NC State University Insect Museum

I've been incredibly fortunate to have colleagues who are 1) entrenched in Brobdingnagian biodiversity inventories and 2) willing to dump scads of high quality specimens on me. That's one advantage, anyway, of studying groups of insects that few other labs actively research. Our latest shipment of vials (that image above) comes from the Swedish Malaise Trap Project, and are chock-a-block with Megaspilidae (and only Megaspilidae, in these vials anyway). Impressive. You can imagine that >70 Malaise traps (a Swede did, after all, invent the Malaise trap!) running for three years (year-round, mind you) up and down that kingdom will yield hymenopteran biomass that must be measured in petagrams, and we are not disappointed. My freezer's crammed with at least 30 boxes of vials filled with tiny wasps (mainly Evaniidae, Ceraphronidae, and Megaspilidae) from similar projects, for example:

• Project ALAS (Longino et al.) - Evaniidae from Costa Rica.
• Project LLAMA (Longino et al.) - Ceraphronidae, Megaspilidae, Evaniidae from Central America.
• TIGER: Thailand Inventory Group for Entomological Research (Sharkey et al.) - Ceraphronidae, Megaspilidae, Evaniidae from Thailand.
• Insect Survey of a Megadiverse Country: Colombia (Parts I & II) (Sharkey & Brown) - Evaniidae from...you guessed it, Colombia.
• Terrestrial Arthropod Inventory of Madagascar (Fisher & Griswold) - Ceraphronidae, Megaspilidae, Evaniidae from Madagascar
• Madagascar Ant Diversity Initiative (MANDI) (Fisher & Ward) - Ceraphronidae, Megaspilidae, Evaniidae from Madagascar.
• Miscellaneous collecting efforts by my friends at USDA-SEL - Ceraphronidae, Megaspilidae, Evaniidae from Africa, New Mexico, elsewhere (the snack pack of vials in the image below).

We benefit from so many projects, and the TENS of THOUSANDS of specimens we've been loaned from them, that it takes up too much space to list 'em. The hymenopterans we're currently (finally!) examining reveal so much - not only about the relationships within these families, but also the evolution of Apocrita. If you know a lot about apocritan relationships you might be in for a few surprises this year (manuscripts in prep.) Of course the ultimate goal is to put species names on all those specimens and to get those data back to the investigators/museums that loaned us the specimens. Fortunately we now have some funding to do this, and I'll post more about that tomorrow or Wednesday (hint: we seek two grad students).