Category: Uncategorized
KU’s Wilcox Classical Museum
Sometimes it is good to be early for appointments. My colleague in the Office of Study Abroad was not ready for our meeting, so I got to dawdle and text in the corridors of Lippincott Hall. When I spied plaster casts of Greek statues through a doorway, I had to investigate. I must have been holding…
Belize Barrier Reef
Fantastic flight path out of Costa Rica, past volcanoes, over Lake Nicaragua, Honduras, then the awe-inspiring barrier reef off Belize. Even though I am more at home in terrestrial forest landscapes, it is fantastic to see this extensive formation of coral islets…to imagine the wild colors, the calm water on the inside of the barrier…
Symbiosis between ants and Acacia
In Carara National Park, Costa Rica, we found numerous Acacia trees with their Peudomyrmex ant defenders. It is a classic model of mutualism, where species interaction over evolutionary time result in the interaction we see today. Each partner in this model provides benefits to its partner and obtains benefits in return. The ant’s have a…
Ant-loving leaf beetles
Leaf beetles comprise about 40,000 described species. We should anticipate that over their long evolutionary history and great species diversity, leaf beetles have evolved many unusual traits. Thus, it is not so surprising the some leaf beetles may not eat leaves at all. One subfamily clade, the Cryptocephalinae (crypto=hidden, ceph=head), contains some members that live with…
Let’s paint the town red!
Scale insects (Hemiptera: Coccidae), a plant-sucking parasite of a cactus (Family Cactaceae), is wild-harvested or farmed and dried to make carmine. Carmine or carminic acid is used as a natural red dye. This insect (also called cochenille) may be the first New World domesticated insect, like silk moths and bees have been domesticated in the Old World.…
Charles D. Michener (1918 – 2015)
One of the most distinguished and interesting people on Earth passed away last night. But I cannot be sad, thinking of loss. Dr. Michener, or Mich as he asked me to call him at our first meeting in 1992, was the world’s leading authority on those most important insects, bees. His scientific life began as…
Beetle-hunting in the Florida Keys
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…
Javeta beetle pest of date palms (Phoenix species)
The first email came on 25 December 2014 from my collaborator, Dr. KD Prathapan of Kerala Agricultural University, India. He and his students had found that week a large healthy population of Javeta pallida, an Indian endemic species, on indigenous wild date palms. Over the course of this year, we collaborated by mail to document the…
Publishing the ‘Beetles of Peru’ project
Gosh, what a day, a milestone. I toured the printing facilities of Allen Press, a publishing house based in Lawrence, KS, since 1935 (http://allenpress.com/company/history). It is the publisher of many journals, including the Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society, which I am the Editor for in 2015 (I am the transition between Roy Beckemeyer who…