It sounds odd but true, to travel to a renowned playground to collect beetles. It was in December 2003 that I found Eurypepla calochroma on a small tree, Cordia sebestema, that was planted in the parking lot of the Ft. Lauderdale Convention Center. This tree has attractive dark green leathery foliage, bright orange tubular flowers, and nice green fruits – it is easy to understand why this tree, an endemic to the Keys, was being planted along the south coast of Florida. My small 2004 paper on these beetles started me on a long pursuit that led to a NSF-EPSCoR grant to support a doctoral student’s research on the tribe containing this beetle (Ischyrosonychini=Physonotini). A recent NSF-EAGER grant will examine anti-predator defences in tortoisebeetles, and thus I am selecting several beetle species to do experimental work. This new research is complex and multi-disciplinary; I am armed in Florida with agar plates to grow out anything living on the beetles, Pampels solutions to preserve animals for anatomical study, 95% ethanol for cryotissues, and methanol solutions for chemistry analyses. I feel odd to be wearing sterile gloves, working slowly but carefully to process animals off trees planted along US Hwy 1. These string of coral islets stretch from Miami towards Cuba and offer a unique vegetation with forests dominated by strangler figs (Ficus sp.), mangrove (Rhizophora spp.), and naked indian (Bursera sp.). On the Gulf side, miles of sea-grass beds and a glass-surface sea offer wonderful snorkeling and diving. It is not often you see road signs about “Crocodiles Crossing” or boat traffic signals reading “Watch out for Manatees.” So far, I spied a dolphin but no crocs or manatees.
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