Congratulations to Tabanid PEET student, Keith Bayless, for placing runner-up in the competition for the President's Prize at the 2010 Entomological Society of America meeting in San Diego, CA! He competed against other M.S. and Ph.D. graduate students in the "Taxonomy, Classifications, and Revisions" section in a talk entitled "Resolving conflict and outgroup sampling in the diachlorine grade; a new classification system for Tabaninae (Diptera: Tabanidae)". His presentation (pdf 6.5 MB) is available, along with a more legible version of the Bayesian inference tree featured there.
Keith states that in researching his talk, he discovered two things:
1) Contrary to what he had been used to using, the spelling 'Hematophage' is more common and preferable to 'Haematophage' according to dictionaries, Wikipedia, etc. [or use "bloodsuckers" (with a wicked gleam in your eye) to impress your friends and grab your audience -gk]
and
2) "Tabanidae is the most species-rich group of bloodsucking insects." This attention-getting statement is how Keith began his talk, based on his own research of the number of recorded hematophagous insect species in other groups.
