![\"\"](\"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Rhopalosiphum-oxyacanthae-on-Sorbus-14-v-2017-207x300.jpg\")
<\/a>Rhopalosiphum oxyacanthae on Sorbus. There’s a single fundatrix and some of her offspring on this leaf.<\/p><\/div>\n
Slide mounting 2016 specimens kept me busy until December sometime.\u00a0 The collection is up to 9118 slides now.\u00a0 A part of slide-making is of course identification of all that material to the degree possible with a reasonable amount of effort, but with an eye toward getting material filed away for future study.\u00a0 I make slides into 100-slide boxes where the balsam is allowed to harden and I spend my evenings identifying material I mounted in the past day or two.\u00a0 Once the box is full of slides and all identifications made, both things occurring within a day or two of each other, I put the full box in a warm place to harden for another month or so.\u00a0 One of my main points is that all material is identified as it is mounted and labeled, allowing quick and efficient filing in the collection.<\/p>\n
In the process of all this, some genera end up with long rows of slides with only a genus name on each.\u00a0 This usually results from poor species-level taxonomy, or my decision that making species identifications as I mount the specimens will take too much time and bog down the process.\u00a0 Most commonly, the former situation is the case, i.e. I think making species identifications is simply not possible with the current literature and comparative specimens at hand.\u00a0 Winter, therefore, is a time to sort such slides to what I think might represent species.<\/p>\n
Since moving to Lakeview, I have been focusing a lot of effort on collecting from sagebrushes (i.e. Artemisia<\/em> shrubs) and learning to recognize the various species we have in the Northwest and south through Utah and New Mexico (alas, I have almost no material from the species of sagebrush limited to California).\u00a0 Concentrated field work like this has led to many new slides and a desire to sort out the taxonomy of some challenging groups, especially Pseudoepameibaphis, Epameibaphis, Obtusicauda<\/em>, and Microsiphoniella<\/em>.\u00a0 After finishing this year\u2019s aphid manuscript (describing two new species of Macrosiphum<\/em>) back in February, I\u2019ve spent most of my aphid research time sorting my material of these four genera of sagebrush aphids.\u00a0 All four have very poorly developed species-level taxonomy, in my opinion, and almost no understanding of ecology or niche use in the field.<\/p>\nJust this weekend I finally finished sorting, re-sorting, and then sorting again my slides of Pseudoepameibaphis<\/em>. Current understanding is there are 4 species in this genus.\u00a0 My sorting points to 5 taxa that are pretty easy to recognize, plus another large series of slides that seem to fit none of those and that don\u2019t necessarily share distinctive features with each other either.\u00a0 There seem to be some associations to host-plant of possibly-distinct groups of specimens (e.g. one semi-distinctive form from Artemisia arbuscula<\/em>, \u2018low sage\u2019), while other apparently morphologically uniform sets of specimens seem to use several different Artemisia<\/em> species.\u00a0 I have examined the types of the accepted species, and due to very poor mounts and odd collecting times of year, they are of little use in many cases.\u00a0 In a way this is a problem, but in another way it is freeing to allow study of the genus almost de novo.\u00a0 Pseudoepameibaphis<\/em> is a perfect example of a very interesting group that is poorly known, with many taxonomic, phylogenetic, ecological, and biogeographic questions that could be answered with concerted study by a Ph.D. student for a 4-year thesis project.\u00a0 Anyone interested??<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Pseudoepameibaphis-slides-v-2017.jpg\")
<\/a>All three boxes of my Pseudoepameibaphis slides, sorted behind little note cards.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here in Lakeview (south central Oregon) we are finally emerging from a wet and snowy winter. The mountains and valleys here have seen tremendous water and snow, with all of our temporary streams still running hard with snow melt in mid-May.\u00a0 In fact, we had yet another 3-4 cm snow fall overnight this weekend (12 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1299"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1304,"href":"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299\/revisions\/1304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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