PEET Staphylinid Field Trips
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Fieldwork is an important part of systematics research, particularly when the taxa are significantly under-documented, as is the case for Staphylinidae in most parts of the world. As part of the PEET staphylinid project, all team members will engage in fieldwork to collect staphylinid beetles from southern South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. These lands, with historical Gondwanan connections, represent most of the southern temperate, or austral, regions and many taxa are only known from these areas. The primary purpose of the fieldwork for this project will be to collect more staphylinids for use in monographic revisionary work. (Each team member will conduct a revision and biogeographic analysis of at least one target group of austral Staphylinidae, each group occurring in at least three of these austral regions). The planned field trips will also increase the staphylinid collection resources available within both the Field Museum and collaborating in-country collections, greatly contributing to the accessibility of this group to researchers within those countries. There has been relatively little targeted collecting of Staphylinidae in the Gondwanan countries, and few, if any, resident researchers (all of whom focus on other groups) routinely use the techniques most suitable for collecting staphylinids.
Another purpose of this fieldwork is to train the post-doc researcher and graduate student in methods for collecting Staphylinidae. The highly effective standardized collecting protocol used by the PI’s over a number of years of field experience includes flight intercept traps, carrion-baited pitfall traps, and litter extraction (using Berlese funnels) in addition to hand searching in specific habitats and small-scale pyrethrin fogging of suitable substrates. In addition, on each trip a local participant will accompany the PEET team in the field, allowing us to provide training in staphylinid collecting techniques and potentially encourage local students toward an interest in Staphylinidae. Each field trip includes visits to local collections, where we can arrange loans of target specimens, sort existing collections of Staphylinidae to improve their curatorial condition and usefulness, and arrange for the deposition of specimens collected during our fieldwork.
The focus of the collecting trips will be to explore a range of habitats, employing many different collecting methods to gain more information on the ecology, habits, and distributions of target staphylinid groups in each country. The combination of trapping methods and hand searching in specific habitats offers opportunities to collect larvae of the target taxa as well as observing direct associations between adults and larvae and possibly rearing in some cases, ultimately allowing for greater understanding of the natural history of the target taxa. The planned field trips also provide opportunities to collect fresh specimens specially preserved for DNA extraction and sequencing, which will form a component of the training and monographic revisionary work.
continue to the Chile (December 2002) expedition>>
continue to the South Africa (January-February 2004) expedition>>
continue to the Australia (July-September 2004) expedition>>
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