Leading a discussion of a scientific paper

January 21, 2015 / Chris Buddle / 3 Comments

I’m teaching a graduate class in Entomology this term, and part of that class involves students leading discussions about scientific papers in our discipline. These discussions are typically between 60 and 90 minutes, with a small group (4-6 individuals). This post provides some advice and guidelines around how to go about doing this. That being said, this is not a ‘one size fits all’ kind of world, especially when talking about science: you may have better or alternative approaches when discussing scientific papers - please comment, and share your ideas!

1. Provide a (quick) summary of the paper:

In most cases, you want to first provide the audience a brief but accurate overview of the paper. It’s often useful to do a little research about the authors – this provides a context that may be very helpful and may prove insightful later on. For example, do the authors have a publication record that aligns with the current paper? Are the authors graduate students or post-doc (not that it matters, but it does provide context!).

The focus on the summary should be about the Research Questions / Hypothesis, and to explain these you will also need to discuss an overall conceptual framework. This means you need to know this conceptual framework very well. After providing the broader context and framework, you should quickly go over the main methods, and the key results. You should act as a guide for your audience, and take them through the key results. Try not to spend a lot of time on more trivial aspects of a paper. In general, your summary should not delve too deeply in the discussion part of the paper.

Don’t forget: you are assuming everyone in the room has read the paper, so your overall introduction should be relatively short (no more than 10 minutes). More time may be required if a concept or methodological approach is particularly complex. Try not to provide opinions or critiques of the paper at this point in time – save this for the general discussion.

2. Ask for points of clarification:

Before proceeding with detailed discussion of the paper, you should ask the audience if they require clarification on anything in the paper. You are leading a discussion and therefore considered an ‘expert’ on the paper, and as such, should be prepared to handle these points of clarification – this will most likely require you to do a bit of research on areas of the paper that you do not understand! It’s important you you make it clear that you are not starting a detailed critique (yet); you are first making sure that people all understand the critical ‘nuts and bolts’ of the paper.

3. Leading a discussion:

The majority of the time should be spent on the actual discussion. There are many ways to do this, but here are some tips:

Try not to let your own opinion of the paper distract or take over – your goal is to get other people to reveal their own views; these may or may not agree with your own views! Be welcoming and accommodating to other people’s opinions and viewpoints. Never make anyone feel small or stupid, even if they make a goofy mistake.
That being said, make sure that you do have an opinion, and be willing to share it at some point
Prepare a list of questions that you could ask other people if the discussion needs help to get started. Always try to find positive points in a paper, even if the paper is, overall, very weak. Similarly, try to bring out negative features even if the paper is strong. This means you have to sort out strong and negative parts of a paper for yourself (well ahead of time)
It’s sometimes a good idea to first go around the room and ask for something that people felt was strong and positive about the paper, and then do this again but ask for points of constructive criticism about the paper.
Don’t hesitate to ask people (specifically) for their views on some sections of this paper: a gentle push may be needed to get started on discussing the specifics, but this can be fruitful.
Since you are chairing the discussion, don’t be afraid to take control if the discussion wanders too far from where it needs to be, and/or if the discussion gets too trivial or mired in the weeds
Related, whenever possible, draw the discussion back to the actual research objectives, and try to broaden the discussion out to the overarching concenptual framework: are the results generalizable to other fields? Does the paper make broad and meaningful conclusions that will be long-lived and significant?
Towards the end of the discussion, it may be useful to ask people how they might have done the work differently. Or, stated another way, what could have been improved?

4. Summarize the discussion:

Spend the last five minutes of your time reminding people abou the actual research objectives, and provide a concise summary of the discussion that just wrapped up. Do this in an inclusive way, and give a nod to everyone in the room: make everyone feel that their points of views and opinions are taken seriously. Try to get an overall consensus about the general quality of the paper, and one litmus test may be whether or not you would cite the paper in your own work, and in what context.

Meet the lab: Elyssa Cameron

January 2, 2015 / Chris Buddle / 1 Comment

Here’s another in the “Meet the lab” series - written by Master’s student Elyssa Cameron.

Like many in my field, my love of nature and the creatures which inhabit it began much earlier than I can remember. From camping trips to day camps to museums and everything in between, I have always been passionate about understanding the world around me. Whether I was catching butterflies, trying to identify an elusive bird, exploring a new place or simply basking the in the beauty and wonder of an unaltered landscape, I knew that I wanted to be an advocate for nature.

Elyssa Cameron, with a furry friend.

In 2011, this led me to pursue an undergraduate degree at McGill University in Environmental Biology, specializing in wildlife. Here I learned the skills and thought processes that would help guide me on my journey. This is also where I feel in love with ecology and ecosystem dynamics. I was humbled by the enormous web of complexity which governs our world and sought to discover where exactly my interests lay. My search took me to South Africa, where I spent 3 week learning about wildlife management, game ranching, governance of national parks, and the challenges in maintaining healthy, safe, sustainable populations and ecosystems. It was during this trip that I realised that the management and conservation of any ecosystem needed to rest upon a solid understanding of the ecology of the system as well as the interactions of individual species, between different species and between species and their environment. Without this basic knowledge of how something works, one cannot hope to protect it.

With this newfound drive for management and conservation through a better understanding of ecosystem ecology, I signed on to do a Master’s project with Chris Buddle (McGill University) on arctic arthropods in 2014. Having never truly worked on insects and spiders before, I knew such an undertaking would be a challenge; but one that I was excited to take on! The aim of this project is to establish a more comprehensive long-term ecological monitoring program in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, by linking patterns of vegetation and habitat diversity to arthropod diversity. In this way, we can examine the arctic ecosystem in a more complete way and not as a series of individual pieces. This will allow for more effective management in this rapidly changing ecosystem and will hopefully provide more predictive power for models and policies.

However, to obtain these baseline conditions, we must first collect the data. This took me on my second great adventure – a summer in Canada’s high arctic! For those of you who have not yet experienced the vast and diverse beauty of Canada, it is something I cannot recommend enough. But be forewarned, there are LOTS of bugs – which was great for the Bug Team! Working in association with CHARS (Canadian High Arctic Research Station) the Bug Team was part of a unit of researchers set on better understanding the arctic ecosystem and promoting interdisciplinary collaboration. We sampled spiders, flies, beetles, wasps and others to try and get the most complete view of the species diversity and community structure as we could in such a short summer.

Elyssa’s Arctic Adventures!

While there, we also did a number of community outreach programs to try and get the locals interested in science. We participated in a science night, made insect and butterfly collections to leave at the high school and Sarah Loboda (one of my wonderful lab mates!) organized day camp activities for the kids.

Now back at McGill, I spend most of my days in the lab looking through a microscope. With the general sorting of samples now complete, I am about to embark on my biggest challenge yet: species identifications! Both scary and exciting; but with the great support system here, I’m not worried.

As of January, I will also be co-supervising an intern from the Vanier Wildlife Technicians program with Chris Cloutier (the lab’s resident mosquito expert).

Meet the lab: Sarah Loboda

November 20, 2014 / Chris Buddle / 1 Comment

This is the second in a series of posts that will introduce the members of the arthropod ecology lab. This one is about Sarah Loboda:

I am not one of those people who can reflect back on my childhood with memories of chasing butterflies with a net. Instead, I could be found shouting loudly when seeing a spider in the bathtub. Things change… today I study community ecology of Arctic arthropods, and have a deep passion for arthropod of all kinds, from spiders to butterflies and flies.

Sarah, with a butterfly net.

My interest in entomology began as a challenge, and I love challenges! When I was an undergrad at Université du Québec à Rimouski, Québec, a tackled the big challenge of learning to identify insects. During my undergrad, I participated in several research projects where I could encounter biodiversity of insects and spiders and I developed a curiosity and a fascination about arthropods, particularly those living in extreme Arctic environments. Arthropods are ectotherms, yet they survive, year-round, in a region where the climate is very harsh. I quickly realized that the taxonomy was not the only interesting aspect in entomology. I wanted to identify arthropods in order to do research on community ecology. During the final year of undergrad in Rimouski, I decided to do a research project on the community ecology of spiders in salt marshes. As part of this project, I met Chris Buddle who encouraged my passion for entomology and the Arctic and I was lucky to do a Master’s project on spiders in the Canadian North as part of the Northern Biodiversity Program.

I take all opportunities to do outreach, and talk about insects and spiders with anyone who is interested. I am also involved in different societies, including the Entomological Society of Canada, and the Entomological Society of Québec, for which I’m the student representative. I love to volunteer and organize activities for members. Being the mother of two children, I also like to share my passion about arthropods with my kids, their friends and classmates in schools or daycares.

Sarah in front of her awesome poster at an Entomological Society of Canada meeting. This poster was a runner-up for a prize!

I have just started the second year of my Ph.D. I work with the veritable goldmine of data that has been collected from Zackenberg (northeast Greenland), where a long term monitoring program of arctic biodiversity has existed since 1996. My primary research objective is to assess temporal changes of the Arctic fly communities in this region, using the Muscidae and Phoridae families as model study taxa. The second objective of my research project will be to assess phenotypic and genetic changes over the last two decades in two species of Arctic muscids from Zackenberg. For this project, I am co-supervised by Jade Savage, a muscids expert from Bishop’s University, and Toke Høye from Aarhus University.

What is the motivation for pursuing graduate school?

October 8, 2014October 8, 2014 / Chris Buddle / Leave a comment

Last week an interesting hashtag was floating around twitter: #whyididaphd. It was great to see reflections on this topic, and during our most recent lab meeting, I asked my students why they were pursuing advanced research-based degrees, and here are some of their responses:

Graduate school allows an opportunity for freedom to do the things you find interesting, every day.
Doing research means you can follow your interests and curiosity.
Doing a MSc is a perfect transition between an undergraduate degree and whatever might come next!
Doing research is an opportunity to work independently, and this is important to me.
Research is about gaining knowledge and learning on your own. It’s like the best kind of drug: you can get hooked and it’s good for you, and it never ends.
Graduate school develops my network of collaborators, and I need this as I enter the work force.
I want to do things that are relevant, and are my ‘own’. Research allows this.
Doing an advanced degree was an important career stage, because I need it in order to do what I really want to do into the future (i.e., academic position).

These reflections were insightful, and showed that the students had wonderful motivations for pursing advanced degrees in a research-based laboratory. I agree that doing a MSc or PhD is perfect for people who are curiosity-driven, and who appreciate the independent nature of the work.

I had two responses to #whyididaphd. The first one certainly reflects my thinking now:

Screen Shot 2014-10-08 at 1.12.23 PM

The second response is a little more honest, and reflects my thinking at the time I decided to continue with research, about 20 years ago:

Screen Shot 2014-10-08 at 1.13.21 PM

Is it wrong to pursue a MSc or PhD “just because there’s nothing better to do”, or “because I don’t have another plan and I like University”? We had a heated debate about this, and the lab was divided. One argument is that it’s a total waste of time, energy, money and resources to pursue a MSc or PhD “just because”. Sure it’s nice to stay in a University after the undergrad degree is done, but why pursue it unless you know you need that advanced degree! Have a plan, have a career goal, and if a MSc or PhD is part of that plan, pursue graduate school.

In contrast, if you don’t have a plan, or a specific career in mind, perhaps graduate school is the *perfect* place to develop your research skills in an exciting, and familiar environment. Graduate school is a perfect transition to many, many careers, so if there is nothing else on your horizons, keep on trucking along at a University! If you are a curious person, and independent thinker, it’s an ideal learning environment.

I suspect many people fall somewhere in the middle (I think that was the case for me). I always felt I might eventually like a career at a University, and since I seemed to like research, and be good at it, pursuing graduate school was a natural progression. So, even if the motivations for doing graduate school aren’t always based on a clear career path, those motivations can still be more than enough to give it a try.

I’ll finish by expanding that last point: “give it a try” does not mean “stick with it even when it’s not working”. It’s important to know when to quit if grad school is not for you. It’s an awfully difficult and frustrating process if it’s not going well. Give it a try if it floats your boat, or it’s what you need. However, also know when to quit.

Meet the lab: Crystal Ernst

September 19, 2014September 19, 2014 / Chris Buddle

This is the first in a series of posts where each Arthropod Ecology lab member can introduce themselves. First up is PhD student Crystal Ernst:

I’m a Ph.D. candidate in the final stages of my program: these days I’m crunching out analyses and writing papers as I prepare to submit my thesis at the end of the term. As a community ecologist, I spend a lot of time thinking about how and why different species assemble together in space and time. These questions are foundational to the study of ecology and provide the overall framework for my research program, which uses beetles and other ground-dwelling arthropods to study the structure and determinants of terrestrial animal assemblages.

PhD student Crystal Ernst installing pan traps along the Dempster Highway (Yukon)

I have spent my summers conducting field research in gorgeous, remote regions of our northern territories, including Kugluktuk Nunavut and the Dempster Highway in the Yukon. My colleagues, members of the Northern Biodiversity Program, have contributed to the collection efforts as well, resulting in specimens being obtained from twelve different locations in the boreal forest, the subarctic and high arctic, spanning Canada coast to coast. I’m now neck-deep in the joy of interpreting the stories contained in my collection of specimens.

Specimens in pan trap (photo by C Ernst)

Sorting specimens back in the lab

I’ve taken two approaches with this work. First, I’ve used a fairly traditional taxonomic approach to studying these animals: by identifying them morphologically (with a microscope and identification keys), I can associate each individual with a known insect species – although some new species have also been discovered! With this information I can describe the species richness (diversity) and distributions of different beetles in the north, and see which species are associated with each other at different northern locations. Secondly, I’ve looked at my arthropods from the perspective of their ecological functions – their roles in their environments. For example, some insects are responsible for pollenating plants, others are important decomposers, and others still are predators; arthropod assemblages can therefore be described in terms of the diversity and dominance of different functional groups. I am in the process of comparing taxonomic and functional assemblages found across northern Canada, and working to determine what aspects of their ecosystems (things like: temperature, wind, and sunlight; the diversity and structure of the plant community in which they live; soil characteristics) are associated with the way these assemblages are structured, and how they change over time and across space.

Three color morphs of Blethisa catenaria, a rare subarctic species (H. Goulet)

A fun complementary topic I’ve researched is the relationships between some high arctic ground beetles and a fascinating group of parasites called hairworms. I found a number of beetles from different locations to be infested with these worms; in one instance almost a quarter of the beetles were infected! The parasites are aquatic as adults and must first infect an aquatic insect (like a mosquito larva) before being transmitted to a terrestrial host (like a beetle) via the predation of the aquatic host by the terrestrial insect. To complete their life cycles, the worms somehow compel the beetles to enter the water, effectively forcing them to drown themselves so that the worms can emerge safely into their aquatic habitat. This discovery suggests an important link between the creatures living in terrestrial habitats and those in aquatic habitats and tells us about the arctic food chain: beetles must be eating mosquitos or other insects that have aquatic larval/immature stages. These prey items may, in fact, be a very important source of food. More work needs to be done to confirm this! In the meantime, I am excited to have found these associations – the fact that these particular species of beetles can be hosts for hairworm parasites is new information, and it appears that the parasite itself is a new species!

Pterostichus caribou with hairworms (C. Ernst)

When I’m not writing my thesis or putting obscure little black beetles on pins, you can probably find me working at McGill’s Teaching and Learning Services, enjoying my time as a teaching assistant, networking on Twitter, mucking around in my vegetable garden (or putting said veggies in jars), walking my dogs, enjoying nature while canoe tripping with my partner, poking wildlife, or lifting heavy things at the gym. I’m on the hunt for a fantastic postdoctoral position that will allow me to continue studying different communities of living things in other ecosystems, and that factors that affect how they’re put together, and I’m excited about the many opportunities out there!

Meet the 2014 Arthropod Ecology Lab!

September 5, 2014 / Chris Buddle / 1 Comment

Welcome back to the new Academic term! We had our first lab meeting yesterday, and made sure to run outside to get a “Start of year” lab photo:

The Arthropod Ecology Lab (2014)

From left to right we are: Yifu Wang, Anne-Sophie Caron, Sarah Loboda, Shaun Turney, Chris Buddle, Elyssa Cameron, Jessica Turgeon, Crystal Ernst, Etienne Normandin, and Chris Cloutier. (missing is Dorothy Maguire)

We are smiling for good reason: September brings enthusiasm, and optimism. We are ready to have an exciting year. Learning from each other, doing science, and sharing our passion for arthropods. This year, this blog will hopefully host a lot of news from the lab, and will include posts from many of the students. Starting next week, we will roll out “Meet the lab” posts, where each student will write a short post about themselves, and about their projects. Stay tuned!

The effect of insecticides on jumping spider personalities

November 26, 2013 / Chris Buddle / 2 Comments

This post was written by C. Buddle and R. Royaute (a PhD student in the Arthropod Ecology lab).

We are pleased to announce a recent publication from our lab, titled Interpopulation variations in behavioral syndromes of a jumping spider from insecticide-treated and insecticide-free Orchards. As is traditional in the lab, here’s a plain language summary of the work:

Agriculture has strongly intensified in the last 60 years, causing major concerns the sustainability of biodiversity. Agricultural practices can reduce habitats available for wildlife and also release toxins in the environment through the use of pesticides. Not all organisms living in agricultural fields are harmful, and many predators, including spiders, can help to reduce pest density. We have a relatively good knowledge that the diversity of spider species in agriculture, especially under our temperate latitudes, can help reduce pest damage. However, many of the factors that influence spider predation on pests depend on the outcome of behavioural interactions and we don’t know much about that topic. Spiders are often cannibalistic and aggressive with one another and these types of behaviours may limit their efficiency for pest control. We also need to understand if these aggressive tendencies vary depending on the type of agricultural field considered, a pesticide treated field may favour very different behaviours than one that is managed organically. Another important point is that populations are composed by a multitude of individuals, each with its own behavioural tendencies. Some individuals take more risks when confronted with predators (i.e. they are more bold), others are more active and explore larger areas or consume more prey. These tendencies - often referred to as personality traits - may also be correlated with one another.

In the context of agriculture, this may mean that certain individual spiders may contribute more to biocontrol because they consume more prey, or that certain individuals are more at risk of being in contact with pesticides because they are more active. To understand, how agricultural practices, and particularly insecticidal applications, affects personality and behavioural syndromes in spiders, we focused on the jumping spider Eris militaris, an abundant and charming jumping spider occurring in apple orchards in Quebec. Here’s a lovely photo from Crystal Ernst to illustrate how attractive they are: (thanks, Crystal, for permission to post the photo here!)

We collected spiders from pesticide-treated and pesticide-free orchards, brought them back to the laboratory, and did a number of behavioural tests on the individuals from the two populations. Compared to the insecticide-free populations, we document that individuals from orchards that did receive insecticides experienced a shift in their behaviours syndromes. The overall shape of this syndrome is multidimensional, but it suffices to say that the correlations among different behaviours (the ‘syndromes’, otherwise known as the ‘personality’) differed depending on where the population came from.

A ‘mirror test’ - used to study behaviour in E. militaris (photo by R. Royaute)

In sum, the personality shifts that we documented for E. militaris are potentially quite important since the relationships between different behaviours may affect a spider’s ability to be an effective generalist predator in apple orchards. We need to consider how management (including use of insecticides) may affect specific behaviours, and more importantly, the relationships between the different behaviours.

Reference

Royaute, R., C.M. Buddle & C. Vincent. 2013. Interpopulation Variations in Behavioral Syndromes of a Jumping Spider from Insecticide-Treated and Insecticide-Free Orchards. Ethology. doi: 10.1111/eth.12185

Arthropod Ecology Mission Statement

October 9, 2013 / Chris Buddle / 5 Comments

Last week, during our laboratory meeting, we worked to develop a laboratory mission statement. My real inspiration for this came from my friend and colleague Elena Bennett - she also got me connected to Jessica Hellmann’s excellent post on the topic. A mission statement is really just a way to clearly define who we are, what we do, and why we do the sorts of things that we do. From a research laboratory’s point of view, the goal of the exercise is (in part) to help all members of the laboratory feel part of something bigger. Something that has broad relevance to a community that extends far beyond the walls of our institution, and far beyond the boundaries of our own specific research projects.

As Jessica states clearly in her post, a Mission Statement “…is a description of the purpose for your organization, primarily as it now is and/or will be within the next few years. A good mission statement should accurately explain why your organization exists and what it hopes to achieve in the near future. It articulates the organization’s essential nature, its values, and its work. The statement should resonate with the people working in and for the organization, as well as with the different constituencies that the organization hopes to affect. It must express the organization’s purpose in a way that inspires commitment, innovation, and courage.”. A mission statement should be short, easily remembered, jargon-free, proactive, and readable to people outside of our organization.

Here’s what we did to come up with our (draft) statement:

1) We each wrote down a few words or a short sentence on an index card. We tried to write things that we felt described what the laboratory does in a broader sense (i.e. beyond our own specific interests). Here’s an example:

2) We mixed up these cards and each person took someone else’s card. We then went around the table and read what was on the cards. This allowed us a terrific jumping off point for the discussion and generated the necessary words and ideas.

3) The ‘scribe’ (in this case, it was me) wrote down each descriptive word (in our case, things like ‘arthropods‘, ‘human disturbance‘, ‘biodiversity‘ came up a lot), and as a group, we wrote down some verbs to help us think about the ‘action’ that we take with the things we do. Here, verbs like ‘explore‘, ‘quantify‘, ‘share’ came up a lot.

4) We wrote the mission statement - in two parts. (a) We tried to provide a few sentence of context, and to ground our laboratory in the ‘why‘ and the ‘what‘; (b) We wrote a few sentence of ‘how‘ we do our research.

5) Edit, edit, edit. This was done during the lab meeting, but also over email

Here’s the end result:

Mission Statement:

Arthropods (insects, spiders and their relatives) comprise most of the known biodiversity on the planet. Human activities are rapidly changing our environment, from climate change to landscape fragmentation and urbanization, with unknown consequences for local and global biodiversity. Arthropods have profound effects on ecosystem function, human health, goods and services, and culture. Our well-being is connected to this “smaller majority”, yet we know little about where they live, what they do, and how their diversity is changing. In our laboratory we: 1) Quantify patterns of terrestrial arthropod biodiversity across a suite of ecosystems, over a range of spatial and temporal scales; 2) Explore how arthropods respond to and are affected by human-induced environmental changes; 3) Investigate the interaction between arthropods and ecological processes; 4) Share our knowledge, ideas, and passion about arthropods.

How did we do? We would love your feedback on this.

Here are a few thoughts and reflections:

This was a very worthwhile process - it was an amazing discussion and gave as opportunity to really delve into areas that were well beyond our individual research interests.
I have always believed that ‘patterns in terrestrial arthropod biodiversity’ was really what I spend my research time thinking about; it’s good that the collaborative process of developing a mission statement ended up reflecting that!
Any specific habitat (e.g., canopy systems, the Arctic), or even any type of arthropod (e.g., beetles, spiders) never remained in our final mission statement. This is terrific, and shows well that the laboratory has diverse interests, but more importantly, that we encourage research in different places and with different model taxa.
Yes, jargon remains. This is difficult. We agreed, as a laboratory, that our mission statement would be aimed at a ‘scientifically literate’ audience.
I’m an ecologists and we do ecology, yet that word did not end up in the final product. Curious.
We ALL agreed about the importance of ‘sharing’ and engagement with a broader audience -many of us do various kinds of outreach, from blogs and tweets to volunteering to talk about insects in local elementary schools. I was extremely pleased and proud that our laboratory sees this is a core activity.

This process if far from over: the next step is a “Vision Statement“. As Jessica points out, a Mission statement is more about what we “do” and why, whereas a Vision Statement “...looks at least five years into the future and defines a future state. It is an articulation of a world that the organization and people are working toward, not what is expected to happen now“. Ok, that’s a task for a future lab meeting!

(BIG thanks to my amazing laboratory for helping develop a mission statement)

It’s a wrap! How about a thesis on Arctic spiders? How about two of them…?

May 29, 2013 / Chris Buddle / 4 Comments

This week I am thrilled to report that two of my MSc students have successfully completed their degrees! Both the projects are part of the collaborative Northern Biodiversity Program - a project aimed to quantify and understand ecological change with Arthropods from Canada’s north.

A BIG congratulations to Sarah Loboda and Katie Sim - they are both tremendously talented students, excellent Arachnologists, and wonderful people to know. Last night we had our annual Lab BBQ - and at that event, I was pleased to give Sarah and Katie a small token of appreciation. Here’s a photo showing them both with their wolf spider photographs (photos by the incredible Thomas Shahan):

Katie Sim (l) and Sarah Loboda (r) - successful MSc students!

Katie Sim (left) and Sarah Loboda (right) - successful (& happy) MSc students!

Sarah Loboda’s thesis is titled Multi-scale patterns of ground-dwelling spider (Araneae) diversity in northern Canada. Her research focused on broad diversity patterns of ground-dwelling spiders collected from our 12 study sites, spread across Canada’s north. Our project spanned 30 degrees of latitude and 80 degrees of longitude -> yes that is a lot of land area! Sarah identified over 300 spider species from 14 families, and over 23,000 individuals. Publications are forthcoming so I won’t give details here, except to say that we can learn a lot about diversity patterns over broad spatial scales using a study taxon such as spiders.

Here’s where the Northern Biodiversity Program took our field teams.

Katie’s work (co-supervised by Prof. Terry Wheeler) had a different slant, but was still on Arctic spiders. Her thesis is titled: Genetic analysis of Pardosa wolf spiders (Araneae: Lycosidae) across the northern Nearctic. The first part of Katie’s thesis was about understanding the phylogeographic history of the Arctic spider Pardosa glacialis, with particular attention to post-glacial dispersal patterns, as inferred by population genetics. The second part of her thesis was focused on whether or not there is enough evidence to suggest two northern Pardosa species should remain as separate species, or be merged into one - based on both molecular and morphological characters. Let’s just say that Katie had to be a ‘field genius‘, ‘lab genius‘ and ‘spider genitalia genius‘. Here’s an example of what she looked at, a lot:

The epigynum of a wolf spider species, (part of) the topic of Katie’s research.

In sum, I am thrilled to see Sarah and Katie finish up their work, although their success also comes with a touch of sadness, as I will miss their daily presence in the laboratory. Stay tuned… we shall soon report all the details from their research.

Seasonality of Arctic Beetles

March 26, 2013 / Chris Buddle / 4 Comments

I’m excited to report on paper written by Crystal Ernst, PhD student in my lab, and well known as the “Bug Geek“. This paper is a product of the Northern Biodiversity Program (yes, it sure is great that the papers from this project are starting to appear!), and will be one of Crystal’s PhD thesis chapters. The paper is titled Seasonal patterns in the structure of epigeic beetle (Coleoptera) assemblages in two subarctic habitats in Nunavut, Canada

A very nice Arctic beetle! (photo by C. Ernst, reproduced here with permission)

Here’s a plain-language summary of the work:

Although we often think of Arctic systems as cold and lifeless, Canada’s tundra habitats are home to a high diversity of arthropods (insects, spiders and their relatives). Beetles are important insects on the tundra - filling ecological roles as predators (feeding on other insects), herbivores (feeding on plants), mycophages (feeding on fungi), and necrophages (feeding on dead or decaying animals). In this research, we wanted to find out what happens to ground-dwelling Arctic beetles as a function of seasonality. We were curious about whether different species occurred at different times during the short Arctic summer, and whether the functions of the beetles changes over the summer. This is an important area of study because beetles perform important ecological functions, and knowing how these functions change over time may have broader implications for northern ecosystems. This is especially relevant in the Arctic since these systems have a short ‘active season’, and climate change is disproportionally affecting northern latitudes. If climate change alters an already short summer, what might happen to the beetles?

This research was done as part of the Northern Biodiversity Program (NBP) - a broad, integrative project about the diversity of insects and spiders across northern Canada. The NBP involved collecting samples at 12 sites in the Arctic, but at one of these sites (Kugluktuk, in Nunavut) we had an opportunity to do a more detailed collection over the entire summer of 2010. This involved setting out traps for the entire active season, from June through to August. These traps were plastic containers sunk into the ground - beetles that wander along the tundra fall unawares into these traps, which contain preservatives, and are trapped until a researcher collects the samples. Traps were placed in wet and (relatively) dry habitats so that we could compare the two habitats. After the collections were returned to our laboratory, the beetles were identified to species, counted, and the biomass of the beetles was estimated - biomass lets us determine what happens to the ‘amount of beetles’ on the tundra in addition to figuring out ‘how many’ (abundance) and ‘what kind’ (species) were in the traps. The beetles were also classified into their key ecological roles. The data were then compared as a function of when traps were serviced to let us assess what happens to beetles as a function of seasonality.

We collected over 2500 beetles, representing 50 different species - remarkably, 17 of these species represented new Territorial records. This means that 17 of the species that were identified had never before been recorded in all of Nunavut! Although many ecological functions were represented by the beetles we collected, most were predators. We documented that wet habitats had different kinds of beetle species than the drier tundra habitats, even though the actual number of species between the habitats did not differ. We also uncovered a seasonal affect on the functions of beetles in the system - as the season progressed, the beetles tended to be represented more by predators compared to earlier in the season, which was dominated by beetles representing a diversity of functions. The mean daily temperature also related to the seasonal change that was observed in the beetles.

PhD student Crystal Ernst, happily working on the Arctic tundra.

This work is one of the first to carefully quantify how beetles change during short Arctic summers. We found a diverse assemblage of beetles, filling a range of ecological roles. These ecological roles, however, do not stay the same all summer long, and the shifts in the beetles were related to mean daily temperature. Given that Arctic systems will be significantly affected by climate change, this is worrisome - if temperatures increase, or become more variable, this may affect ecosystem functions that are mediated by beetles. This is more evidence supporting the need to track climate change in the Arctic, and play close attention to the small animals of the tundra.

Reference:

Ernst, C., & Buddle, C. (2013). Seasonal patterns in the structure of epigeic beetle (Coleoptera) assemblages in two subarctic habitats in Nunavut, Canada The Canadian Entomologist, 145 (02), 171-183 DOI: 10.4039/tce.2012.111

Arthropod Ecology

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