A Taxonomist's Notebook

#365Insects 115: #Sphinx perelegans Edwards, 1874 Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond my control, this Elegant Sphinx Moth will be the final #365Insects entry for the foreseeable future. I'm disappointed to not have been able to highlight a full year's worth of biodiversity, but I've really enjoyed and valued the opportunity to discover more about the insects that we share our planet with in such a visual manner. Thanks to everyone who has been following along, and I'm sorry I won't be able to continue brightening your feeds with the 365 project. Hopefully it will live again another day, but in the meantime I'll continue to share entomological ideas, discoveries, and more. (at University of Guelph)

#365Insects 114: #Arge coccinea (Fabricius, 1804) A specialist on sumac as larvae, this sawfly certainly lives up to its "scarlet" moniker. (at University of Guelph)

#365Insects 113: #Pseudoxenos tigridis Pierce, 1911 Another pin, another story. Here, the tale of a trio of weird parasites with twisted wings and peculiar habits along with their wasp host, #Ancistrocercus adianatus. The two winged males on points emerged from between the abdominal segments of this potter wasp, while their sister stays put inside her host in a sac-like adult form waiting for Mr. Right to come along and mate with her neck. Then, it's only a matter of time until her cute little larvae burrow out of her body in search of a host of their own. Ah, love in the time of #Strepsiptera! (at University of Guelph)

#365Insects 112: #Mesovelia mulsanti White, 1879 Named in honour of Étienne Mulsanti, a French natural historian who studied everything from hummingbirds to #Hemiptera, including describing the genus #Mesovelia, this species is found from Canada to Argentina striding along ponds and lakes, and even salt marshes scavenging insect remains floating along. With ties to Europe, North, Central, and South America, as well as Pacific islands like Hawaii, this little bug makes for a good ambassador for World #HemipteraDay! (at University of Guelph)

#365Insects 111: #Hemichaeta scutellata (Cresson, 1930) Today would have been German Dipterist and founder of modern phylogenetics Willi Hennig's 103rd birthday, and to celebrate, I thought I'd share a little story about how even great scientists make mistakes while they're starting out. In 1934, as an undergraduate research project, Hennig revised the family of flies that I specialize on, the #Micropezidae. In his earliest work, he drew attention to the uniqueness of this fly, putting it into a new subgenus he created for it & 3 other species. Unfortunately, being a young, green taxonomist, he failed to fulfill all the requirements to make a new name "official", and so it wasn't until another scientist came along 34 years later and finished the job that the name become official, and without Hennig's name attached. Through the course of my Master's research, it became apparent that this fly was unique enough to warrant a genus of its own, and so my advisor and I built off of Hennig's work, raising it up to stand on its own. Don't feel too bad for Hennig however; he would go on to (correctly) describe more than 50 genera and subgenera along with ~80 new species. (at University of Guelph)

#365Insects 110: #Panagaeus cruciger Say, 1823 As an undergrad, Charles Darwin, who died on this day in 1882, was out collecting beetles one day when he came across 2 Ground Beetles which he collected, one in each bare hand. It was then that he spotted the rare #Panagaeus cruxmajor, a species very similar to this more common North American species. With both hands already full of beetles and a real prize sitting right before his eyes, Darwin popped a beetle from his hand into his mouth, and was reaching for the #Panagaeus when the beetle in his mouth expelled defensive chemicals, causing Darwin to spit it out, and losing all three of his prizes in the process. (at University of Guelph)

#365Insects 109: #Dolichogenidea cacoeciae (Riley, 1881) Although it looks like a piece of abstract entomological art, this is actually a member of the hyper-diverse family of parasitoid wasps, the #Braconidae. With ~17,000 species already described, and some estimates suggesting the real total may approach 50,000 species when all is said and done, there is much work for people like @ymilesz to do! (at University of Guelph)

#365Insects 108: #Clinidium sculptile (Newman, 1838) The individual rounded pieces of the head exoskeleton, along with the deep grooves and rounded edges of the elytra sculpture make this Wrinkled Bark Beetle look like a porcelain anatomy sculpture to me. (at University of Guelph)

#365Insects 107: #Chilacis typhae (Perris, 1857) You never know what you'll find in an insect collection: international travellers, local neighbours, or sometimes a little bit of both. This little Bulrush Bug, native to Europe but introduced to North America sometime in the 1970s or '80s, was collected across the street from my house in Guelph 23 years ago by a former student! (at University of Guelph)

#365Insects 105: #Gasteruption assectator (Linnaeus, 1758) Although their larvae are predators or kleptoparasites of twig-nesting #Hymenoptera, the adults are pollen & nectar feeders, particularly on members of the #Apiaceae, giving them the peculiar common name of Carrot Wasps. (at University of Guelph)