feeding mechanism of Epibulus, which is unique among fishes.

Westneat, M.W.  1991.  Linkage biomechanics and evolution of the jaw protrusion mechanism of the sling-jaw wrasse, Epibulus insidiator.  J. Exp. Biol. 159: 165-184.

Westneat, M. W. and P. C. Wainwright.  1989.  Feeding mechanism of the sling-jaw wrasse, Epibulus insidiator (Labridae; Teleostei): Evolution of a novel functional system. J. Morph. 202: 129-150.

EOL at NCSE
In a world layered with issues as complex as globalization, poverty, and political and economic crisis, there is a demand to develop science-based solutions through collaboration among scientists, policy makers, businesses, and the international public. Where on earth can people from the far ends of these different communities come together to collectively strategize about how to conserve our planet’s biodiversity?

The National Center for Science and the Environment (NCSE)’s Biodiversity in a Rapidly Changing World Conference in Washington, D.C. (December 8-10, 2008) is an excellent place to start. Joining the dialogue on biodiversity is The Encyclopedia of Life. The EOL symposium, entitled “Exploring Earth’s Species, Writing the Encyclopedia of Life” is focused on the future of descriptive taxonomy, improving universal access to primary literature about biodiversity, engaging the scientific community in the writing of the Encyclopedia of Life, and exploring how EOL is helping to facilitate collaborative, on-line learning communities. On a species level, the Encyclopedia of Life provides an immense opportunity to transform the documentation of taxonomic information into a relevant, useable, 21^st century scientific web portal.

Potential for using EOL as a as a resource for science-based decision making: The Red Lionfish        

The red lionfish came to my attention when I visited the BBC’s Oceans website.  Under the  “Interesting For” section, there was a link at the bottom of the page to EOL’s red lionfish species page. Under the sub-heading, ” About the Red Lionfish”, there was a link to the Encyclopedia of Life and a brief description which read: ” The Encyclopedia of Life gives an overview of the lionfish.”

I began to wonder how EOL, in the future, might be able to provide information for science-based decision making. Red lionfish are native to coral reef ecosystems in the Indo-Pacific. Yet, due to the release of the fish from aquariums near the coast of Florida (initially caused by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and subsequent human releases of the fish from aquariums) a large population has found itself in the waters near the Bahamas.  These venomous hunters are hunting and eating the native juvenile fish species, such as damselfish and parrotfish, which inhabit the coral reefs of the Caribbean.  Damselfish and parrotfish are herbivores and without their consumption of seaweeds, there is the danger that seaweeds could take over the coral reefs.

In this hypothetical scenario, EOL and its data partners would be able to provide up to date information about the red lionfish, or pterois volitans, in a species page. Policy makers, marine economic stakeholders, and others could then examine the information about the red lionfish to make informed decisions about marine policy in the affected area. At present state, the EOL red lionfish pages provides stunning images, a nice overview, and good information about behavior and trophic strategy. The occurrence map does not yet provide the up-to-date geographic information that is necessary for marine policy makers and the habitat description is limited. This brings to point, one of the things I love most about the Encyclopedia of Life- EOL is not a finished project, it is a work in progress. Calling all marine biologists! If you have more information about the distribution of the red lionfish in the Caribbean Sea and its effect on the native fish species and coral reef ecosystems that you would like to see on the EOL red lionfish species page, please contact us!

It is exciting to think about the future and the potential of EOL as a resource. We are working hard every day to balance this enormous  task of creating a page for all 1.8 million known species. This task includes reaching out to data partners,the scientific community ( including citizen scientists and amateur naturalists), educators and students, for their feedback and comments about how to best create the EOL.  While there is currently a place holder for every species, there are countless pages that are not complete. The two dozen or so exemplar pages are a good indicator of what we’d like every page to look like. Updates and interactivity are coming. Please be patient with us and continue to email us your comments and feedback. We truly appreciate it.

For more information about the red lionfish and its threat to Caribbean coral reef ecosystems click here.

Encyclopedia of Life at the 2008 NCSE Conference

Keynote Address: Biodiversity in a Rapidly Changing World

Cristian Samper, Director, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, EOL Steering Committee

NCSE Lifetime Achievement Awards

E.O.Wilson, Harvard University, EOL Honorary Chair, EOL Distinguished Advisory Board

Peter Raven, Director of Missouri Botanical Gardens, EOL Steering Committee

Symposium: Exploring the Earth’s Species, Writing the Encyclopedia of Life

Quentin Wheeler, International Institute for Species Exploration, Arizona State University

Jim Edwards,  Executive Director, Encyclopedia of Life, Smithsonian Institution

Tom Garnett, Encyclopedia of Life, Biodiversity Heritage Library

Marie Studer, Encyclopedia of Life, Education and Outreach

As an Ornithologist and birder I thought it would be fun to blog about one of my favorite winter time traditions, the National Audubon Societies Christmas Bird Count.  Between December 14^th 2008 and January 5^th 2009 tens of thousands of citizen scientists (a.k.a. Birders) across the Western Hemisphere will fan out to their favorite birding spots to take part in the Audubon Societies Annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC), the National Audubon Society’s long standing volunteer run census of wintering birds.

Frank Chapman, former curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History started the first CBC in 1900 as an alternative activity to the traditional Christmas “side hunt” in which people would choose “sides” and team up to shoot as many birds as possible.  The side with the biggest pile of birds won!  Instead, Christmas Bird Counts involve volunteers identifying and counting every single bird that they see or hear all day in a 15-mile diameter count circle. This first CBC was conducted in 1900 by 27 volunteers who counted birds in 25 count circles and documented 18,500 individual birds of 90 species.  Over 100 years later, participation in the CBC has reached an all time high.  Last year’s (2007/2008) 108^th CBC was conducted by 59,918 volunteers (that’s more observers than the number of birds seen on the 1900 count!), who counted birds in more than 2100 count circles and documented 57,704, 250 individual birds of 2267 species (LeBaron 2008).  In addition to having a great time competing to find the most species and the rarest birds, volunteers are contributing to a large long-term database that has been used by researchers and conservationists to document changes in winter bird populations and distributions.  These data are available for anyone to search online and a long list of scientific and popular publications report on analyses of these data.  Thanks to Frank M. Chapman and countless numbers of citizen scientists we now have an unprecedented and publicly available long term biodiversity data set that can provide a picture of the changes in wintering distribution and abundance of western hemisphere birds over the past 100 years.

This year’s count (109^th CBC) looks promising for a number of exciting north country inhabitants including Snow Owl (Bubo scandiaca) and boreal (northern) forest birds like the White-winged Crossbill (Loxia leucoptera), which only periodically drift south of their usual northern spruce forest and tundra homes.

White-winged Crossbill, note the crossed bill (left) and White-winged Crossbill feeding on a spruce cone (center).

Snowy Owl (left), and a group (also known as a parliament or blizzard) of snowy owls (right), found on a rural Montana CBC during the 106th annual CBC.

CBC data have been instrumental in understanding the frequency and to some extent the causes of these events. Some researchers have suggested that Snowy Owls appear further south than normal due to population crashes of their principle arctic tundra food item, the Collared Lemmings (Dicrostonyx torquatus) (Shelford 1945).  However, others have questioned the correlation between lemming population crashes and large numbers of Snowy Owls south of where they normally winter (Parmalee 1992).  White-winged Crossbills are a different story.  They specialize on eating the seeds of cone bearing trees such as spruce trees and they use their weird crossed bill to pry the cones open to extract the seeds.  Christmas Bird Count Data were used to show that the “irruptions” of boreal seed eating birds like White-winged Crossbills were synchronized with low cone crops in the boreal forest populations of their favorite food plants (Bock and Lepthien 1976).  There’s a lot more to learn about these and other wintering birds so get out there and count some birds!

It turns out that the best environment for identifying thousands of mushrooms is not the damp forest or southeastern bog. Instead, it is the internet.

Imagine taking your camera outside on a sunny afternoon and crouching over a reddish brown mushroom cap. You focus your camera on the fungi and “click,” you’ve recorded a snapshot of that organism. But what species of fungi is it? Does it have a scientific name? Is it poisonous?

If you join the website Mushroom Observer, you can upload your picture and post it for other users to help identify. The website welcomes everyone from backyard observers to Ph.D. wielding mycologists, and users can search for fungi based on name, date, or location. Some scientists estimate that we’ve only officially named a mere 5% of all fungi species. With so much to be learned, sharing information and connecting with one another via the internet has become especially important. Nathan Wilson, the founder of the Mushroom Observer website, wrote to EOL that without the internet “the majority of people end up working with old taxonomies that are no where close to the current state of knowledge and are often in conflict with each other.”

Recognizing the potential of the internet, Wilson launched Mushroom Observer to expand and engage the community around the scientific exploration of fungi. In fact, since Wilson created Mushroom Observer back in May 2006, more than five hundred members have registered and made over 12,500 comments to help each other properly identify over 2,700 observed taxa! You can view an example of someone posting a photograph and learning something new about taxonomy right here.

So how does Mushroom Observer relate to EOL? Wilson serves as a member of the Advisory Board to the Education and Outreach component of EOL, helping to shape our involvement with hobbyists, naturalists, citizen scientists, students, and educators. He has also agreed to use Mushroom Observer to help migrate content into EOL’s fungi pages and to help EOL test a new undergraduate project. Although the EOL page for genus Boletus has been populated with photos, the EOL species page for Boletus edulis presently lacks current taxonomic information. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (EOL’s Scanning and Digitization component group) has contributed the majority of the information on this page so far, scanning texts and making them available to people all over the world.

Published in 1894 and now available online, thanks to scanning efforts, Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms: What to Eat and What to Avoid contains antique images of Boletus edulis and descriptions that may have a funny ring to modern ears. “After the summer rains it is plentiful in woods, with a convex cap of three or four, and even six to seven, inches in diameter, of a warm brownish colour, like a Bath bun…” The Bath bun is a traditional English enriched dough cake. Not only will these pages be enjoyed for their historical perspective, soon many fungi, such as Boletus edulis, will have more complete data.

As part of an EOL Education and Outreach pilot project, undergraduate mycology classes at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, University of California-Berkeley, Oregon State University, and Harvard University will be completing species accounts for several different fungi. Each student has chosen a species and Wilson has provided a template which students access through the Mushroom Observer website. The template includes space for a general and diagnostic description, as well as a list of “look alikes” to help users avoid common identification errors. These draft accounts will be verified by the students’ professors and eventually make their way onto EOL species pages. Stay tuned for stories about these students’ experiences with fungal taxonomy!

This week I will feature a group of true flies called robber or assassin flies. Scientifically they are known as Asilidae and they are easy to see in the field because of their obvious predatory behavior and generally large body size (5–60 mm = 0.2–2.4 inches). To date, slightly more than 7,000 species have been scientifically described from all regions of the world save Antarctica. The greatest number of species is found in desert environments and tropical lowland forests. Currently the EOL species pages for these and other true flies (Diptera) are empty, but my own research and the recent meeting of fly researchers at the Biodiversity Synthesis Center will provide information for all true flies very soon.

Left: Beameromyia disfascia Martin, 1957 with a midge as prey. USA: Rhode Island. Photo by Michael Thomas. Right: Tipulogaster glabrata (Wiedemann, 1828). USA: Massachusetts. Photo by Giff Beaton.

I will focus here only a group of about 450 species called Leptogastrinae (there is no common name for most flies). These flies are outstanding and show some very interesting behavior. In contrast to other robber flies, which sit on a perch and attack other insects as prey in the air, Leptogastrinae species also attack sitting prey. They can do so because they can hover like a helicopter to target prey items. Many specimens in museum and university collections have been caught with spiders as their prey, since spiders can’t fly. Leptogastrinae flies catch spiders either directly from spider webs or from a flowers where spiders stalk their own prey. Spiders do occasionally ‘fly’ in what is called ballooning, but scientists looking for robber flies have never cuaght any flies attacking ballooning spiders.

 
YouTube video explaining spider ballooning.

How do the Leptogastrinae flies catch the spiders? One possible way was documented by a fly researcher from South Africa who observed a species, named Lasiocnemus lugens, catching a spider in the neighboring country of Swaziland and described the behavior as, “… these asilids fly around the umbelliferous flowering heads of plants growing to a height of about a metre. The asilids were seen ’searching’ the flower heads for prey and hovering above victims before rapidly swooping down and capturing the spiders.” Here is a museum specimen of a closely related species, Lasiocnemus hyalipennis, photographed in the laboratory from which a Quicktime movie of a rotating fly was made: Movie of a rotating Lasiocnemus hyalipennis by Torsten Dikow & Hans Pohl.

Another method of spider catching is found in the genus Schildia from the New World and which I recently studied. These are very small and slender flies that live from Guatemala in the north to southern Brazil in the south (together with my colleague Keith Bayless we actually described yet unknown species also from Madagascar and Malaysia extending the distribution of this genus into the Old World). These flies have peculiar claws used to capture prey—one of them is longer than the other one, which is not known in any other robber fly. Interestingly, we have evidence that Schildia feeds on spiders, too, as has been observed in Jamaica by a fly researcher in the 1960’s and who described his observations as, “Most of the specimens of Schildia jamaicensis have been collected as they rested in spider webs located in niches in banks and cliffs; others were collected as they hovered about the webs.”

Surprisingly, very similar claws are found in the true bug Lipokophila eberhardi (family Plokiophilidae). This species of true bugs has been observed by researchers living in aggregation on the webs of the spider Tengella radiata (family Tengellidae), in Costa Rica, feeding from the spiders’ kills and moving around deftly in a web that would trap other insects. This might suggest that Schildia species behave similarly to the bug species. Interestingly, we have found a Schildia species, which is extinct and preserved in 20 Million year old amber from the Dominican Republic, in a piece of amber together with a spider (see photo below). However, we can’t be sure that both were caught in the then still liquid resin at the same time.

Above left: Schildia fragilis Carrera, 1944. Above and below right: Scanning Electron Micrograph of claws and leg of Schildia microthorax Aldrich, 1923. Below left: Extinct species Schildia sp. (yet to be scientifically described) preserved in Dominican amber with a spider near its fore legs.

A third way of catching spiders is found in a south-east Asian species, Ophionomima solocifemur (pictured below), that I have caught recently with a jewelled spider (family Araneidae) as prey in Singapore. Unfortunately, I couldn’t observe any interaction between the predator and the orb-web spider as the fly was already feeding on it. Both, the robber fly (length 2 cm = 0.8 inches) and the jewelled spider (width 8 mm = 0.3 inches), are relatively large in contrast to the very slender species of Schildia and I doubt that the fly would be hanging in the spider web.

Ophionomima solocifemur Enderlein, 1914. Singapore. Photo by Meng Foo Choo.

Although we know of three different species of Leptogastrinae robber flies that feed on spiders, scientists don’t know much about the behavior of most Leptogastrinae flies. I am sure that future research will reveal many interesting ecological interactions with spiders and possibly other insects, for which field observations will be necessary.

References: Eberhard, W.G., N.I. Platnick and R.T. Schuh. 1993. Natural history and systematics of arthropod symbionts (Araneae; Hemiptera; Diptera) inhabiting webs of the spider Tengella radiata (Araneae, Tengellidae). American Museum Novitates 3065: 1–17. download this publication
Farr, T.H. 1963. The robber flies of Jamaica (Diptera: Asilidae). Part 1. The subfamily Leptogastrinae. Bulletin of the Institute of Jamaica. Science Series 13(1): 19–20.
Londt, J.G.H. 2006. Predation by Afrotropical Asilidae (Diptera): an analysis of 2000 prey records. African Entomology 14(2): 317–328.

EOL was strongly represented at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America.  The meeting, in Reno Nevada November 16-20, was crowded with people interested in insects and their biology.  Presentations ranged from pest control to systematics to behavioral ecology.

(Darolyn, Audrey and Alta in downtown Reno)

EOL was represented at an exhibit booth hosted by the Synthesis Group which recruited interest in EOL synthesis meetings, the EOL curators program, contributing to EOL, and the upcoming 2009 e-biosphere conference.  We expect many synthesis meeting proposals and new EOL contributions to result from our interactions at the meeting. Thanks to everyone who stopped by!

(Darolyn and Alta, hard at work!)

EOL was also publicized in several presentations; Jason Weckstein gave one on his bird-parasite research, Cyndy Parr gave an invited talk on EOL and its developing curator network, and Darolyn Striley and Alta Buden presented a poster on synthesis meetings as an avenue for involvement with EOL.

(Jason giving his talk)

We took an afternoon trip to Lake Tahoe (pict below) to see some nature (not much natural in downtown Reno!) and were introduced to the finer points of birding by Jason.