Summer intern Katie Lyons working on taxonomic revisions

Text by Katie Lyons

My project this summer (June to August 2010) at the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, IL, USA) is to revise the genera Ectyphus and Parectyphus (Mydidae: Ectyphinae). Both genera are known to southern Africa, although very few specimens have been collected so far. To learn more about the project follow this link.

This work is supported with a summer stipend by Torsten Dikow's NSF REVSYS grant on Apioceridae, Asilidae, and Mydidae (details here).

Torsten Dikow spent a week in Florida for field work in order to collect several Mydidae species of interest to the NSF REVSYS grant. Two species of Phyllomydas (Mydinae: Phyllomydini) were collected as well as several Asilidae species in general. Archbold Biological Station in Lake Placid, FL was the base for some of the field work conducted in Florida scrub.

Torsten also visited the Florida State Collection of Arthropods (FSCA) in Gainesville, FL for a day to photograph several Mydidae type specimens and study the extensive Mydidae collection particularly from the south-eastern United States.

Torsten Dikow visited the Snow Entomological Collections at the Natural History Museum of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS, USA from March 8–10 in order to study the many primary type specimens of Nearctic Apioceridae and Mydidae.

A new version of the web-site has been released. This is version 3, which is now using the open source content management system Drupal in order to provide better access to information stored in databases. Not only are the taxa catalogues for family-group names, genera, and species fully searchable, the site itself can also be searched.

The bibliography is presented in a much better way and you can search the bibliography for authors, journals, or just words. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to implement a keyword search that would provide you with every paper dealing with the genus Syllegomydas, for example. Stay tuned as I hope to implement this soon. In addition, when you click on the title of a publication it will either give you the full record or take you directly to a web-site where you can download a free PDF of the article, e.g., Biodiversity Heritage Library, American Museum of Natural History, the journal Psyche, or the electronic edition of the Biologia Centrali-Americana. I will try to add new links from time to time, but it is difficult to keep up with the huge amount of digital media made available online for free.

Another great update is the presentation of specimen occurrence data in a table and map format for both Apioceridae and Mydidae. This database will be updated regularly and eventually provide a great source to see the exact distribution of each species. The image galleries are also provided in an easier-to-navigate way and almost all Mydidae genera are represented by at least one image (often of the holotype of the type species).

Migrating a site from a pure CSS and HTML style to Drupal isn't easy and I thank Kris Urie and Maria Tzeka from the Biodiversity Synthesis Center for their help with all my questions about Drupal.

If you have comments or suggestions, please don't hesitate to e-mail me at torsten at tdvia.de. Enjoy the new site.

The first manuscript within the NSF REVSYS grant on a review of the Mydidae fauna of the United Arab Emirates has been submitted to the “Arthropod Fauna of the UAE” series.

As part of the NSF REVSYS grant, the first field trip to north-western South Africa took place and the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town was also visited to to study the many holotypes of Mydidae deposited there. Read more news about this trip here.