Society of Systematic Biologists

I know we've been quiet here for a while, and some of you may be expecting a juicy return, but I have a peripherally related topic, instead: bed bugs.
Several articles in the popular press [1,2,3] have made a big deal about them, backed by the internet amplification [4], so I presume this is a topic of broad interest. If you travel much, or if you live in a major city in the United States, you've probably had bed bug bites, or known someone who has. Here I simply wish to share my two simple tips for not bringing them home. (If you have them in your house, look elsewhere for help, and good luck!)
I've read somewhere early on, maybe 2005, that heat (around 120F) can relatively easily kill them at all life cycle stages. The main problem is exposing your stuff. I have a related pair solutions that seem to have worked, preventing their spread after I've been savaged by them. (My field assistant in Chile suffered from bed-bug-induced PTSD, no joke.) First, in several instances, I placed all of my belongings in black trash bags, and simply left them out in the sun on hot pavement or roof top. Second, I highly recommend using your car as an oven. The last time I was doing field work, I baked all of my stuff in the rental car, parked in full sunlight, and then, after I landed at O'Hare, I left all the luggage inside my car here, which is easily over 120F on most April-October days. I get a towel and shove what I'm wearing into a dryer. So far so good--no bed bugs at home. I don't mean to revel in this fact; it's clear that it is also a matter of luck. (The last time came back, it turned out I also had scabies. Ew.)
The source of the present infestation is unclear, but it seems like a rather straightforward phylogeographic question, taken on by at least a pair of labs [6]. Also, this bed bug sensor seems fairly accessible to biologists, in case you think you may have them, but aren't sure (requires a bottle, dry ice, and a plastic pit fall trap to hold the bottle). I haven't tried tanglefoot yet, but it could be a band-aid solution on the legs of a clean bed.
Hope you never need any of this advice!

The "PAUP running - Do not touch!!!" sign should look familiar to anyone who's done phylogenetic analyses over the past two decades. Fortunately, the days of these signs - and the inevitable lab drama that results - are quickly becoming a thing of the past. As access to high-performance computing (HPC) expands, most modern phylogenetic analyses are being conducted remotely on shared community- or campus-wide resources. Even as access to these resources expands, however, expertise in utilizing them to their full potential remains limited. For this reason, I'm excited to spread the news about The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis's (NIMBioS) new workshop titled “Fast, Free Phylogenies: HPC for Phylogenetics Tutorial.” This workshop, which takes place this October in Knoxville, TN, will bring together some of the most knowledgeable experts on HPC for phylogenetics with the goal of teaching others how best to use resources like TeraGrid, CIPRES, iPlant, university clusters, and other free HPC resources. More details are available at the tutorials webpage. Tuition is covered by NIMBioS, but enrollment is limited.

Warning: large video. May take a few seconds to load.



This has been the scene on my front lawn for the past few evenings. Basically, every day in the late afternoon a large swath of ants - not going anywhere in particular or consuming any resource that I can detect - seems to form in the same general region of my front yard in Durham, North Carolina. When I get up to run in the morning and the yard is shaded, they are still there; but as soon as the hot summer sun hits the front lawn they have disappeared. In the evening, when the lawn is again shaded, sure enough - they reappear. Any comments on this peculiar phenomenon are welcome!

The 'Evolution' meeting is quickly coming to a close here in Portland. I'm presently blogging from the second last session of the meeting while Marc Johnson gives a fascinating talk on the functional evolutionary loss of sex, via the loss of recombination and segregation, in the evening primrose genus. Among evening primroses (Oenothera) 16% of species have functionally lost the ability to sexually reproduce - but this loss is associated with reciprocal translocations among chromosomes rather than with polyploidy, as it is in most asexual plants. This allows him to study the evolutionary loss of sex independently of the evolution of increased ploidy number. Evidently, asexual species pay a high cost of asexuality in terms of their susceptibility to generalist herbivore insects - although they also exhibit a decreased vulnerability to specialists herbivores (though the underlying mechanism seems a little unclear). In addition, he has found the intriguing, and somewhat counterintuitive, result (but one that had been predicted by some prior theory due to J. Felsenstein) that speciation rates are higher in functionally asexual lineages than in sexual lineages. Extinction also seems slightly elevated in asexual lineages, although this effect was non-significant.

Still at "Evolution 2010," we just saw a great talk by Charles Marshall, formerly at Harvard but now at UC Berkeley, about calibrating molecular phylogenies using the fossil records. This is a much more complicated problem that it would seem at first glance because: 1) the maximum likelihood estimate of a node age based on a fossil series from the descendant lineage is biased (towards the present); 2) an assumption that fossilization is temporally random allows for a simple correction to the maximum likelihood estimate - but this assumption is (invariably) violated in empirical data; 3) fossils are not only temporally, but also geographically, non-random; and, finally, 4) the rock record is globally incomplete in some geological eras. Charles's talk included some fantastic graphical simulations of sedimentation and "de-sedimentation" (the removal of previously deposited sediments) as ocean sea levels rise and fall over geological timescales. Evidently, though, in spite of these significant complications, there is still hope that the use of fossil calibrations can improve molecular phylogenetic estimates of species divergence dates. As usual Charles was an intensively engaging speaker and gave a great seminar!

The third day of the 'Evolution' conference is officially completed and it was a good one! Among the highlights for me today was a great talk by Graham Slater (a postdoc with Mike Alfaro) about approximate Bayesian computational methods for estimating diversification and phenotypic evolutionary rates from unresolved phylogenetic trees. I think this general approach will probably have considerable utility in this and other problems for years to come.

I also saw a fantastic talk by Jeanne Robertson about courtship and aggressive behavior in dark and white sand dwelling lizards. White sand dwelling lizards have evidently evolved light colored dorsal coloration, obviously for crypsis. However, perhaps even more interestingly, in staged encounters white sand males nearly as often tried to court dark sand males as they tried to fight them. The confusion was one way, however, and Jeanne provided some excellent video of a dark sand male attacking a confused, and simultaneously courting, white sands individual. This unusual tendency is apparently due to a pleiotropic effect that dark dorsal coloration appears to have on ventral patch size - an effect that makes their ventral patches of dark sand males not much larger than the analogous patch on white sand females. So, as Jeanne so elegantly put it in the title of her talk: in white sand lizards, "Dude looks like a lady!" (For the record, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith is pictured above because that "Dude" really does "look like a lady!")

The first two days of the meeting have been a blast, capped so far by a thought provoking ASN presidential address by Jonathan Losos and a picnic this evening at the Oregon Zoo. However, in terms of pure irony the most amusing experience thus far was the discovery by Carlos Botero and I (shortly after our arrival) that the Oregon Convention Center is simultaneously hosting the 'Evolution' joint meeting (as you no doubt already know) along with the 'Oregon Christian Home Education Conference.' Note, particularly for non-American readers, that one of the primary reasons children are homeschooled in the United States is so their parents can avoid teaching them about evolution (e.g., refs here and here). Luckily I had the foresight to snap a picture (above), as their conference ended this evening.

It's that time again - the annual joint meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB), commonly referred to as the "Evolution meeting" will be held from today through June 29th in Portland, OR. Dechronization bloggers Glor, Igic, Harmon, and myself are all attending, so we should be able to put up a few posts during the conference. Not to miss tomorrow: Joe Felsenstein's 9am talk on "A comparative method for discrete and continuous characters using the threshold model and MCMC." I look forward to witnessing the famous "Felsenstein effect" described by Rich at Moscow's meeting last year. Please post other must-see talks in the comments.