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Author Archives: stireman
Pivotal Pervasive Pigments: Carotenoids in insect ecology
Carotenoids are nearly ubiquitous organic compounds involved in all sorts of important functions across all major groups of organisms. They play key roles in photosynthesis in plants, they function as antioxidants, and they provide many of the bright yellow, orange, … Continue reading
Posted in Scientific publications
Tagged carotenoids, chemical ecology, insect-plant interactions
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Ecuador Expedition 2012
I (Stireman) recently returned from a trip to Ecuador. The primary reasons for the trip were 1. To collect tachinid flies for systematic and biodiversity research, and 2. To get graduate student, Karen Pedersen, set up for her studies on … Continue reading
Posted in Meetings & Travel
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Doctor Heath and Master Davis
Congratulations to Environmental Science PhD student Jeremy Heath for successfully defending his thesis this week!! Jeremy’s thesis, “Assessing the drivers of adaptive radiation in a complex of gall midges: A multitrophic perspective on ecological speciation,” took about a ream of … Continue reading
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Phylogeny of the Tachinidae World Tour, Part 1: South Africa
One of the major pursuits in the Stireman lab right now is to assemble and analyze a phylogeny of Tachinidae of the world. If you know what tachinid flies are (i.e., awesomely diverse parasitoid flies, again I refer you to … Continue reading
Carnivores and carotenoids…a new paper by Jeremy Heath
PhD student Jeremy Heath had something additional to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. His manuscript entitled “Carnivores and carotenoids are associated with adaptive behavioural divergence in a radiation of gall midges” was just officially published (online) in the journal Ecological … Continue reading
Posted in Scientific publications
Tagged Adaptive radiation, Asteromyia, Cecidomyiidae, Jeremy Heath
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Enemy mine
Bob Kula and colleagues (Oscar Dix-Luna and Scott Shaw) recently published a revision of the braconid genus Ilatha. These are relatively large, often brightly colored braconid wasps found exclusively in the New World tropics. They are certainly attractive wasps, but … Continue reading
Beth Stayrook receives award
Beth Stayrook, undergraduate research assistant extraordinare in the Stireman lab, was recently awarded a $1500 scholarship award from the Women in Science Giving Circle at Wright State University. Beth is a seriously smart, dual major in Biology and Chemistry. Way … Continue reading
Tachinid flies and the final frontier…
Forest canopies are often referred to as one of the “final frontiers” of biodiversity exploration. We know astonishingly little about what organisms and ecological interactions occur in forest canopies, primarily due to the difficulty in sampling and studying them. In … Continue reading
Paper on adaptive radiation in gall midges published in Journal of Evolutionary Biology
Stireman, collaborator Patrick Abbot, and Lab technician Hilary Devlin have just published a paper analyzing the extraordinary radiation of Asteromyia carbonifera gall midges on their Solidago hosts across North America. We show that this nominal species is actually comprised of a … Continue reading
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Stireman attends the International Congress of Entomology in South Korea
For a first real report from the Stireman lab, I thought I might say a few words about my recent trip to South Korea to attend the XXIV International Congress of Entomology. This meeting, my first ICE actually, was held … Continue reading
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