Insect Taxonomy

This semester I took my final full time class to qualify for the Master's degree at LSU, and it was my favourite class I've taken so far. The class was Insect Taxonomy and taught by Dr. Chris Carlton and Victoria Bayliss. The class material consisted of learning the life history and key characteristics for identification of over 200 total families of beetles, flies, moths and butterflies, bees and wasps, and other insect groups. We also had a lab each week where we put this knowledge into practice by identifying specimens presented to us using dichotomous keys, our notes, pictures in books and on the internet (www.bugguide.net is an excellent resource), and the guide of our teachers.

One of the main requirements of the course was to assemble an insect collection. This needed to include 150 different insect families as well as additional specimens. Unfortunately I wasn't all that stoked with my final collection, which is far from a perfect example as you can see below. However, I enjoyed the course so much I intend to start my own personal collection, while the knowledge of identifying insects I gained from the course will also be immensely important for my research, where I am currently collecting many species of fly, wasp and beetle from inside galls of Phragmites australis, such as the cool-looking beetle and wasp in this post.

Fall Courses

To complete my PhD at LSU I have to take a number of graduate level ecology-based courses. This is one of the main ways in which a PhD from an American university differs to one from a university in New Zealand where a PhD is almost entirely research based. Some of the courses I'll take while I'm here include classes in macroecology, community ecology, insect taxonomy, and statistics, along with a number of 'seminar' courses which consist of a weekly meeting to discuss papers, give presentations, or talk about chapters of a book.

This semester I have been taking three courses and teaching a class of my own. One course is called 'Biodiversity & Macroecology' which focuses on large-scale ecological patterns such as the latitudinal gradient in biodiversity (in general species richness declines with increasing latitude), species-area and species-time relationships (species richness tends to increase with area and geological time), spatial autocorrelation (variables being more closely related the closer they are together. This can confound ecological studies), and the use of phylogenetic trees (trees of species relatedness usually based on genetic analyses). We meet twice a week and discuss one or two papers on one of the above topics, and sometimes our instructor, Richard Stevens - a leading macroecologist, will give a lecture. The most fun part of this course is the project we get to work on. We have to use original data to conduct a (hopefully) publishable study on an aspect of biodiversity or macroecology. This is great for me as my old lecturer from Lincoln University (Hannah Buckley) has kindly allowed me to use data on sand dune communities I helped collect from all around New Zealand a couple of years ago. In using this data I plan to answer the following questions:
   
1. Is there a difference in beetle species richness between sand dunes with exotic and native vegetation?
2. Is there a difference in beetle species richness at different sections of the dune (fore, mid, and rear)?
3. Is there a latitudinal gradient in beetle species richness?
4. Is beetle species richness driven by habitat heterogeneity (i.e. the species richness of plant species)?

This is not an insignificant challenge and will definitely keep me very busy for the next two months!

The sand dunes we sampled at Mason Bay, Stewart Island

The second main course I am taking is called 'Statistical Techniques I', which is a pretty basic introduction to statistics which can be applied to ecology. I've done a course like this in my second year of university back in New Zealand, but it's good to get a bit of a refresher and I'm learning how to use a new statistical software program in the lab part of the course. Otherwise it's a fairly boring course as you would expect with statistics.

The third course was only for half a semester and has already finished. It was basically just a lecture course about how to teach university level courses to undergraduate students, and was useful preparation as this semester I have also begun teaching for the first time. I have to teach two three-hour introductory biology laboratories a week which involves a quick lecture on the topic of the lab and then leading the students through a series of experiments which they conduct, collect data from, and then analyse as their homework. I also have to write quizzes, grade all of my students' work and make sure I am well prepared and know the material for each class. This is more challenging than it sounds, as I haven't thought about most of the topics (photosynthesis, respiration, membrane permeability, enzyme kinetics etc) since my first year at university, so I'm learning myself at the same time.

In any case, I'm learning a lot and gaining a great variety of new skills during just my first semester studying at LSU!