Our big day is tomorrow

Tomorrow, Saturday April 22, from 10 AM – 4 PM we will open our doors and welcome all of you to visit our hidden treasures in the natural history collections of The Ohio State University. Stop by and talk to the curators who meticulously keep these specimens and make them available to students and researchers for study throughout the year. This is your chance each year to see what we do and to support our efforts.

The event is FREE and so is parking. We will have many activities for children including face painting, the very popular bugs-in-goo, a live arthropod zoo … and this year new, for anyone over 15 years, guided sessions on scientific illustration, drawing natural history specimens.

Enjoy some photos from last year events

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The set-up for tomorrow is in full swing, here is what I have seen so far

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About the Author: Angelika Nelson is curator of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics and coordinates social media and outreach at the museum.

*** We hope to see you tomorrow ***

Know your ticks: Ohio

Daffodils are in bloom, students walk around in shorts and T-shirts, so it must be the beginning of tick season.  And indeed, the first ticks are out and questing (= searching for a host). This might be a good time to talk about ticks in Ohio.  Ohio is not a major center for tick diversity, but it has some diversity.  Most people only know the three main people biters, Dermacentor variabilis (American dog tick), Amblyomma americanum (lone star tick), and Ixodes scapularis (deer tick), so let’s start with these:

Dermacentor variabilis is perhaps the most widespread and common tick in Ohio.  Immatures feed on rodents and other small animals, but adults feed on medium (opossums, raccoons, dogs) to large (humans) mammals.  Of the “big three” this species is the most tolerant of drying out, and the most likely to be encountered in open areas.  The main activity period for adults is mid-April – mid-July.  D. variabilis is the vector of, among others, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF) and tularemia.  Columbus used to be a focal area for RMSF, but the disease is less common now.  D. variabilis may also cause tick paralysis, although less frequently than the related D. andersoni from the Rocky Mountains region.

American dog tick

Dermacentor variabilis American dog tick

Amblyomma americanum used to be uncommon in southern Ohio, but has increased in numbers and range over the last decades.  This is part of a general trend.  In the eastern U.S., this species is rapidly expanding its range northwards.  All instars, larva, nymph, and adult feed on mid-size to large animals, incl. humans.  Like D. variabilis, females can deposit very large clutches of eggs, but in this case the resulting larvae often stay together.  If you are unlucky and step close to a mass of these “seed ticks”, you may be attacked by hundreds of ticks simultaneously.  These ticks are active in all warm months of the year.  Unlike D. variabilis, “Lone stars” are not common in open areas, preferring more shady and humid sites.  For a long time A. americanum was listed as vectoring few human diseases, but it has now been identified as vector of human monocytic ehrlichiosis and STARI, and possibly tularemia and Q-fever.

lone star tick

Amblyoma americanum lone star tick

Ixodes scapularis appears to be an even more recent resident.  This species was rare or absent in Ohio before 2010, but has now been found in a majority of Ohio counties.  The reason for this sudden expansion is unclear.  This is a relatively small species.  Larvae can be found in summer, nymphs late summer, and adults in fall and early spring.  Immatures tend to feed on smaller sized hosts, e.g. rodents, small birds, while adults prefer larger hosts, such as deer.  However, all instars may attach to humans.  Nymphs are considered the most problematic: they are small (thus often undetected), and can be infected with e.g. Lyme disease (unlike the even smaller larvae).  Like A. americanum, this species prefers shady, humid environments.  New subdivisions build in forests, resulting in large amounts of forest edges with lots of deer, have been a very good habitat for this tick in New England.  Ixodes scapularis has become famous as the vector for, among others, Lyme disease, human granulocytic anaplasmosis, and babesiosis.  Co-infection is common in New England and appears to result in increased pathology.

deer tick

Ixodes scapularis deer tick

So much for the common people biters.  It is important to note that most species of tick rarely if ever bite people.  They prefer different, usually smaller, hosts.  For example, Rhipicephalus sanguineus, the brown dog tick prefers feeding on dogs.  It is one of the few species that may occur indoors in dog kennels etc.  Haemaphylis leporispalustris appears to be specialized on hares and rabbits.  Several Ixodes species, I. cookei, I. dentatus, I. kingi, I. marxi, can be found on small to medium sized mammals, often associated with nests or burrows.  Finally, the so-called soft ticks, family Argasidae, are represented by only a single species in Ohio, Carios kelleyi, primarily found in bat colonies.

Find out more about the ticks’ life cycles and their diseases.

Dr. Hans Klompen, Professor EEOBiology at OSUAbout the Author: Dr. Hans Klompen is professor in the department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology and director of the Ohio State University Acarology Collection.

 

*** Have you found a tick yet this spring? send us a photo of your specimen on Facebook! ***

 

Teaching in the collections

Unlike the super heroes in popular movies, scientists don’t just wake up and suddenly have the power and knowledge of everything in their field. It takes tremendous work and studying for researchers or curators to get to where they are today. In the field of natural history, museums play a huge role in the establishment of a baseline of identification knowledge for students. The Ohio State University (OSU) students have the privilege of gaining hands-on-experience with the very species they may study in the future. The MBD provides a hands-on aspect to many of OSU’s “-ology” courses, with our teaching collections.

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What distinguishes a teaching collection from a scientific collection?

Scientific specimens hold valuable data. Typically, they will have a specific date or location when and where they were collected associated with them. Sometimes they may be the first described of their species, a state record, or from an expedition. These specimens are all unique and valuable to the scientific community. Therefore we tend to only use them for teaching when they are the only example available in our collection. Our goal is to make these scientific specimens last for centuries. If they are used for teaching and are handled regularly, they degrade quicker and may not be available for future research.

Specimens in a teaching collection typically do not have data associated with them. Instead, these specimens are chosen and prepared to be best representations of their species. Instead of having drawers with many individuals of the same species, specimens for a teaching collection are carefully chosen so that they represent a male and a female, a juvenile and an adult, winter and breeding plumage of a species. So if every specimen in a collection is individualistic and different looking why do our teaching collections only have a few representatives? The goal for a teaching collection is to show a general representation of a species. Students should be able to look at one or two specimens of a species, use what they have learned from those specimens, to identify living representations out in nature.

Who uses the teaching collections?

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The main value of a teaching collection is to further science education. The primary purpose of the OSU teaching is to educate OSU students. Courses such as Ohio Birds, Avian Wildlife Biology and Management, Mammalogy, and Herpetology use teaching specimens as hands-on tools to help students to become engaged in the classroom. Students also gain skills in understanding how natural history collections work. They have opportunities to contribute specimens to the collections, learn how skins are made, and learn the overall value of a collection. When not being used to educate OSU students, the teaching collection is also used for identification workshops at the museum, during tours, for outreach events, such as our annual Open House – coming up soon on April 22, 2017.

 

 

Stephanie Malinich, collection manager TetrapodsAbout the Author: Stephanie Malinich is Tetrapod Collection Manager at the Museum of Biological Diversity and research assistant in Dr. Andreas Chavez’ lab.

 

*** We would like to hear from you – please leave a comment ***

Interns on Internship


As we mentioned in our previous post, at the conclusion of the semester we asked our interns to share their impressions of the time they spent with us. We have taken the liberty of using some of their comments (highlighted in italics below) to provide a picture of their experience.

Insects are often thought of as the least appealing members of the taxonomic Kingdom Animalia. Even though most people recognize that they are, by definition, animals, people don’t like them as much as cuddly cats and dapper dolphins. Admittedly, this applies to myself as well.

This kind of impression is widespread and can be heard often. By providing a broad view of entomology we hope the interns developed a new perspective and will now write that last sentence in the past tense!

To our delight, all the interns came out of the internship with a better understanding of (and some experience on) the wide range of skills and knowledge needed in curatorial work.

Multiple tasks were laid before me throughout the semester, slowly building on previous knowledge and skills. … Originally, I had no idea how much time an entomologist may spend simply sitting in front of a computer. A portion of my time was spent databasing specimens, an important task allowing for collections to be easily found and identified. It has been made apparent how important this is when considering that millions of specimens fill the cabinets of the collection.”

“Through performing the … tasks, I was able to increase my knowledge of both the curation profession as well as the study of entomology in general”.

“… the only expectation I really had was that I would leave the internship having gained a lot of insect and museum-related knowledge that I had not had before. … this expectation was fulfilled with flying colors!”.

People have different styles of learning, and “doing” can often be more effective than listening or reading. The interns highlighted the importance of hands-on activities.

“… seeing the physical traits of different orders and families in person helped me to memorize these classifications for the General Entomology course, and gaining experience with pinning and labeling helped me to improve my collection project for the same course.”

“Whereas my entomology class was somewhat hard to grasp at times as a result of its lecture format, I found that hands-on activities (the same kind that are done by REAL curatorial staff in REAL museums) really ingrained a lot of the knowledge into my brain in a more profound way than surface-level memorization ever could.”



It is sometimes interesting to see how people react differently to the same task:

“I was able to further classify/identify the specimens by family using a taxonomic key. This exercise taught me how to use a key and how to look for specific features of insect physiology/morphology.”“Later came the classification by suborder and family, a grueling task using a key much like a personal narrative children’s book only with scientific terms and a lot of microscope adjusting. Though tedious and time consuming, I find it interesting to understand how such small characteristics may differentiate one insect family from another.”

Perhaps the most gratifying, though, was to see that at least a little taste of the fun and excitement that we find working with insects was also experienced by the interns:

“One of my favorite insects that I found while working in the collection was a cuckoo wasp, a very small organism but with brilliant colors that sparkle as if dipped in jewels. Everyway you turn the tiny hymenopteran, the colors seem to shift, ranging from a deep, rich blue to a bright metallic-like green with some splashes of vibrant red or orange. Not only is it beautiful but also to Dr. Musetti’s excitement it is a parasitoid wasp, laying eggs in a host species.”

Ceratochrysis perpulchra, OSUC 96424

Ceratochrysis perpulchra (Cresson), a beautiful cuckoo wasp specimen from the collection. ID# OSUC 96424. This is not the one that Ellen found, but similar. Ellen’s cuckoo wasp is still in the freezer, and will be used for DNA extraction.

Taking on an internship is a pretty serious commitment of time on the part of the student, and we hope that it turned out to be time well invested. We have all learned from the experience, and we will use what we have learned to continue to improve. Even if a professional job as curator is not in the interns’ future, at least we have made a contribution to a future taxpaying citizenry that will understand the whys and wherefores of an insect collection.

“The past ten weeks have been quite the eye opening experience for me. Science is tedious work that I am happy to tackle. I have learned things I did not know I was interested in, as well as things I may not want to spend the rest of my life doing. Not only has this internship helped me to understand what it takes to have a collection, but I also have a compelling experience that may help me stand out from the others when searching for a career in entomology.”

”Overall, I feel that this internship has been very beneficial to me as both a student and a person. It provided me with a better background in entomology, it showed me the importance of curatorial work, and it gave me workplace experience that will benefit me in future careers both inside and outside of entomology.”

”I was able to get a complete picture of what entomology is like in the museum world, which, to me, is the overarching purpose of the (internship) program itself.”


Snapshots of the interns’ lab notebooks:


2016 Interns:

  • Ellen Dunkle
  • Alexandria Ent
  • Hannah McKenzie

About the Authors: Dr. Natalia Munteanu Molotievskiy is an Entomologist and Guest Scholar, Dr. Luciana Musetti is an Entomologist and Curator, & Dr. Norman Johnson is Professor of Entomology and Director of the Triplehorn Insect Collection.

What We Learned From Our Insect Curation Internship


triplehorn-scarletbandLast semester we of the Triplehorn Insect Collection offered our first Insect Curation Internship. I was pleasantly surprised with the interest generated by it. There were over 380 visits to the internship announcement and 207 visits to my post “Internship, Volunteering or Job?” on this blog.  Fifty one (51) undergraduate students (of those 49 were women!) and 2 graduate students inquired about the internship. Of the 12 students interviewed we accepted 3 for the Fall 2016 internship. I also received requests for information from a few colleagues who are planning to offer similar internship activities in their collections and/or institutions. Here’s a summary of what we did.

Our overall goal was to provide OSU students, both graduate and undergraduate, with a structured, mentored, hands-on experience on collection curation techniques and the preparation of research quality insect specimens. Activities were planned specifically for the internship. Our requirements were simple: patience, attention to detail, good organizational skills and a minimum commitment of 5 hours/week for 10 weeks.

Interns received handouts containing our broad goals and specific objectives for the internship, and were asked to write down their own goals and expectations for the internship. At the end of the semester we did a two-way evaluation of the internship, from the perspective of the mentors and from the perspective of the interns. They also submitted a report of their activities and were asked to comment on what they thought of the internship.

From theory to practice

Interns received training on basic preparation standards and techniques used in insect collections, from sorting bulk samples to mounting and adding a label to the specimen, to entering the specimen information in the collection database. They worked on identification of the most common orders of insects and had the opportunity to take high resolution images of dry specimens. Weekly discussions involved broad topics of interest such as the importance of biological collections, why and how to deposit scientific vouchers in collections, challenges of long term preservation of collections, etc. Interns received handouts and/or electronic links to reading material related to our topics of discussion. Each intern kept a lab notebook with records of all their internship activities, with date, brief description of the activity, time spent on the activity, plus any difficulties they encountered, questions, etc. Those records served as the basis for their internship report, due on the closing day.

Challenges to offering an internship

Time:  A great deal of time went into the planning of the internship. We defined goals, developed activities, prepared handouts and tool kits. During the semester, we worked closely with the interns, individually and in groups, mentoring and evaluating their progress as we went along.

Space & Equipment:  We do not have much idle space or equipment in the collection. Work space allocation to accommodate both our working staff and our interns was one of our major concerns (and cause of stress) in the planning of the internship.

Credit where it’s due

Our three interns, Ellen Dunkle, Hannah McKenzie, and Alexandria Ent, were very diligent and focused. They set the bar high for future interns. I also want to acknowledge the terrific work done by our guest scholar, Dr. Natalia Munteanu Molotievskiy, who instructed the interns on general insect taxonomy and on recognition of Coleoptera families.

Sorting funOur goal is to repeat the internship offering in 2017 as we already have students interested. Watch for the announcement some time during spring and come learn how to build a top notch insect collection with us.

 


About the Author: Dr. Luciana Musetti is an Entomologist, Parasitoid Wasp Specialist, Curator of the Triplehorn Insect Collection. Find me @osuc_curator on Instagram and on Twitter

See the Seaweeds

As a scientist and curator, learning is a constant endeavor. Mix this with the continuous increase in knowledge about organismal relationships and classification, and training becomes critical to maintaining knowledge necessary to effectively curate collections in the OSU herbarium. Thus, I traveled, sixteen hours by car, to Eagle Hill Field Station in Steuben, Maine at the end of July 2016 to attend two, week-long courses, one of which was “Introduction to Maine Seaweeds: Identification, Ecology, and Ethnobotany.”

My reasons to take a course about seaweeds were two-fold: the OSU herbarium has a very small collection of seaweeds, or macro-algae, and I wanted to add to it. Secondly, I had very little experience collecting seaweeds, and thus sought to learn proper collection and curating techniques.

During the class, we spent about three hours each day collecting seaweeds at low tide. We collected along different types of shorelines near the Field Station.

Shorelines with large rocks and ledges are common near the Field Station (see below). The dark rocks closer to the water are covered with brown rock weeds. Large rock ledges occur at the water’s edge. At low tide near the rock ledges, the water is about chest high. Many different species of seaweeds, especially red algae, occur beneath the water surface attached to the sides of the large rocks. Large brown kelps, such as sugar kelp and winged kelp, are underwater and attached to rocks on the sandy bottom.

A typical rocky shoreline at low tide along the Maine coast near Eagle Hill Field Station.

A typical rocky shoreline at low tide along the Maine coast near Eagle Hill Field Station.

Rock weeds often cover the rocks from the high tide line to almost the water’s edge. The rock weeds are usually of two species: knotted wrack (Ascophyllum nodosum) and bladder wrack (Fucus vesiculosus). Both species are shown in the slide show below. Bladder wrack can be identified by paired air bladders (green bumps on the plant on the left side of the close-up photo of rock weeds). Knotted wrack possesses singularly arranged air bladders along the branches (inflated areas on the plant on the right side of the close-up photo of rock weeds). The creamy white bumps on the rock surfaces are barnacles that cover nearly every rock that receives water at high tide. Pools among the rocks are often havens for red algae, small shrimp, crabs and sand dollars.

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What an incredible experience! Where else could I spend an afternoon clambering over barnacle-covered rocks, poking my hands into pools and crevices looking for red, brown and green seaweed treasures.

A different type of shoreline that we visited is characterized at low tide by open, exposed sandy or gravelly bottoms that often have scattered rocks (see slideshow below). The water is often cloudy, and seaweeds that are attached to rocks beneath the water are difficult to see. The students were often seen strung along the shore, hoping to find a unique specimen in the cloudy water.

After collecting, we began the elaborate task of processing and pressing the seaweeds to create archival specimens by “floating” them onto herbarium paper before drying them in a plant press. On a photo in the slideshow below, one of the students is holding a jug with seawater. We used seawater in the lab to “float” the algae onto the herbarium paper. Tap water is not ever used, as it kills the algae and makes the specimens mushy.

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This is where I leave you until next time. Next time, look forward to meeting some of the seaweeds that I collected, but here is a teaser:

collection sheet of red alga, Devaleraea ramentacea

A collection of the red alga, Devaleraea ramentacea.

Above, each individual alga was “floated” and arranged on a herbarium sheet before drying in a plant press. The specimen was found underwater attached to rocky ledges that were partly exposed at low tide. I collected this alga by reaching underwater and feeling along a rock, choosing it because it felt different than the other algae around it. This species has a limited native distribution, found only along the northern Atlantic coast from Cape Cod to Labrador and Newfoundland.

About the Author:  Dr. Cynthia Dassler is curator of Cryptogams (small plants that produce spores) at The Ohio State Herbarium (OS) in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology.

All photos were taken by Nick Blouin.

 

Impacts of Rain Gardens on Urban Bird Diversity

Rain gardens have proven to be a useful tool to mitigate stormwater run-off in cities. They are depressions on the side of the road or sidewalk with plants that absorb rainfall and prevent water from picking up pollutants and carrying them to the nearest stream. The plants and soil also filter the water. But this is not the only service rain gardens provide, the diversity of plants used in them increases habitat for many animals. Many insects and spiders are drawn to the local plants and they in return attract birds and small mammals. Rain gardens can provide nice shelter for these animals too.

As part of project “BluePrint” the City of Columbus plans to install some 500 rain gardens in the Clintonville area to manage stormwater runoff. Dr. Jay Martin, Professor of Ecological Engineering at OSU joined the project to holistically quantify the impacts of stormwater green infrastructure on societal services such as stormwater management, public health, community behavior, economics, and wildlife habitat. Dr. Martin’s PhD student David Wituszynski focuses on the animal aspect and recently contacted the Borror lab to discuss his research idea. David wants to test the hypothesis that implementation of such a large network of rain gardens will increase the diversity of urban bird species.

SongMeter mounted (https://www.wildlifeacoustics.com)

SongMeter mounted (https://www.wildlifeacoustics.com)

Specifically, he wants to develop automated acoustic methods to track urban bird populations. He will deploy SongMeters, automated recordings units, and program them to record surrounding sounds at certain times of the day. It is easy to record thousands of hours of bird and insect sound, but one needs to analyze them afterwards and identify vocalizing species.

This takes us back to the problem of automated sound recognition raised in Monday’s post. Dr. Martin and David are collaborating with Don Hayford from Columbus Innovation Group who will develop techniques to filter out background noise (such as human voices, machinery, cars, barking dogs – all familiar sounds to our neighborhoods) and produce files of target sounds that can then be analyzed with existing software.

My role will be to provide reference sounds for the software as we need to train the software to recognize known vocalizations of local bird species. This is not an easy task because some bird species have quite varied vocalizations. Our large and diverse archive of sound recordings will come in handy, we have many recordings of local Ohio species. These should cover most of their diverse vocalizations. Our goal is to build classifiers that automatically recognize and label species in the recordings.

map of Clintonville area with proposed rain gardens (project BluePrint, Columbus OH)

Will you get a rain garden on your street? check this map

We have just submitted a grant application to help us fund some of this research. The first SongMeters will be deployed this fall and we will start monitoring the areas to get a baseline level of bird activity. Come spring the city will install rain gardens in the neighborhood and we can compare our recordings before and after the installation. This certainly is a multi-year project. We will keep you updated.

Should you see a rain garden in your neighborhood, take a picture and share it on social media #BLB #raingarden #songmeter!

 

Further resources:

The project BluePrint was featured in the Columbus Dispatch last January!

Learn more about rain gardens in Central Ohio!

 

About the Author: Angelika Nelson is the curator of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics at OSU and Co-PI on the project “Determining Impacts of Rain Gardens on Urban Bird Diversity” with Dr. Jay Martin, David Wituszynski and collaborator Don Hayford.

The holy grail of sound recognition: a birdsong recognition app

Listen to the cacophony of bird sounds at dawn. Does it make you want to be able to tell which species chime in? Wouldn’t it be nice to have an app “listen” with you and list all the bird species that are vocalizing? You are not alone, this is what researchers have been and are still working on. If you are somewhat familiar with bird song, you can imagine that it is not an easy task. Every species has its own characteristic sounds. But even within a species every individual most likely sings more than one rendition of the species-specific song and does so with variations.

Listen to the songs of the Yellow Warbler, Chestnut-sided Warbler and Yellow-throated Warbler, three species in the wood warbler family, that commonly sing in Ohio in spring.

Here is an example of two different song types sung by the same Yellow Warbler male:

Training software

To develop a bird song recognition app, software needs to be trained with real bird songs. An animal sound archive that houses thousands of recordings is an ideal resource for this endeavor. The Borror lab has provided many of our 47,000+ recordings to different researchers. Recently, Dr. Peter Jančovic, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Birmingham, UK collaborated with us. He and his colleagues developed and tested an algorithm on over 33 hours of field recordings, containing 30 bird species (To put this in perspective, to-date 10,000 species of birds have been described and half of them are songbirds – so 30 species is really only the tip of the iceberg). But, his results are promising, the developed system recognizes bird species with an accuracy of 97.8% using 3 seconds of the detected signal. He presented these first results at the  International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Shanghai.

Sonogram of Yellow Warbler, not Yellow-throated Warbler song

The software correctly identified this sonogram as song from a Yellow Warbler.

Birdsong recognition apps

Some prototypes of birdsong recognition software and apps are already on the market.

bird song recognition apps: Warblr, Chirpomatic, Birdgenie

These are some of the already available bird song recognition apps that you may want to try.

 

Think of them as the Shazam of birdsong (For those of you not familiar with Shazam, it is an app that identifies music for you). Instead of sampling audio being played you record the bird’s song in question. The software will then compare features of the recorded sound against a database based on pre-recorded, identified sounds, a sound library.

 

Challenges and problems

This simple sounding process has challenges and problems: You need to get a really good recording of the bird you want to identify, i.e. no other birds singing nearby, no traffic noise, people talking or lawn mowers obscuring your target sound. Once you have managed this, a good app takes into account where in the world, even within the USA and within Ohio you recorded the song. Birds sing with local variations. Research in our lab has focused on this for many years: Birds learn their songs by imitating conspecific adults where they grow up and will incorporate any variations these birds sing in their repertoire. Thus the recorded sounds need to be compared to geographically correct songs of each species. Once the location has been set, the app needs to compare the recording to thousands of songs, because most of our songbirds sing at least 5 types of typical song, some sing over 100. Some like the Northern Mockingbird imitate the sounds of other species.

Geographic variation in song of Yellow Warbler YEWA

Listen to and compare Yellow Warbler songs from Ohio, Maine and Mexico, Baja California and Sonora.

I hope I have not completely discouraged you from trying one of the bird song recognition apps. They truly are an innovative application of the thousands of songs that have been recorded, archived and can be listened to for free. Have you already tried one of these apps? We would love to hear your experiences!

 

About the Author: Angelika Nelson is the curator of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics.

 

Resources:

Jančovic, M. Köküer, M. Zakeri and M. Russell, “Bird species recognition using HMM-based unsupervised modelling of individual syllables with incorporated duration modelling,” 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Shanghai, 2016, pp. 559-563. doi: 10.1109/ICASSP.2016.7471737

Bird song ID apps

USA:
Bird Song Id USA Automatic Recognition and Reference – Songs and Calls of America
BirdGenie

UK:
Chirpomatic
Warblr

A comparison of Chirpomatic and Warblr for birds recorded in the UK.

What it takes to be a successful Invader

Invasive species have received a lot of bad press, but let’s face it, some of these alien species really have what it takes to make it!  One example of a highly successful invasive species is the Round Goby, a native to central Eurasia including the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

Male Round Goby in black spawning coloration

Male Round Goby in black spawning coloration

Identifying an alien

Recently a graduate student in Michigan sent a request for identification of a fish skull.  When I saw the skull on a photo that the student attached to the inquiry my first thought was that this is a species I haven’t seen before.  I was thinking to myself, “in my mind I’ve got a fairly good catalog of all the native species that are found in the Great Lakes, so this one is probably exotic”.  Furthermore, I examined the teeth and the rest of the skull picture, and found features that are similar to the marine blennies and gobies that I’m familiar with; quite possibly a Round Goby.

OSUM 104701, Neogobius melanostomus skull

OSUM 104701, Neogobius melanostomus skull

When one observes the teeth of a Round Goby skull, it becomes readily apparent that they are eminently suited to catching prey: numerous, closely packed and somewhat curved teeth. Once the fangs are sunk into the prey’s body it would be difficult to wriggle out of the goby’s maw.  Speaking of the “maw”, the width of the Round Goby’s head and mouth are somewhat disproportionately large in comparison to the size of the body.  This aspect of the anatomy amplifies the capacity of the fish to suck in its prey.  By opening the mouth quickly a vacuum is created, which when combined with the sudden forward lunge that the goby employs toward the prey, improves the likelihood of successful capture.

Neogobius melanostomus are extremely aggressive and will challenge fishes larger than themselves, outcompeting native fish for preferred habitat as well as preying on other fish’s eggs and young.

What makes the Round Goby so successful?

Round Gobies are found primarily in the benthic zone of the water body, from the bottom of shallow areas down to 70 feet in depth.  They prefer areas where there is plenty of cover such as around rocks, sticks and logs.  The species has been found to tolerate polluted conditions, which enables it to occupy areas that less tolerant species cannot live in. This increases their opportunities to grow into a large population that aids in overcoming the other species in less polluted areas.  Another aspect of their biology that enhances their prowess is a highly developed lateralis system, a fishes’ sensory system conveying environmental information to the brain and making them an effective competitor and predator in dark, murky conditions as well as in clear daylight.

High productivity is a hallmark of an effective invader.  A mature Round Goby female is able to produce over 3,000 eggs, the older the female the more eggs they produce.  The male uses posturing and coloration (see the photo above) to attract females to its nest, often mating with more than one female.  The females spawn up to six times in a season, which lasts all summer long from April through September. Let’s do the math: a female could produce 18,000 young in just one year, that’s a lot of Round Gobies!

Although the deleterious effects of this intruder are considerable in scope, as some research here at OSU has shown, one must nonetheless admire their capabilities.  But we should keep in mind that without our assistance it is doubtful that Round Gobies would have spread so far and certainly not so quickly.  Their ability to tolerate euryhaline conditions, a wide range of salinities, facilitates their natural spread under normal conditions over a much longer time. It has allowed them to survive in the ballast waters of vessels and occupy new areas when the ballast is flushed.

Although they are best known from the Great Lakes they are now found in the lower reaches of larger rivers and have been captured in the Illinois River drainage, presaging their invasion of other Mississippi River tributaries.

map of Round Goby invasion in Great lakes regionBut thus far the most dramatic spread of the Round Goby has occurred in the Great Lakes of North America where a lack of effective competitors facilitated their occupation of new territories.

Northern Europe, too, has suffered from a Round Goby Invasion as shown in these maps and the potential for their spread in Europe is estimated to be much greater. You can follow them on AquaMaps, enter genus “Neogobius” and species “melanostomus” to obtain a map showing their predicted spread.

map of Round Goby invasion in Europe

 

Because they are not tasty to humans it is hard to truly appreciate this fish from any perspective other than that of their successes as invaders. But to a larger, piscine predator they must indeed be tasty as they have become a substantial part of native gamefishes’ diet.  And for Lake Erie water snakes, as well as aquatic birds like gulls and cormorants, Round Gobies are a major new item on the menu.  Indeed, Round Gobies are so abundant in Lake Erie that frustrated anglers often complain that the pesky little perciforms are the only thing they can catch.

The Round Goby is here to stay, and changes wrought by their incursion will reverberate for decades across the Great Lakes at least. Have you caught one yet?

 

About the Author: Marc Kibbey is Associate Curator of the Fish Division at the Museum of Biological Diversity.

Impressions of working in the Herbarium

I have been working at The Ohio State University Herbarium in the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology (EEOB) since May 2015. This particular unit is known for its vast collection of botanical specimens. A quick stroll through the herbarium paints a picture of its deep reserve of information. This stroll both begins and ends with my workplace, the herbarium preparation room, where my co-workers and I mount pressed plants as our student job.

Workplace to process plant specimens in the herbarium

Workplace to process plant specimens in the herbarium

For us, a typical work day starts by preparing all the necessary utensils or equipment. First I lay out a sheet of plexiglass as the working surface. Then I prepare a suitable ratio of Elmer’s glue (used for wood, paper, etc.) with water, and the brushes that I’ll need for the day. There’s a cabinet that includes the specimens that I and other assistants work from. One day we work with simpler, more sturdy specimens with wide leaves, like those of the Asteraceae (the daisy family) or Solanaceae (the potato family) – families of plants that I learned well while working here. Other days we work with grasses, the Poaceae, that are harder to mount as there are many thin surfaces to attach to the mounting paper. This will then be kept in a bin for up to 48 hours to dry, after which it will be taken out, sorted out, and given an accession number.  Additional work such as taping and sewing is done by volunteers. Finally the specimens are stored for posterity in the herbarium’s collection.

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What is interesting about these dry plants is that each specimen was brought to the herbarium for a particular purpose. Each specimen has its own story. Although the action of mounting the plants requires attentive handling and an affinity for aesthetics and composition, the heart of the process really lies in the plant’s journey to the OSU herbarium. Some of the plants we mount are fifty or even hundred years older than us. Others come from remote parts of the world that we had never heard of and, at times, we resort to a discussion of geography and history with the herbarium staff to satisfy our curiosity.

To think that many of these plants crossed oceans to be stored for dozens or hundreds of years is quite humbling. They are the fruits of botanists who travel the world to catalogue and annotate their findings on a piece of archival paper. The information contained in the collected specimen is crucial to the progress of research. That’s why scientists go through such lengths to collect more data.

A small perk of working with old specimens is that they often come wrapped in a newspaper from their time of collection. It’s interesting to see the age of the dried plants and to gain an appreciation of their historical context. Once, I opened a bundle wrapped in a Ugandan newspaper so old that the images were added manually before being printed, instead of being inserted digitally. I then wondered how far technology has progressed. The newspapers also tell other stories, for example the news items, prices of products, etc., 50 or even 100 years ago. So, there is another kind of history in a herbarium collection.

Quirks aside, there are some more serious undertones to the practice of mounting plants. Truthfully, I feel like it is a declining practice. With the growing emphasis on molecular biology in research facilities, the value placed on plant preservation or mounting is dwindling. Although understandable, as genetic analyses can be more lucrative, it’s a shame that plant collecting and mounting is losing attention.

There will always be demand for mounted specimens as they are reflections of botanical history. They give researchers eyes-on contact with their subject of botanical research. Familiarity with the plant of study is paramount to creating quality research. Furthermore, the practice of plant collecting underlies botanical methods laid out by the famous Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus, from the start.

Plant mounting connects the botanical community. It’s a reliable way of building relationships between universities while building on the communal body of knowledge. We just have to make sure not to lose sight of its importance. Students like me who work in such facilities have also built up relationships with one another and with the staff of the unit as well as the volunteers who come once a week to help in this process of preserving biodiversity.

Plant mounting makes the botanical community grow tighter. It’s a practice that has been used for hundreds of years, and will continue to be used well into the future.

I learned a lot not only about botany but also history and geography while working in The Ohio State University Herbarium.

 

About the Author: Martin Stuessy is an undergraduate senior at The Ohio State University, majoring in Philosophy.