Drosophila or Sophophora?

"One interesting high impact dipterological discussion popping up on science news sites is the nomenclatural snafu that is Drosophila melanogaster. In a sentence, if melanogaster Meigen was not a model organism but still was part of a modern systematic revision, it would not be in the genus Drosophila." ...

So begins a post by Keith Bayless in the excellent North Carolina State Insect Museum blog. Check out the rest of the article about this controversy of one of the work horses of the arthropod world!

2009 Field Meeting of the North American Dipterists Society

Mark your calendars for the 2009 NADS Field Meeting! The Meeting will be held from 1-4 June 2009, based in Crescent City, California, organized by Peter Kerr and the rest of the dipterists (Steve Gaimari, Martin Hauser, Alessandra Rung) at the California Department of Food and Agriculture in Sacramento. Laboratory and presentation facilities will be provided by The College of the Redwoods, Del Norte campus, in Crescent City. Participants making flight arrangements are advised to fly into Arcata, CA (ACV; 1 hour south of Crescent City), Medford, Oregon (MFR; 2 hours northeast of Crescent City), or Eugene, Oregon (EUG; 4 hours north of Crescent City), then arrange for a rental car. Crescent City is approximately 6 hours north of San Francisco, California. The area is surrounded by a number of protected areas including Tolowa Dunes State Park, Lake Earl State Wildlife Area, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park, and Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. Contact the organizers (below) for details about accommodations. The meeting registration fee is $20/person, and $10/accompanying person if they will be attending group functions. Please contact Peter Kerr (pkerr@cdfa.ca.gov) or Steve Gaimari (sgaimari@cdfa.ca.gov) as soon as possible if you intend to come to the Meeting, and if you would like to give a presentation on current research topics or activities involving Diptera. We hope for a lively set of presentations, as well as fantastic collecting in this beautiful part of California! More details will be given in the April issue of Fly Times, but by then time will be tight!

FLYTREE joins EDIT's The (new) Diptera site

The FLYTREE project has become a group within the EDIT (European Distributed Institute for Taxonomy) Diptera Exemplar, taking advantage of EDIT's aim at unifying revisionary taxonomy on the web. FLYTREE collaborator, Irina Brake, with EDIT at the Natural History Museum, London, is coordinating both the Diptera and Insect exemplars. Much of the content from F. Christian Thompson's pioneering Diptera.org has now moved to form the core of The (New) Diptera Site. Image galleries feature stunning photos by Steve Marshall as well as photos of BMNH dipterists in 1974. Registered users from the Diptera community can add to or modify existing content, import a bibliography, start a conversation about taxonomic concepts in the forum, create an image gallery, and disseminate knowledge about their favorite groups of Diptera. Guests can browse contributed content and read fly-related RSS news feeds aggregated from uBio.

This collaborative environment for "getting biodiversity on the web" is called a Scratchpad. It has a sandbox or trial area for experimenting while you learn the system, as well as helpful training videos illustrating features of this Drupal-based content management system.

Crane fly haikus!

There's something about the leggy, gangly crane fly (Diptera: Tipulidae) that inspires the Japanese poetry art form, the haiku. North Carolina State Insect Museum's Andy Deans contributes whimsical haikus on this family of flies for the contest that closes with the arrival of spring in the northern hemisphere.

FLYTREE students feature research

FLYTREE and North Carolina State University students, Michelle Trautwein, Matt Bertone, Keith Bayless, and Whitney Swink, are featured in the NC State University's Insect Museum blog

"On the Fly" wins Whitley Book Award

Dr. David Yeates (Australian Biological Resources Study Center for Biological Information Technology) proudly accepted the 2007 Whitley Book Awards Certificate of Commendation from the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales for the CD-based "On The Fly: The Interactive Atlas and Key to Australian Fly Families," judged by the Society to be the best book in the category, "Interactive Atlas and Key." More...

Finding Foureyes

A major effort in the quest to complete the FLYTREE research for the second tier of taxa has been to search the globe for representatives of each fly family so that fresh material can be used for DNA sequencing and morphological scoring. The project has often relied on our collaborators, who are scattered around the world, to obtain members of critical, localized families. One such family, the Perissommatidae (see Figures) had eluded the Australian FLYTREE team for the first few years of the grant. The family is only known from a handful of species found in southeastern Australia and Chile. Specimens are uncommon in collections, but the type locality of one species in this family is close to Canberra, Australia, based on specimens collected by Don Colless in the southern hemisphere winter over 40 years ago. Morphological data has not provided compelling evidence for the phylogenetic position of Perissommatidae, and no recent material had been collected for further studies. The adults have broad, mottled wings and bizarre compound eyes divided into separate dorsal and ventral sections.

Establishing the phylogenetic position of the Perissommatidae in the Lower Diptera is an important goal of FLYTREE. The Australian FLYTREE team searched the type locality for two years in a row without success, and began to believe that the extended drought conditions in Australia may have caused a local extinction of the species. However, a volunteer in the Diptera section of the Australian National Insect Collection, David Ferguson, came to the rescue. He established a winter Malaise trapping program in Tallaganda National Park, part of a range of mountains just to the east of Canberra, to snare the elusive Perissomma. In July 2006, David found a series of adults of Perissomma mcalpinei in a trap placed in a tall, moist woodland forest at 1150 m altitude. Subsequently, numerous adults were hand netted at the site. Specimens preserved in 100% ethanol were sent to Brian Wiegmann’s lab at North Carolina State University, and his Ph.D. student, Matt Bertone, obtained DNA sequences and by the end of July 2006, he was able to place the Perissommatidae in his molecular phylogenetic analysis of the Lower Diptera. Matt will be publishing his results in 2007, and The Australian Entomologist has just accepted a paper by David Ferguson, reporting on the behavioural observations of adult Perissommatidae.

This example demonstrates how much we rely on the energy and enthusiasm of FLYTREE collaborators. Great work, Dave!!

Submitted by David K. Yeates, Co-PI on FLYTREE, Assembling the Tree of Life for Diptera.