Archetype

Postdoc postion in beetle morphology/taxonomy

I’m reposting this job announcement here:

The International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE), Arizona State University (ASU), invites applications and nominations for a postdoc available January 1, 2010. Duties include dissections, descriptions, and digital illustrations of beetles for print and Web publications, participating in the Institute team working on various cybertaxonomy initiatives, and supporting the research of the director, currently including taxonomic studies of Eleodes (Coleoptera, Tenebrionidae).

ASU is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. Submit statement of interest, CV, and names/email addresses of three references to: Quentin Wheeler, Vice President and Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University. Please submit electronically to tyna.chu@asu.edu with subject line Morphology Postdoc. Review of candidates will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled.

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Tags: Eleodes, Quentin Wheeler

Ross Crozier, pioneer in the study of genetics in social insects, died on November 12th, aged 66

Ross Crozier (© Alex Wild 2009)

He represented all things genetic within the study of ants an other social insects. Over the years, countless of students will pass through his laboratory in way of becoming great researchers and mentors themselves.

When in 2006 the International Union for the Study of Social Insects instituted the Hamilton Award, in recognition of outstanding contribution to the field by senior scientists, Ross Crozier became its first recipient.

I had meet Prof. Crozier just briefly at scientific meetings before, but I was very lucky to sit down with him and a handful of other myrmecologists over lunch one day during a short visit he made to Harvard in 2008.

James Cook University, his academic home, has published the following obituary:

One of Australia’s leading biological scientists Professor Ross Crozier has died in Townsville. He was world renowned for his contributions to evolutionary theory, behavioural biology and to genetics.

An Australian Research Council Professorial fellow based at James Cook University, Professor Crozier was a world leader in the study of social insects.

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Alex Wild has written some notes about Crozier and his visit to the Field Museum in Chicago the previous week.

Tags: Ross Crozier

Evolution and development of castes in ants

Up until resuming posting a couple of weeks ago you may had thought I was dead. Well, fear not (nor rejoice just yet). I am now happy to report that those previous months of blogging slowness paid off: I got funding for the project I wrote during the summer.

Starting next year I will be working as a postdoc in the laboratory of Patrícia Beldade at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Portugal. This is an evolutionary developmental biology lab, an area of research fondly know as EvoDevo.

EvoDevo ask questions that are of a different nature than the classical Neo-Darwinian ones. For example, in the latter you always presuppose that variation exists in populations and that there is a link between what you see at the level of an organism’s morphology (its phenotype) and the underlying genetics (its genotype), and you study how natural selection then goes to mess things around. In EvoDevo you don’t give these things for granted. Rather, you ask how do new features (novelties and innovations) arise in the first place and exactly how does the link between genotype and phenotype comes about through the developmental process. From there, what you seek is to understand evolution as a process of modification of development.

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Tags: Castes, EvoDevo, Plasticity

More dinosaur than we thought

Familiar to many, you can know how old a tree is and how fast it has grown by counting the number of rings in a cross section. Well, you can do the same with the long bones of vertebrates.

Now Gregory M. Erickson and co-workers published a paper in which they did just that to a specimen of one of the most famous fossil forms around: Archaeopterix. Watch Mark Norell, paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History and co-author of the paper, explain the results:

Tags: AMNH, Archaeopterix

Eickwort’s Manual of Insect Morphology

George Campbell Eickwort (1949–1994)

The Department of Entomology at Cornell University saw a time of great research and teaching in insect morphology at the end of the Twentieth Century, most of which came from the efforts by two extraordinary systematists: William L. Brown Jr. and George Campbell Eickwort.

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Tags: Cornell University, George Campbell Eickwort, William L. Brown Jr.

Three succinct reasons why scientists should communicate science to the general public

Raghavendra Gadagkar, social insects biologist, writes:

I believe that most working scientists should spend part of their time explaining and discussing their work with a larger audience. There are at least three important reasons for this. One is that science needs to become an integral and essential part of society and not be perceived as an outside force that is at loggerheads with society. Second, scientists need to recruit the best young minds to make up the next generation and that can only happen if we devote time to communicate with the general public. Third, I have no doubt it will help us appreciate our own work better.

From the book review of  Keller, L. & Gordon, É. 2009: The lives of ants. – Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, XI + 252 pp.¹

Tags: Raghavendra Gadagkar

Homology Weekly: Compound Eyes

Gigantiops destructor (via Michael Branstetter - www.antweb.org)

The lateral eyes of adult insects (and most Arthropods) known as compound eyes, are like no other visual organs found in animals. You can think of our vertebrate eye as a simplified, one-lens photographic camera with a sensor composed of millions of light sensitive cells (and a blind spot, mind you). Well, that’s nothing. Each insects eye is composed of several small photographic cameras, each with its own lens and light sensitive cells (albeit, commonly only six of these). These units are called ommatidia (sing. ommatidium), and the image if formed by the combined information from all of them.¹

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Tags: Acropyga, Aenictus binghami, Compound eye, Concoctio, Cryptopone gilva, Eciton, Gigantiops, Harpegnathos, Lasius occidentalis, Modularity, Myrmecia, Ommatidia, Ommatidium, Proceratium avium

Queen of Formicidae

Hail Queen of Formicidae, ruler of all ant species! (that’s 12,591 species as of today if you ask)

Via Queen of Formicidae by ~Y-Ikeda on deviantART.

Tags: Queen

Charlie Darwin – by The Low Anthem live on Lake Fever Sessions

Low Anthem “Charle Darwin” from Lake Fever Sessions on Vimeo.

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Tags: Charles Darwin, The Low Anthem

Counterintuition in Biology

Over at Evolving Thoughts, the mighty white gorilla from the Antipodes (that sometimes goes under the nom de plume John Wilkins) has paused from his grand World Tour 2009 to write a nice and succinct reflection on the nature of concepts and definitions in Biology. He writes:

We ought not to think that a conception or definition or hypothesis that works in one part of biology must work in all others, and yet biologists themselves often behave as if this were true. That is another challenge: why is this? The answer, I believe, is that biology is both highly diverse, and also massive.

Read the rest in his post: Counterintuition: Bdelloid Rotifers « Evolving Thoughts.

Tags: John Wilkins, Species concepts