Archivos de Diario para agosto 2023

19 de agosto de 2023

Cynipini and Associates Larval Sequencing Pilot Study

We have an exciting opportunity coming up in the world of oak gall research!

TL;DR: we're looking for volunteers to collect oak wasp galls, put them in a sealed container, label them clearly and carefully, and mail them within 2-3 days to:

Andrew Forbes
The University of Iowa
434A Biology Building
Iowa City, IA 52242

Long version:

If you’ve posted many gall observations by now, there’s a good chance I’ve asked you to return to a site to collect a gall and rear adults. Rearing adults of the inducing wasp is important because it’s the only way taxonomists can describe an unknown species. We’ve had a remarkable amount of success with this so far, and I was able to bring dozens of specimens reared by iNat users to taxonomists this July at the International Gall Symposium thanks to those efforts.

But if you’ve been involved in this process, you know that rearing has a ton of failure points. You might not know the gall is worth collecting until you leave the site. You don’t know when the gall will be mature enough to viably collect. The gall could mold or dry out or you might rear parasitoids or inquilines instead of the inducer.

For this new project, we don’t have to worry about any of that. The goal is to study the whole community at each point in time using genetic sequencing of larvae. We’re trying to determine when different species show up in galls and which species of parasitoid and inquiline are associated with which inducers. In other words, no more waiting and no need to rear (we will still want to rear plenty of things but galls collected too early or too late to rear inducers are now valuable too).

We are currently working on a grant proposal that will get us some funds to support this work in the lab and in the field for the next few years. This fall, we’re conducting a pilot study to find issues and opportunities in the workflow we hope to expand in the grant. Here’s what we’d like you to do, starting now and extending into Gall Week (9/2-10) and beyond.

Collect oak galls and place them in a sealed container so they don’t dry out (ziploc bags work, or a plastic condiment cup with a lid). If the gall is detachable you can remove it from the plant; if it’s integral, you can either put the whole leaf or host tissue or cut as needed to fit in your container. Ideally each container should contain only one gall species, but multiple galls of a species can go together if they share a host, date, and location.
Label each distinct collection with the following information:
iNat observation number
Host tree species
Location (including lat/long)
Date of collection
Collector name

Within 2-3 days of collection, place them in a padded envelope or small box and mail them to this address
Andrew Forbes
The University of Iowa
434A Biology Building
Iowa City, IA 52242

If you can’t get the galls mailed out in a short timeframe and are confident/curious to try it, you can also dissect the larvae out yourself and put them in 0.5-2 mL vials (eg) of 95% ethanol and store them in the freezer. If there are people who are willing to consolidate collections and do this dissection in bulk, let me know and we can mail vials prefilled with ethanol to you.

DO NOT put dry galls in the freezer--this will destroy the larvae and make it impossible to preserve them for shipment. It may be possible to keep the fresh galls in the fridge to keep the larvae alive longer to consolidate a larger shipment collected over several days, but we haven’t experimented with this. It would be valuable if someone wanted to try it.

It’s your responsibility to make sure that you collect only where it is legally permissible to do so--make sure you avoid collecting in National Parks or similar locations. Most municipal parks should be fine but it’s always good to double check. Use your judgment in terms of collection effort, but generally speaking your ability to affect populations of these insects is negligible.

If anyone is planning to organize any events for Gall Week, you could consolidate collections and make a single shipment from your area, which would save a lot of money overall. Broadly speaking, if you are going to make a shipment, it would make sense to try to collect enough galls of enough species to make it worth the postage.

In terms of priorities: I’ve made a few posts in the past about things I’m especially interested in, but really there are just too many species and generations to list. Anything listed as “Undescribed” on gallformers.org is a top priority and we can’t get too many. A few of the most common species (all the Belonocnema species, Bassettia pallida, and Druon quercuslanigerum on live oak, Amphibolips confluenta and Philonix fulvicollis in the eastern US) are no longer needed, but many other very abundant galls are still of interest. Generally speaking, err on the side of assuming that something is worth collecting, unless you have a specific plan to do something else with it later.

I’m unfortunately not going to have a ton of time to guide everyone on this individually, so I’m hoping that this project provides the space for new and existing members of the wonderful gall community to take initiative on their own and to support each other. That said, feel free to tag me or message me with questions and I’ll try to help.

You can also tag Dr Forbes at @aforbes10 or contanct him by email at andrew-forbes@uiowa.edu or tag Guerin Brown at @moneykittens. They'll be the ones receiving and processing your specimens.

Publicado el 19 de agosto de 2023 a las 05:59 AM por megachile megachile | 12 comentarios | Deja un comentario

21 de agosto de 2023

Cynipini Larval Sequencing Project

Hi (North American) gall hunters!

Every year for gall week, you all go out and find a ton of interesting galls, including many undescribed and understudied species. Most of the time, there's no easy path to making scientific use of those specimens. This year, we have an opportunity to make use of a large proportion of what you might find. Gallformers.org is partnering with the Forbes Lab at the University of Iowa and the Prior Lab at Binghamton University on a grant to study the oak gall wasp community in North America. This fall we're hoping to conduct a pilot study to test the procedure we hope to use over the next few years. The goal of the study is to barcode sequence all of the inducer, inquiline, and parasitoid larvae present in oak galls over the course of their development, so any gall inhabitant and any developmental stage is valuable.

If you're interested in participating, you can start collecting immediately--you don't need to wait for gall week. In fact, we're hoping to spread the arrivals out across the season. Feel free to get started now or wait until after gall week, whatever suits your schedule.

What we're asking you to do is this:

Find oak wasp (cynipini) galls on oaks and document them (and their host oak) on iNat

Collect galls and put them in a sealed container (ziploc, plastic cup with lid, etc)

Label each collection with its iNat record, collector name, collection date, location, and host tree species

Within 2-3 days of collection, mail to the Forbes lab:

Andrew Forbes
The University of Iowa
434A Biology Building
Iowa City, IA 52242

In the interest of economizing on postage, it would be ideal to send fewer packages with more galls instead of many packages with fewer galls. We don't have funds to pay for shipping this year (that would be part of the grant, if we get it), so it will be up to you to decide how you want to approach that. Just know that if you wait too long, the larvae we're looking for may not arrive intact.

If you're planning to host a gall week event, we'd love to have you consolidate a shipment of collections made by participants before and during that event.

If you want to make collections over a longer period and not mail them immediately, you are also welcome to dissect the galls yourself and preserve any larvae you find in 95% ethanol and store them in your freezer until shipment. We can potentially send you vials already filled with ethanol if you are interested in doing this. As always, just make sure they are clearly labelled.

DO NOT freeze galls or larvae dry; this will kill them and make it impossible to ship them intact.

As always, it’s your responsibility to make sure that you collect only where it is legally permissible to do so--make sure you avoid collecting in National Parks or similar locations. Most municipal parks should be fine but it’s always good to double check. Use your judgment in terms of collection effort, but generally speaking your ability to affect populations of these insects is negligible.

If you have questions, you can reply here, or tag Dr Forbes at @aforbes10 or contact him by email at andrew-forbes@uiowa.edu or tag Guerin Brown at @moneykittens. They'll be the ones receiving and processing your specimens. More info is available here: https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/megachile/83377-cynipini-and-associates-larval-sequencing-pilot-study

If you have any feedback about this procedure in advance or as you put it into action, please let us know. Working out the kinks of this process is our main goal this year.

Thank you all--looking forward to seeing what you all find!

Publicado el 21 de agosto de 2023 a las 03:45 AM por megachile megachile | 15 comentarios | Deja un comentario