NC State University Insect Museum

I focused on yellow pan traps (YPT), mostly, for my collecting because the material we get is relatively easy to sort, with numerous parasitoids, like Ceraphronoidea and quite easy to install and control them. I started with 300 YPT at the first site, the number of the traps decreased, though, for different reasons. Collecting sites are marked below, and I am giving just short descriptions of main collecting sites and events in this post. Probably you will hear some nice stories later, when writing blogs about the most important things related to the Microceraphron trip: What are in the jars?


We started at Baja, my hometown and collected with 300 YPT near Gara, on an alkali meadow near the alkaline lake of Gara. Then we crossed the country and went to the Hungarian-Ukranian border where we spent 10 days collecting on one of the island hills of Bereg, the Béganyi Hill with 300 (at first), then just 246 YPT and a Malaise trap. During our collecting some of the YPTs were taken over by the Ukranian army controlling the border between Hungary and Ukraine (Why Ukranian soldiers love to steal our YPT remains an unanswered question). On the way back to Kőszeg we stopped in Debrecen and met Szabi Lengyel (former postdoc of Rob Dunn), who is involved in the project: Grassland restoration and marsh protection in Egyek-Pusztakócs. One of his students will compare the Hymenoptera fauna of areas have been restored in different time using different collecting methods (including YPT, therefore I left there 100 YPT). We are now waiting for amazing ceraphronoids (perhaps Elysoceraphron and Microceraphron) from that project! We stopped a while near Budapest, but did not collect at the locus typicus for Microceraphron - too suburban now. During our next Hungarian trip (next year the wasp conference will be held in Hungary) probably we will rent a house and try to collect in the garden :). We spent the next five days with 146 YPT and George Melika at Kőszeg, then went back to Baja and collect some more dudes from the saline/alkaline meadow of Gara. And that's it. Done. We arrived back safely to the sunny Raleigh with all of the samples, two tired kids and a patience-lost wife. Was our effort successful? Hopefully yes, at least there are many insects in our jars, which could either help our research or "just" go into the not-too-rich palearctic part of the Insect Museum.

Oops. Just one question remained for this blog. What can you do if your wife decide not to care about children in the middle of sweeping on a really good looking meadow?


Just try to be patient!

I am back from Hungary without posting anything during my trip (although I did promise this to Andy!). Internet connections, however, were not the best in the places we spent most of our time, but perhaps the main reason for this "blogless" period is that I haven't and never will be the winner of a Blogitzer Prize. Anyway, now I am back and Andy tells me at least 25 times a day, that I promised to write something about the Hungarian collecting expedition. First of all let me tell you something about Microceraphron and to explain why is it important to go back to Hungary (besides visiting my family...oops....I am from Hungary, by the way).


Microceraphron subterraneus was described by Szelényi in 1936 based on 14 specimens collected in Budapest, and this species is the only representative of the genus. Szelényi placed his new genus between Aphanogmus and Synarsis based on the laterally compressed body and lack of any sulci on the mesonotum. The salient character of the genus is the anterodorsally located compound eyes.


No other Ceraphronoidea have such a frog-like head. There are other ceraphronoid reasons, however, why to collect in Hungary.


Elysoceraphron, whose unique character is the square-shaped mesoscutellum, was also described from Hungary (also by Szelényi in 1936). Besides some recently found oriental specimens of an undescribed Elysoceraphron sp. from the Tiger Project, the genus is known only by E. hungaricus represented by two specimens at the HNHM.

OK. Now you can put the question: Why does anybody want to collect more Microceraphron or Elysoceraphron specimens? These taxa are seemingly very rare, so what kind of information could we gain by finding more specimens? To answer this question, you should look a bit on the quite chaotic higher-level classification of Ceraphronoidea, the superfamily to which the above mentioned Hungarian guys belong to. Frankly, are there any genera of Ceraphronoidea with well-defined limits? Moreover, are the limits between Ceraphronidae and Megaspilidae well defined? It is striking, that we have such a limited knowledge about the systematics of this extraordinarily common Hymenoptera taxon. The reason is probably that except for the late Paul Dessart, almost nobody has worked on these wasps in >80 years. But why has this ignorance persisted?

First of all they are small, difficult-to-see, boring (superficially, anyway), uniform wasps. Why could they be interesting? Why did Dessart spend almost all of his lifetime working on small, boring wasps? You have sink deeply into the morphology of Ceraphronoidea to discover the really crazy and shocking surprises that are hidden behind the uniformly brown sclerites of ceraphronoid specimens. Please, show me a non-ceraphronoid wasp with such a crazy and amazing male genitalia as what's present in the genus Conostigmus! So again, why do we need Microceraphron and Elysoceraphron? Since these two genera are on the border between the two giant ceraphronid taxa, Aphanogmus and Ceraphron, studying their DNA and functional morphology could shed light on the mysterious higher-level classification of the family. Why is it important to clarify the taxonomy of this group? Why are Ceraphronoidea important?

Many hosts of ceraphronoids are primary parasitoids or predators of considerable importance in agriculture and forestry. Within the hyperparasitoid-parasitoid-host-plant systems the roles of hyperparasitoids are quite complex. It has been proposed that the efficiency of the primary parasitoids is affected negatively by high levels of hyperparasitism. It was also suggested, that hyperparasitoid may improve the stability of primary parasitoid systems and therefore increase the chance of the successful establishment of exotic natural enemies during classical biological control.

Beside their economic importance ceraphronoid species are important in serving as model systems in ecological and behavioral research. These studies have largely utilized Dendrocerus carpenteri (Curtis, 1829), the most polyphagous aphid hyperparasitoid species. Dendrocerus spp. have been the subject of studies on sex ratio allocation, competition, host habitat specificity foraging behavior and aspects of DNA-based IPM.

Enough for excuses for visiting my family, and spending most of my life looking and dissecting wasps small like the head of a pin. Let me write something about the trip. Watch for part 2 tomorrow.

I posted a photo gallery of our latest expedition. Feel free to check it out and make comments. Overall it was quite a successful trip, though we still await the final tally of insects collected.

Well, we made it back to Raleigh a couple days ago with quite the haul of insects. One of our quests (not so much for us, but for our colleagues on the Platygastroidea PBI) was a tiny (1 mm long) scelionid wasp by the name of Janzenella innupta Masner & Johnson, 2007. No one knows its biology, but until recently, and I think this is pretty cool, it was only known from Miocene amber. You can read about it here (pdf). The extant species has only been collected in Malaise traps in the dry forests of Costa Rica. We're still working through our samples to see if we managed to capture one. We certainly managed to collect numerous ceraphronoid (Ceraphronoidea) and ensign wasps (Evaniidae), which were the main targets of our collecting effort there. We also brought back some crazy looking stink bugs (Pentatomidae) and their relatives (e.g., leaf-footed bugs (Coreidae), assassin bugs (Reduviidae), and plant bugs (Miridae)). Expect pictures soon. In the meantime, here's a picture of the motley crew that carried out this research (L to R: Bob Blinn, Andy Deans, Josephine Rodriguez (University of Illinois), and Matt Bertone):

There aren't very many insects flying this time of year in Guanacaste. Check out the Hg-vapor light:


We probably saw a total of 20 insects each night we trapped at the light. Our Malaise trap samples from November and December are equally sparse, with about 100 insects in each - that's after sitting for a week in the field! Yellow pan traps, however, seem to excel this time of year (and do well in the monsoon as well). Here's our net result from 30 YPTs sitting for 5 hours in the dry forest:



TONS of ceraphronoid wasps and other cool flies, hoppers, and wasp-like critters. We lost the contents of the other 20 pans to thirsty deer.