Insect flower visitors lab at ESA 2023

This is the first year that multiple lab members attended the ESA meeting in National Harbor. To be fair, it is the first year that the lab counts with multiple members!

Insect flower visitors lab members at ESA

Bruno de Medeiros presented his ongoing research on applying large language models (LLMs) in taxonomy.

Diego Souza presented on his progess in using adaptive sampling in nanopore sequencers to generate phylogenetic datasets.

Diego calmly reading a book in perfect lighting after getting done with talks in the first day (photo by Elizabeth Postema)

ElizabethPostema and Abigail Magland joined the lab more recently, presenting on their previous research: an ingenious poster on UV reflectance in swallowtail butterflies and a a presentation on the evolution of eyes in beetle flower visitors.

Elizabeth presenting her poster with visible and UV photos.

Abigail presenting on evolution of flower beetles

First Chicago summer wrap-up

Annual cicada noise is beyond its peak, and almost all grasshoppers around are adults showing their beautifully colored wings. Summer is coming to an end!

This was also the first summer of the de Medeiros Insect Flower Visitors lab at the Field Museum, marked by a lot of activity.

We participated in the first Bioblitz at the Rice Garden, organized together with the Learning Center and the Action Center of the Field Museum.

Diego Souza and Allisa Doucet preparing insects collected during the Rice Garden Bioblitz

We visited local natural areas, such as the James Woodworth Prairie and the Warren Woods Field Station.

Elizabeth Postema, Bruno de Medeiros and the James Woodworth Prairie director Alan Molumby collecting insects

We searched for monarchs to update the Field Museum learning resources.

Bruno showing a monarch caterpillar in the Rice Garden

And we interacted with the museum public in person and through the media.

Bruno showing “Surprising Pollinators” at the Grainger Science Hub

As we recede into our offices (and a bit of international fieldwork) for the next few months, we look forward to planning more exciting activities for next summer!

In the news: weevil brood pollinators

Julien Haran, Gael Kergoat and I just published this review on weevil brood pollinators:

Haran J, Kergoat GJ, de Medeiros BAS. 2023 Most diverse, most neglected: weevils (Coleoptera: Curculionoidea) are ubiquitous specialized brood-site pollinators of tropical flora. Peer Community Journal, 3 https://doi.org/10.24072/pcjournal.279

In the article we review what we know about brood pollination in weevils and trying to understand why something so obvious for anyone that has looked closely has been missed both by many pollination ecologists and many weevil experts.

Much to my surprise, it caught a lot of media attention, so hopefully many more people will consider weevils when looking at flowers in the future! Here are a few of the news articles mentioning our review:

https://phys.org/visualstories/2023-05-weevils-long-nosed-beetles-unsung-heroes.amp

https://www.popsci.com/environment/weevil-beetle-pollination/

https://www.earth.com/news/weevils-the-unknown-and-underappreciated-pollination-heroes/

Ok, this last photo is NOT one of the pollinators, but I hope some day we will change what you can find when searching the internet for palm weevils!

More generally, it is nice to see more attention given to the role of insects as pollinators and other ecosystem functions. For example, The Nature Conservancy put together this nice page about pollinators in the Midwest: https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/priority-landscapes/great-lakes/stories-in-the-great-lakes/peculiar-pollinators/

In the News: what is a species, anyway?

Bruno spoke to CNN about species concepts and limits, and Anchylorhynchus ended up with a photo there!

See the news piece here: https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/12/world/what-is-a-species-explainer-scn/index.html

Visit to O'Brien weevil collection at ASU

This week, Bruno and Aline visited one of the most important weevil collection in the USA: the Charles O’Brien collection at Arizona State University.

Its importance comes not only from its impressive size, but also the amazing state of curation, benefitting from the years of careful work and passion by Charles O’Brien. Incidentally, he and the current of the collection - Nico Franz - have sone a lot of taxonomic work in flower-associated weevils, rendering it especially relevant for these groups.

Aline has found a lot of material for the ongoing phylogeny of Eugnomini, which we will soon take to the Field Museum. Also a great opportunity to see friends - some of them for the first time without a Zoom screen in the middle - and to take a break of Chicago weather.

Overall a great trip, and many important results will come from it!

Bruno and Aline can’t get enough weevils at the O’Brien collection

Pollinator beetle workshop at Universidad Ikiam

The past week I have been in Ecuador visiting my colleague Maria Cristina Peñuela at Universidad Ikiam in Tena, Ecuador. Cristina's students have been working with palm pollinators for their theses and therefore collected a lot of beetles, with weevils being a large part of them. As anywhere in the Amazon, those species turn out to be mostly undescribed, and in some cases it is even hard to fit them in the known genera of flower weevils.

Sampling beetle pollinators in Jatun Sacha reserve

Therefore, we partnered up to do a hands-on workshop on pollinator beetles, including discussions on their ecology and evolution and an overview of the taxonomy of main groups. At the end of the week, we had built a curated reference collection of pollinator beetles from the Napo province, which will support future work on ecology and systematics.

Lab component of the workshop, in which we mounted and identified palm flower beetles

This was not only my first time in Ecuador, but the first time in years teaching in person and visiting the Amazon. It was a great relief from the pandemic experience and really joy! It turns out it was also the beginning of the first semester with in-person classes at Ikiam too, so students were also highly motivated. I hope this was just the first step in a long-term collaboration and also the first of many initiatives to facilitate work on tropical beetle pollinators.

End of the workshop, with Maria Cristina Peñuela, students and the three boxes of insects forming a reference collection for further studies

How to sample Cecropia flower weevils

Cecropia is a genus of very common Neotropical plants known as guarumo (spanish) or embaúba (portuguese). They are very well known by their defensive mutualism with ants and generally thought to be wind-pollinated. But the reality is that pollination has never been studied in most cases.

It turns out that, hiding in plain sight, there are weevils intimately associated with flowers of Cecropia. This is the genus Udeus. Aline Lira is a PhD student at the Universidad Federal Rural de Pernambuco in Brazil, who I am co-advising, and she is currently working on the systematics, natural history and evolution of this genus.

Udeus eugnomoides in male flowers of Cecropia peltata in Panama.

The number of described species in the genus is certainly very small compared to the real existing diversity, and so far pretty much every new species of Cecropia that we sampled has resulted in a different species of Udeus.

It is appalling how rare these weevils are in collections, since in nature their host plants are extremely abundant and the weevils themselves are quite abundant on their flowers. Maybe because of their small size and colors blending well with the flower background? To encourage people to collect more samples, Aline has put together a guide available in Portuguese here: http://www.ppgea.ufrpe.br/sites/ppgea.ufrpe.br/files/entomonews_008.pdf

Basically, you can find adult weevils always in male inflorescences and, in some species of Cecropia, also in the female inflorescences. The larvae can be found inside branches of old male inflorescences. Because these are shed by the plant, this is the easiest way to sample them: find a decaying male inflorescence in the leaf litter, put in a container and wait a week for the adults to emerge.

If you are reading this text and find any Udeus in your backyard, please reach out!

Pandemic Weevil Description

This month, Jennifer Girón, myself and collaborators have described a new species of weevil from Panamá. This was my first time describing a species of Entiminae, but not the first attempt. My first undergrad project was to describe a weird entimine the my advisor Sergio Vanin had found in the collection. When he contacted Analía Lanteri to request more samples in case she had some, we discovered that she was already working on a description, which ended up published here:

This time around, I was the one contacted, and the reason was the covid19 pandemic. Jennifer is the real expert on Entiminae here, but it was logistically impossible for her collaborators in Panama who found the beetle feeding on crops to send samples in 2020. Since I had started a postdoc at STRI by then, she asked for my help to get the samples from Chiriquí and describe the species together.

This turned out to be much more challeging than usual: I arrived at STRI right before Sars-Cov-2. By then I needed a special request to go to the lab and to visit collections. I had no dissection equipment because mine was (and still is) stranded at my previous job at Harvard University. With a lot of help from Don Windsor and Annette Aiello at STRI, I was able to use their equipment, do the dissections and imaging. Jennifer and I discussed characters over e-mail, and we finally realized something very cool: our new species is just one of many at higher elevations in Central America! Most of these are currently identified as Epicaerus inaequalis in collections, but for now we only gave a name to the species found near Volcan Baru in Chiriqui, since it might turn out to be an important pest.

You can find more in the paper:

Atencio R, Barba A, …, de Medeiros BAS, Girón J. 2022. A new species of Epicaerus Pascoe, 1881 (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Entiminae: Geonemini) associated with potato cultivars in Tierras Altas de Chiriquí, Panama. Zootaxa 5115: 103–121. http://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5115.1.7

Using OpenStreetMap for fieldwork hiking

One year later than planned, I am finally spending some time In Barro Colorado Island (i. e. BCI) to conduct to do the research I planned to undertake at STRI. I just finished placing bags to differentially exclude pollinators and in a few days we should start understanding something about the evolution of weevil brood pollinators in generalist palms!

But this is not what I’d like to write about today. Instead, I’d like to share a tool that I have been using for a while and I think other people who spend a lot of time in trails could make use of it. This is OpenStreetMap, and I’m a fan.

Have you ever wished that you could use your GPS to navigate through trails as well as it does through streets? How to add trails that are not available in online maps?

Bagged flowers of the palm Oenocarpus mapora

This is a problem I encountered, for example, here in Barro Colorado. Even though the trails are well mapped, when I set my GPS to go to a specific point it attempts a straight line. This is bad for planning routes and for me to have a realistic idea of how much I have to walk, so ideally I would want it to route through trails. Below I explain how I put the trail information in a map in my GPS, and actually made it available to everyone in the process.

What is OpenStreetMap?

OpenStreetMap is akin to a Wikipedia of maps: anyone, anywhere in the world can edit, and through time it gets more and more accurate. This content is distributed freely under a Creative Commons license. This means that there is a whole community using OpenStreetMap data for all sorts of products, including maps that can be loaded in Garmin GPS units, the brand that I use.

How to load a map from OpenStreetMap to Garmin?

Since there is a large community of knowledgeable people working on optimizing maps for Garmin devices, all you need to do is to follow their advice. The ideal map depends on your intended usage (like driving, sailing or hiking) and region of the world. Check out this page for details.

For the record, I am currently using a map of Central America optimized for hiking and mountain biking: https://openmtbmap.org. They update weekly, so all I have to do is to edit OpenStreetMap to make sure it includes the trails that I need. Then a week later I can download a nice map that works in my GPS device. I did this last week, and now my GPS shows the exact distance through trails and instructions on how to get to the palm trees in which I placed bags:

How to add trails to OpenStreetMap?

The very first page of OpenStreetMap there is a button named EDIT. There you can use satellite images or GPS tracks that have been uploaded to the website to trace trails manually. In my case, I did not need to do that since the Smithsonian Institution already provides maps for BCI trails. Fortunately, they are distributed under a Creative Commons license as well, so I could use that data as base to create trails in OpenStreetMap. Just like Wikipedia, my edits are tracked with an ID and there one can see where the information came from: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/113428019

Since I already started with a file containing edited tracks and names for all trails, I did not manually edit them in the website. Instead, I used JOSM, a program to edit OpenStreetMap that runs in my computer. Consulting the documentation of JOSM, in about an hour I figured out how to transform the raw data from STRI into the kind of data that shows that these are connected hiking trails. The program did a few automated checks and fixes to make sure everything looks right before uploading, and done.

Then I only had to wait a few days until someone used those new additions to OpenStreetMap to create a map suitable for my Garmin device, and follow their installation instructions.

This all seems hard, is there another way to help?

Yes! If while working in the field you have your GPS on all the time, like I do, it will generate traces (or tracks). Those are files that show where you have been, for example, throughout one day. You can download those traces from you gps (for example, using Garmin Explore or Garmin Basecamp) and upload them to OpenStreetMap. Other users can then use the traces to manually refine maps. For example, here I show a trace from one day I was in the field last week, and we can see that the BCI trail map does not match it exactly. If we had a number of these traces from many users (to account for GPS errors), someone could improve this map manually.

OpenStreetMap edit window showing mapped BCI trails (yellow) and GPS tracks from one day of my fieldwork (pink)

Weevil Workers Meeting 2021

I really disliked most of my experiences with online meetings since March 2019. With one exception: smaller conferences without concurrent sessions and held in regular zoom meeting format, with a chance for live interaction between everyone.

This is the case of the Weevil Workers Meeting, bringing together a lot of people interested in weevils and in learning from each other’s talks. This is the kind of conference that I think is enriched by the online format, with the possibility for direct interaction between amazing people that would be very hard to have all at the same time in the same physical space. It is an amazing community and a very fun meeting.

More info at: https://www.curculionoidea.org/weevil-workers-meetings

Gigante Field course

How to do a Field course while the covid19 pandemic is still raging?

Some people at STRI have taken the challenge! Daniel Medina and Rosannette Quesada have all my praise for taking the lead in making this 2-week-long course to happen, even if online, after a a hiatus of one year in the traditional Gigante Course.

I volunteered to lead a student project, and ended up deciding to use iNaturalist as the tool to connect students living across Panama. We created a project to record observations of insect flower visitors, learnt to upload observations and to export data for a project to do a simple test of insect preference for flower colors.

In addition to the teaching experience, it was one more opportunity to test ideas on how to use the data in the platform!

Screenshot of the project home page in iNaturalist, showing student observations.

Picudos en La Prensa

The story on STRI website has just been picked up by La Prensa, one of the largest newspapers in Panamá!

So many of the important plants in Neotropical forests are either pollinated or harmed by weevils (or both!), it is great to spread the word out a little bit.

The article can be accessed here: https://www.prensa.com/impresa/vivir/polinizadores-de-palmeras-gorgojos-no-tan-malvados/

Screenshot of La Prensa website

Story on STRI website

This week, a story on my work about pollinator weevils written by Beth King was published at the STRI webpage, you can check it out here (in English or Spanish): https://stri.si.edu/story/palm-pollinators

Ana Endara also produced these beautiful videos on the two sides of the palm/weevil interaction.

The fact that adults are pollinators:

And the weird morphology and behavior of their larvae:

I really enjoyed both videos, I hope you like them as well!

Teaching about weevils while 3,000 miles away

Here we are in the second year in a row in which a trip to Brazil is unlikely. Too bad, but at least the zoom world allowed be to teach a lecture today on weevils to the graduate student at Federal University of Paraná. Having araucarias, Butia palms and all their weevil flower visitors around would have been even better, but in any case it was great interacting with the students and teaching in Portuguese for the first time in many years!

Screenshot of the weevil lecture at UFPR

Pollinator Weevils at Coleoptera Meeting 2021

A group of students and postdocs from Brazil organized in March a Virtual Coleoptera Meeting (Encontro de Coleoptera). It featured a great group of speakers from multiple countries and speaking 3 languages. All presentations have subtitles in English (or in Portuguese, if presented in another language).

Here’s my talk encouraging everyone in Brazil to look for weevils in their backyard palm flowers:

There were also great surprises when it comes to weevil pollinators. Priscila Sanz-Veiga talked about a weevil species that breeds on fruits of Ouratea spectabilis (Ochnaceae), and apparently adults are flower visitors. It does not look like they are harmful to fruits at all, could they be unrecognized brood pollinators?

Alexandre Medeiros presented on the natural history of species of Oxycorinus weevils (family Belidae) pollinating parasitic plants in the family Balanophoraceae. This is a lineage of weevils for which very little is known, and it seems that in this case there is more than one species involved and their larvae may be feeding on different tissues (underground tubercle or floral stem):

A few other talks to highlight were Roberta Valente showing how she has been greatly advancing the study of palm flower weevils and other beetles in the Amazon, starting basically from scratch:

And Jennifer Girón presented on the ambitious goals of Colombian coleopterists to build a checklist of Coleoptera in one of the most diverse countries in the world!

These are just a few examples, many more great talks are available at the conference YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDRwt-x6B_j9C9OCE4NjNNw/videos

Interview about Amazonia 4.0 project

This week I talked to the “Problemas Brasileiros” magazine about my role in the design of the Amazon Creative Lab of Genomics under the Amazonia 4.0 Initiative. I hope we will have more (and exciting) news on that soon: the idea is to build a portablelab for capacity building on DNA sequencing using automation and real time sequencers, targeted to non-biologists living in Amazonia. Together with a database for these sequences under development in a collaboration with researchers from the University of São Paulo, we hope this can foster the generation of new markets, new products and new research that will ultimately help us to increase the value of standing forests and improve livelihoods.

Here is the link to the interview (in Portuguese): https://revistapb.com.br/meio-ambiente/industria-amazonia-4-0/

A comprehensive tree for dryophthorine weevils

Calibrated phylogeny of Dryophthorinae, showing their Mesozoic diversification following a long temporal lag.

Back in 2011, when I was starting my PhD, I worked for a year on a project that involved getting the first comprehensive molecular phylogeny of Dryophthorinae. These are easily recognizable weevils, not that diverse for weevil standards (about 1,000 species), hugely important for economy and then a model for the study of insect endosymbionts.

However, in 2011 it was not straightforward to obtain molecular data from pinned museum specimens and my attempts at collecting them in the tropics were not very successful, leading to abandonment of the project. I was not the first one: the phylogeny of Dryophthorinae has seemed like low hanging fruit for a while but no one who started it managed to finish. Until now, 10 years later.

Lourdes Chamorro (USDA, Smithsonian Institution) has been focusing on dryophthorids for the last few years, having published an outstanding key based on larval morphology, accomplished important collections of molecular-grade material resulting in new discoveries (such as this and this), and produced morphological and molecular datasets that will still result in more discoveries for the next few years. We joined forces to work on this first comprehensive molecular phylogeny for the group, including a calibrated tree combining ribosomal RNA data with the relatively rich fossil record for the group. It showed us that we still have a lot of work to do on resolving the early branches of the group, but also revealed something surprising. There is a huge temporal lag between the split from platypodines, their closest relatives, and the diversification of extant lineages. All fossils attributable to Dryophthorinae are found in the Cenozoic, while the two groups split in the Jurassic. While platypodines have diversified steadily throughout this time, it seems dryophthorinae explosively diversified in the Cenozoic after the Cretacious-Tertiary boundary. This pattern is remarkably similar to the group of plants that they feed on. Since they are a lot more dependent of specific plants than they fungus-farming sister group, we believe they tracked more closely the rise of angiosperms.

The paper is available here:

Chamorro, ML, de Medeiros, B, Farrell, BD. First phylogenetic analysis of Dryophthorinae (Coleoptera, Curculionidae) based on structural alignment of ribosomal DNA reveals Cenozoic diversification. Ecol Evol. 2021; 00: 1– 15. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.7131

Are antagonistic insect-plant interactions really main drivers of biological diversity?

It is generally thought that antagonistic interactions are the main drivers of divergence in plant-feeding insects (and beetles specifically). A few years ago, I decided to use palm weevils to test this idea: if this is the case, we should find higher levels of genetic divergence between populations of antagonistic insects when compared to mutualists or commensals, if they interact with the same plants in the same space.

Gregorio Bondar did quite a lot of work in the 1940s on the natural history of weevil flower visitors of the licuri and pati palms, having also described many of these beetle species. That means that I knew already that the specialized flower visitors of these palms varied in whether they pollinated their hosts plants and whether they harmed them. To update the studies of the 1940s, I published a very detailed description of the interactions between Syagrus coronata and their flower visitors, which provided the background information for this new study.

Once we had that and I started sequencing weevils, I noticed that something was odd. RAD-seq was not behaving as expected and I could not assemble datasets within species. Investigating the reasons led me to find that some of these species were actually complexes of cryptic species, and that genome evolution is weevils must be crazily fast: while there is no problem to assemble cross-species datasets for the palms, this was really hard even for those closely related species! Theses investigations on the molecular method resulted in another paper and a visualization tool.

So now that we have background information, confidence in the molecular method and well-delimited species, I finally could ask the questions I started with and the answer was surprising: I could not find a consistent trend with antagonists having stronger patterns of isolation. It made me go back to the literature and find that, decades ago, Tibor Jermy published a few papers (here and here) claiming that the idea that insect-plant antagonisms are main drivers of diversity was probably wrong. He suggested instead that insect diversification is mostly about sexual selection: if insects use host volatiles as mating cues, species would diverge with volatile divergence. This makes a lot of sense for flower weevils, and a recent paper on the role of tropical flowers to maintain beetle diversity makes me think we have been paying too little attention to this for a very long time.

The paper is open access and available here:

de Medeiros, B.A.S., Farrell, B.D. Evaluating insect-host interactions as a driver of species divergence in palm flower weevils. Commun Biol 3, 749 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-020-01482-3

Figure 1 in the paper, showing the genetic diversity of each species of plant and weevil.

ECN 2020: Tales from the Field

In this year when everybody is stuck at home I decided to give a different presentation in a conference. I participated in “Tales from the Field” Symposium at the Entomological Collections Network Meeting to talk a little bit about my work sampling beetles from palm trees. It turns out people liked it and voted as the best presentation for the “Golden Net” prize!

Luckily there was a bit of a relief from covid lockdown in Panama in the weeks before so I was able to record fieldwork. The video also includes a tribute to Sergio Vanin, who unfortunately passed away the day I was recording the video and was key for the success of these field trips and the research that came out of it in so many ways.

2020 Entomological Collections Network Meeting, Tales from the Field symposium

Revision of Anchylorhynchus published

This project took several field trips, 11,000 miles driven, 5,532 specimens observed from 23 collections, 1,762 of them collected by myself after sampling palms in over 100 localities. In addition to the morphology of the adults, this sampling resulted in a wealth of natural history information and also information on the immature stages, also summarized in the revision. It is really great to see this monograph published, which will serve as foundation for a number of studies already ongoing.

Here is a photo of all described species of Anchylorhynchus, with multiple color morphs for many of them. One of the most interesting aspects of the genus is that many of the taxa that were previously considered as separate species turned out to be just different color morphs, while many of the yellowish beetles considered to be the same thing were in fact separate clearly diagnosable species!

de Medeiros BAS & Vanin SA. 2020. Systematic revision and morphological phylogenetic analysis of Anchylorhynchus Schoenherr, 1836 (Coleoptera, Curculionidae: Derelomini). Zootaxa 4839: 1–98.

An overview of species of Anchylorhynchus