Keith Bayless Places Runner-up!

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. 

Tabanid PEET Group at ICD7

The Tabanid PEET group is gathered in San José Costa Rica for the 7th International Congress of Dipterology. Team members gave talks in the symposium "Phylogeny and taxonomy within the "orthorrhaphous" Brachycera" on Tuesday, highlighting progress in the Tabanid PEET project.

The team celebrated a successful day:

 (l-r: )M. Turcatel, G. Kampmeier, K. Bayless, D. Yeates, B. Wiegmann, B. Lessard, C. Thompson, & S. Morita)

Diminutive horse fly sought: Microtabanus pygmaeus

Most horse flies noticed by humans would never be characterized as "diminutive" and if they were considered "rare," it might be more a cause for celebration than searching. But searching for live or recently collected specimens of Microtabanus pygmaeus (even the name emphasizes just how small this fly is considered among the general population of horse flies), is part of the quest of Keith Bayless, a Ph.D. candidate on our Tabanid PEET project, and the subject of his post on the NC State Insect Museum blog.

Read more and see photos of this unusual and unique horse fly in the tribe Diachlorini.

Tabanid PEET working group meeting

The Tabanid PEET group gathered in Raleigh, NC 25-27 May 2009 for a working group meeting, with a concentration on databasing, planning for the future, and introducing Daniela Elena Ramirez as one of the newest students on the project. The meeting was joined by F. Chris Thompson to talk about integration of the tabanid names and the BDWD.

The group (l-r: Gail Kampmeier, Keith Bayless, Shelah Morita, Chris Thompson, Brian Wiegmann, Daniela Ramirez; not present was the Aussie contingent: David Yeates, Bryan Lessard) enjoyed dinner at the 42nd Street Oyster Bar in Raleigh.