Uncommon Behavior

It’s easy to forget, with how much we think we know about the world, that new species of animals are being discovered and studied, all of the time. Sometimes, the animal lives where few people are present to observe it. Other times, we just haven’t yet looked close enough. And other times, once in a while, an animal might exhibit an uncommon behavior, perhaps something we can’t fail to notice, and we pay attention, and lo and behold, the animal is new to science. In this episode, Derek Sikes, UAMN curator of insects talks about one such new species, Sciara serpens and its astounding behavior, first brought to his attention by museum docent Maggie Billington.

The research paper can be found here.

The More You Look is a production of the UA Museum of the North, on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the ancestral lands of the Dena people of the lower Tanana River. UAMN illuminates the natural history and cultural heritage of Alaska and the North through collections, research, education, and partnerships, and by creating a singular museum experience that honors diverse knowledge and respect for the land and its peoples.

Transcript

Roger Topp: 0:00

I had this this flashback to the day I was walking down to the West Valley track in my running gear. So I had no container. That's what I remember. I had no container, and this weird thing--and it wasn't snake worms--it was something weird. You mentioned maybe it was a larval form or something. But it was like, in my memory, it was like this long--and it's about five inches. It was spiraling and coming right towards me across the pavement. And I don't know what I did. There my memory ends and you know, like, looking for a container, what can I hold this thing in? And, and that was that and you said, "I have no idea what that was?"

Derek Sikes: 0:33

Yeah, and you weren't brave enough, like Darwin was, to put it in your mouth when he didn't have a container. He was supposedly--he had two big beetles in each hand. And then he saw a third one and he, he had nothing to put it in. So he put it in his mouth and held it in his teeth.

Roger Topp: 0:49

Would not have occurred to me. I stopped at picking it up with my hands. Hello, and welcome to The More You Look, your behind the scenes journey into museum collections, research, exhibition, and public So, if I saw Sciara serpens crossing--or a lot of them programming from Fairbanks, Alaska. I'm Roger Topp, Director of exhibits, design, and digital media at the UA Museum at the North, and host for today's episode. It's easy to forget with how much we think we know about the world, that new species of animals are being discovered and studied all of the time. Sometimes, the animals live where a few people are present to observe them. Other times, we just haven't yet looked close enough. And other times, once in a while, an animal might exhibit an uncommon behavior, perhaps something we can't fail to notice. And we pay attention. And lo and behold, the animal is new to science. And that's just the beginning. Then come the questions. Earlier this January, I spoke with Derek Sikes, UAMN curator of insects, about one such new species and it's astounding behavior now described based on morphological, molecular, and citizen science data. crossing a sidewalk, I would be taken aback and--

Derek Sikes: 2:22

Most people would. It's very strange phenomenon. I'd never heard of it. And when Maggie Billington, a docent here, brought me photos and specimens back in 2007, it was just, you know, I was, I was dumbfounded. Having not heard of this phenomenon, or in any way, it was just, like, fell right into this pattern that I had experienced first moving--I'd only been in Alaska, the year before, when I arrived, and it was, yeah, they talk about it as being a subcontinent. You know, it's different place. So everything was new to me. So this fit into this, like everything is, a new pattern. But this was a whole 'nother level of new. I mean, this was like globally new from my understanding of entomology and, and then I, you know, once I started digging into it, I discovered most anthropologists had never heard of this phenomenon before. But there were scattered reports. In the literature. One of them kind of more well documented ones was out of the Philippines in the 1950s. But they've just been observed around the world, these larvae moving in, in rope like or snake like columns across across the ground. And it led me to try to get more information and talk to as many people as possible. Talked to the the Cooperative Extension, who deals with the public a lot and they got some reports. So this summer of 2007 seemed to be a big year for them because there were reports down in North Pole there, Ester, where Maggie saw them, other places, and then there was one right here in town on Pike, Pico Road, Pika Road, very close to campus that I ran out as soon as I heard it was happening, so I could see it in person, because some of the some of the specialists in this family of flies, these dark wing fungus gnats, have never seen this phenomenon, like--

Roger Topp: 4:46

Infrequent behavior.

Derek Sikes: 4:47

Yeah. So, I get out there and indeed, yeah, there's this column crossing this road. And interestingly, it actually had bifurcated. So I have photos of this where there's a two-headed column, right? So it's but, and I remember at one point, there was, might have been more than one column, I should have double checked my field notes, but when a car had driven over them, and they'd been, you know, kind of crushed, but also tried to reassemble after that. And anyway, I collected a bunch of live ones, brought them back alive. And I collected, preserved some as well took, you know, tried to document it as well as I could, in many different ways. But having a live ones gave me the chance to try to rear them out. And I was just really lucky they survived because I guess sometimes they don't survive. And we tried to do it a couple of years ago, and it didn't work. Because there was another sighting in town. So I went and got those and we couldn't get adults in did have of all of the larvae I collected and reared, which probably were in the many dozens. I only got four adult males. And it's the males that allow you to identify the species because the male terminalia has these very unique structures and setal patterns. Yeah, anyway, I then I contacted some specialists in the group. They they looked at these adult males. This was a Japanese specialist Mitsuaki Sutou and a German Darkwing fungus gnat specialist Kai Heller. And they both agreed that these were probably what was called at the time Sciara militaris, the army worm of Europe. But in North America, we have these moth larvae that are really pestiferous on corn that are called armyworms. So to avoid confusion with the common name armyworms, in North America, we've been referring to these as snakeworms, because they look a little like a snake, when they form these long columns.

Roger Topp: 7:12

When you mentioned it, in the email that the paper was coming out and you said snakeworm. In my mind, I imagine a snake about three, four, maybe six feet long. And kind of sidewinding--I think was a really big larva. But what we're talking about is 1000s of tiny larvae.

Derek Sikes: 7:31

Yeah

Roger Topp: 7:32

That form looks to me from these pictures, like a rope, yeah, or even a river. And it just sort of--I see--bifurcates and but generally is just kind of flowing across the ground with them crawling over each other, starting at the back, right. And heading to the front, like

Derek Sikes: 7:47

We describe it a little like a conveyor belt. The runners on a-- ones on the bottom probably aren't making much progress at all. And the ones on the top are just sliming over their brethren. And and then when the ones on the bottom are exposed in the back, then they climb on top of the ones in front of them, and try to keep going--and no one has studied it in very great detail. Partly because it can't be replicated. And it's very hard to find. It's one of these, you know, it doesn't happen every year. And so, it's just one of these rare phenomena in nature that makes it difficult to.

Roger Topp: 8:25

Of all the wonderful points in the paper, which is extraordinary readable, hopefully, we can put a link to it in the show notes so people can read the paper if they like. It's very readable. But there's a, there's a whole series of sections in it that I found fascinating. And the most fascinating must be the discussion of snakeworm behavior. And there's this question of: they do this, we've documented it. It's been documented not just in Alaska, but in the lower 48. and in--

Derek Sikes: 8:52

Europe.

Roger Topp: 8:53

Europe. But doesn't happen very often. And so it's a big question, why does it happen? And what are the causes? And I love the discussion the paper about that: "Because of what about this? Maybe not that What about this?" Can you talk about some of those what ifs and the process of thining about

Derek Sikes: 9:12

Yeah, well, so that was the part of the paper that I this? spent the most time writing. And let me let me back up a bit because where I last mentioned was 2007 when I got the this Japanese and German collaborator interested and they said maybe it was the species in Europe. And the project kind of floundered after that point because I don't know why exactly. Maybe we didn't have enough-- enough specimens. I know, I got distracted--anyway. It took a backseat, you know, so 2007, fast forward to 2021 when--so, I was fortunate to get a postdoc who happened to was a dipterist, works on flies. And I said, here's a project that has been sitting on the backburner since 2007. And he was a fly taxonomist. And it was like, this probably is a new species. Because I had done some DNA barcoding in between. And I just wanted to kind of get the, get it up to the point where we actually were working on the paper because this postdoc, Thalles Pereira, he spearheaded the project and led the project and got everyone kind of--herding the cat's kind of situation got us all, working on it again. And, and my major job on this project was writing that section that you just were talking about, because they were the fly taxonomists doing the fly taxonomy thing, looking at the genitalia and I did I did the I did the phylogenetic analysis as well, because that was something I was good at. But the behavior section was really interesting, because I went through all the literature, and a lot of this literature was really old and in other languages, you know, thank God for Google Translate, I was really, really happy to be able to translate all this old, old literature, a lot of it in German. And, and, and try to compile all the thoughts that everyone has had about this phenomenon was published on it. And, and put them all together into a single document because no one had known who had published on it before, had done a complete summary. As far as I could tell, it certainly wasn't a recent one. Because some of the the most prolific writing came out of the in the 1800s, the latter half of the 1800s by Nowicki. and in Europe, who had been able to see the phenomenon fairly often in the forest near his home, so he had access to that species. militaris, which I thought the interesting part of the paper was, we discovered that this European army worm, milit--, Sciara militaris actually had an older name, scientific name, it had been named almost over 70 years earlier, named mirabilis, and that name had been kind of ignored, or forgotten. But there's a rule in science that the first name for scientific name given to an organism after Linnaeus, his 10th, edition 1758. From 1758 onwards, the oldest name of an organism is the valid name. So we found--so we found that we fixed that problem in the paper. But yeah, I went through all this literature. And I tried to organize it into into two into into thoughts addressing two questions. What initiates the dispersal event of larvae? Like why don't the larvae just pupate? Right where they are? Why did they move at all? That was question number one. Question number two is the more perplexing one of why do they move looking like a snake. And so there are all these different ideas. Ideas about the like, regarding the first one, the initiation of movement, they've run out of food. But these things feed on decaying leaf matter. You know, fungus, moldy, decaying leaf matter.

Roger Topp: 13:48

I lkike what you said in the paper. You say,"What? They ran out of decaying leaf matter?

Derek Sikes: 13:51

How do you run out of that? Like, and, and running out of food, you know, most of them are at least people who've studied them before have found that they're well-fed these, these are their final instar larvae. So they're, they're done with their larval stage. they're done with their feeding, and they're dispersing so it's not like they're looking at--the adults don't feed. In a lot of insects. The adult is the sexual dispersal stage. And it's the larva that does all that--

Roger Topp: 14:19

They're not going to eat. They're going to camp.

Derek Sikes: 14:21

Yeah. So, so there were all these questions and they don't seem to be hungry. Because when they're collected Seems dangerous. Not just cars. Just being the open air: birds, when they're doing this migration or movement, they usually pupate very soon after. And that's what happened in my case. I collected them, and within a week of having collected them, they had gone through pupation and emerged as adults and other ideas that maybe where they were was too wet or too dry, you know, some kind of environmental condition that they didn't like. But you know, really just moving. You know, they can't move very fast or very far. So, moving from one side of a road to another side of a road is very strange. other predators. Right. Yeah. Right. Just moving at all. Another interesting point that was raised by our, our co author, Kai Heller, is that the adults are weak fliers, which the editor kind of wanted us to elaborate on that, and we didn't really have good data to kind of like, didn't have like, wind tunnel, you know, comparisons of their ability to fly, you know, relative to their close relatives, but it's just sort of the adults don't seem to be very flight active.

Roger Topp: 15:51

It's a very intersting concept that it's better to crawl now than fly later, even though all have wings.

Derek Sikes: 15:56

Yeah, yeah, it's just very strange, perplexing, and the wings are, are fully--full sized wings, a lot of insects that are poor fliers, or don't do much flying, their wings begin to become vestigial, you know, they shrink, mutations hit them, because they're not being used much. So there's no real, you know, detriment to having nonfunctional wings, if you're not really using them. So the wings tend to basically disappear, and the energy gets saved. We see a lot of wingkless--wing lessness evolving in like caves and islands and things, mountain tops, then it got me into this question of why do animals disperse at all, which is like a huge literature? I mean, I don't, I didn't get too deep into that. But like this, you can think about why do and like the simplest answer as well, you know, if you stay put, you end up competing with your family members too much. You, you, you can run out of food, you know, they're you know, things like that just there's all these advantages to to movement to going to other places, Gene flow and, and food and that kind of stuff. We--you know, we know they do it, but not this. The other interesting thing is it doesn't seem to happen every year. If if these. Were doing this every year, you would expect a lot more sightings. Particularly I mean, if these were living in Alaska, since before humans got here, which is--a lot of insects have been here much longer than humans, then you would expect this to be a pretty well-observed phenomenon. There's so many Alaskans who spend a hell of a lot of time outdoors. And would have encountered this since that was also perplexing is how is it that that here we are in 2007. And this has not been seen before? Turns out in 2022, there was a sighting in Denali National Park, Camp Denali by Jennifer Hamm, who contacted me because I had done a --I had been a guest speaker at Camp Denali. And so she knew me. And then I said, Oh, I know what these are. And this is a great observation. And then a new, a newspaper article came out on that which someone down in Wasilla saw and said, Oh, I saw these things back in 2000. So the earliest record we have in Alaska is is the year 2000. The 2007 big year for them, is when I first became aware of them. But

Roger Topp: 18:34

Now you need to know time of day, temperature--

Derek Sikes: 18:37

Well--

Roger Topp: 18:38

Conditions.

Derek Sikes: 18:38

Well, that's a whole 'nother interesting thing is that they when Maggie Billington observed them in Ester, and she she's the docent who first brought them to me. She and her friend made really careful observations of multiple sightings in Ester, and then wrote an article in the Ester Republic, which is a small periodical with the t-- little town of Ester produces. And it's full of detailed information, including time of day and other stuff. And one of the things that all the Alaskan observations shared and I can't say whether all the observations elsewhere are similar, because a lot of them are just lacking in detail--was that they move in the early morning, that in the later afternoon, they're usually gone. And all that remain are some straggling larvae that are that are desiccating that are having trouble in the heat in the sun of the afternoon. They like the shady cool mornings. And this feeds into this whole idea of why they might be traveling in a snake like fashion to begin with. And that is their Um, they're very prone to desiccation. You know, living in the cool moist leaf litter of a dark forest is perfect for them. But when they end up on a dry exposed dirt path or road, then they're prone to desiccation. So they group together, keeping body contact, minimizing their surface area, and minimizing their, you know, desiccation risk. And then in the later afternoon, they're, they're gone.

Roger Topp: 20:31

So, it would defeat the purpose if they then crossed the road in the heat of the day.

Derek Sikes: 20:35

Yeah. Yeah. So. And this was observed as early as, or commented on, I think, as early as 1901. Felt, I believe, was the author who published on it and said, and commented that, yeah, they seem to really prefer cool, moist conditions, and that the dry sun tends to be very difficult for them. So there were these really nice observations and comments scattered throughout the literature that I was pulling together in that section. And that was just really fun. But one of the surprising things was, even though they'd been referred to multiple times in literature in North America anyway, as snakelike or being given this term, snakeworms, no one had thrown out the idea that maybe they're actually mimicking a snake to avoid predation from birds. Which I thought, wow, that, you know, that's strange, because it's one of the ideas that came to us when we were thinking about this. And it's, it's an idea that even though these, these snakeworm gnats are so hard to study, because it's such a rare phenomenon. But you could, it's pretty easy to test this idea of, of does something that look like that looks like a snake, but is otherwise edible to birds are composed of lots of little things that are edible to birds. Does it? Does it prevent predation from birds? You know, like that could be tested experimentally, you just need to get an A nice setup with with, you know, you maybe trained some birds with some mealworms. And I don't know, you attach mealworms to some big piece of tape or something. And you know, so that there's all these ideas come to mind about how that could be experimentally tested.

Roger Topp: 22:35

There are birds that eat snakes, although I've never seen a bird eat a snake in Alaska. Because--

Derek Sikes: 22:41

There are no snakes in Alaska. Yes, there are no snakes in Alaska, but there are lots of birds who migrate and go down to places where there are plenty of snakes. So the birds are at least quite familiar with snakes, except for maybe the Ravens. I mean, some of the birds that that don't migrate, like ravens and redpolls and stuff, probably have no idea what a snake is. But if you don't know what a snake is, and you're you're a bird, and you see something that you've never seen before, and it's bigger than you, you probably don't think it's food. Although ravens are so intelligent, they might or curious to, you know--

Roger Topp: 23:20

They are the one bird I'm thinking about like repolls. Yeah. Okay, redpolls. They might be confused by a mass whereas one grub would be yes.

Derek Sikes: 23:27

Yeah. Right. Yeah, but a raven? So so that that's, that's one line of investigation I hope to pursue, or get some interested students pursue at some point is whether--is whether the snake mimicry has any validity to it. But we, we still think that if snake mimicry plays any role, it's it's sort of a secondary or bonus effect to the minimizing water loss. Benefit. I find the, the, the lack of sort of replicability or you know, the fact that we can't, we can't access these, this phenomenon regularly. It makes it all the more perplexing and challenging to work with, you know.

Roger Topp: 24:22

It's fascinating. I'm just comparing this in my head to the carpenter ant dispersal we saw two summers ago at my house where suddenly they're, they're falling out of the sky, onto the porch, these these, you know, carpenter ants with with wings, were dropping their wings shortly after landing, and that I understand once in a while, they just need to disperse and just spread out. And maybe every year in the case of these carpenter ants, prospective queens I think you referred to them as--and how that I can imagine that getting out there and making some distance--where's these these guys, I don't see them going very far being much of a dispersal.

Derek Sikes: 25:03

Right, the larvae they? How far can they move? And they're certainly moving quite slowly. The other interesting possible artifact is we don't really know what they're doing in the forest. Like, do they, when they get ready to move? Do they form the kind of the snakeworm column in the forest, and just start moving, or in which, which I think that's less likely. But we have no real information on this, because it's one of these things, we people tend to only see these things when they're crossing a road or a trail, because that's where people are. But it could very well be the case that that's the only place they form the snakeworm. They do the snakeworm behavior because this trail or road is dry and open and sunny, or drier than the forest. These trails or roads are very unusual, they're very new, evolutionarily. And the flies could very well be forming these long columns as a as a result of the roads themselves that they wouldn't normally be doing this. We have no evidence as far as I know of them doing it in the forest. So it's not just one of these odd situations that you only see it because it's where humans happen to be. But it might also be an odd situation that it only occurs where humans happen to be.

Roger Topp: 26:45

A road or a trail is a very severe boundary compared to natural gradients, even with different habitats.

Derek Sikes: 26:52

Yeah, yeah, if you're if you're going from a forest into a meadow or something, but even that you've got a lot of vegetation, a lot of shade for them to be under. It's not this harsh transition. Right. So so that, again, with with these guys, it's so speculative, because it's very hard to do any kind of testing. Because we don't know when they're going to do their thing. Yeah, yeah. But that idea I yeah, I really I haven't heard that suggested by anyone else. So it may, you know, others who have thought about this may think it's a little crazy or may know of some data that that contradicts it, you know, if people have observed them in the forest doing this behavior, for example--

Roger Topp: 27:42

But that's the job righ? Speculate on these things. Think about it, discard things that maybe really can't work.

Derek Sikes: 27:48

Yeah. So so that yeah, that's that one's a little bit of a fringe and more recent idea, and it didn't make it into the paper. In that form of, of this being less of a evolved behavior and more of a an artifact of human habitat alteration. You know, like, who knows, who knows. But it's, it is one of these these questions. So we've kind of throw out this, this idea that maybe they disperse individually in random locations. And then when they hit a barrier, where the forest, what we call an ecotone, the edge between the forest and a trail, they're going to randomly turn left or right, because they don't want to go on to that dirt open area alone. So they turn left or right, the ones, some of them, half of them are going to be turning away from the brethren like the ones on the far side that turn right. And the ones on the other far side that turn left are just going to end up going off on their own. But if they if the ones on the on the right side, turn left and the ones on the left side, turn right, converge, they're going to eventually bump into each other. And then they'll start climbing onto each other, and then they can go over the road. So this is just, you know, total speculation.

Roger Topp: 29:18

But it seems more likely getting--if you're in the forest, and you've all your individual larva. And you just bump into some friends next, oh, we have a group now we have more and more and more and more, let's go somewhere, right, as opposed to maybe more realistic is we are all going somewhere. It's that time of day, year, etc. We're traveling, and then you hit those edges and the convergence happens now. Seems a little more plausible.

Derek Sikes: 29:43

Yeah. Yeah. So lots of ideas that need to be tested.

Roger Topp: 29:47

Let's talk let's talk a little bit about another major part of the paper which is it's a it's a new species. Not just new to Alaska, but a new species. And talk a little about that process of--

Derek Sikes: 29:59

Yeah, So we we initially, well, in general, the general process is when you, you find something that could be new, you have to rule out all the things that could already be. And this is one of the places where the Linnaean hierarchy is really helpful if it's, if it's been done properly, because instead of having to compare this fly this potentially new fly to the other 100,000 species of flies that are already described, we only have to compare it to the other ones in the genus, Sciara. Because someone else has already decided that Sciara is a natural group. And and if you belong to this group, then you are within that part of the tree of life, you know, this branch. So that makes it simpler, right? So that's why I had to contact Mistuaki Sutou Aki and Kai, because they they know the genus really well, they, you know, they were able to confidently say what genius was, and also give a good guess as to what species it was closest to, if not the same as then you end up to this question. Okay. You, you know that it's similar to this thing in Europe. Well, how similar? How much variation do you allow, do taxonomists allow within a species? I like to think about humans. I mean, humans are really variable species. You know, when people ask me as a curator, why do you have so many specimens of this one species of Bumblebee, they all look the same to me. And I'm like, Well, every individual on those pins is slightly different from every other individual. Just like every human is slightly different from every other human to us. It's obvious how different we are. To the bees, it's probably how obviously different they are to each other. So some species are really variable, a lot of variation within them, other species less so. But that's the job of the taxonomist is to say, okay, okay, this species is really variable. Maybe there's, you know, darker ones, and lighter ones, and greener ones, but we're all gonna we're gonna call it all one species. But then another taxonomist will say, wait a minute, those green ones there, we thought they were the same as those dark and light ones. But the DNA is different. And you know, now, this is really a different species. So it's all about looking at this variation, understanding all the variation that's out there, which is why museums are so incredibly important because they, they are the storehouse of the variation. I mean, you can try to go out and collect fresh material. But and sometimes you really need that if you're using more modern molecular methods, because sometimes it's hard to get good DNA out of museums, but people are doing amazing work with that lately in museums, so called--talk about museum museomics, you know, getting genomes out of all of these old museum specimens and such. So, our challenge, yeah, was, we knew this was similar to this thing in Europe. But is it the same or not? And what we the first clue we had that was different was the, the DNA so I was, I've been as part of my job here as curator of insects at the UA museum had been building a DNA barcode library. So we've been trying to get as many arthropods of Alaska DNA barcoded and what does that mean? That's--a DNA barcode is a short piece of mitochondrial DNA, short, 658 base pairs.

Roger Topp: 34:07

They're written out your paper.

Derek Sikes: 34:10

Exactly. Just A's T's GS and C's. It's a code, right? And and the idea is that with--if you if you have enough DNA barcode species for a region, then people can begin using DNA to identify unknowns. Instead of having to do it the traditional way with you know, getting an adult male and putting it under a microscope and talking to specialists and you know, other countries who actually know the group. An undergraduate could just get the DNA and compare it to the database and do the analysis. So DNA is is an incredibly valuable tool for the future or for the present and future of taxonomy and biology in general. The Um, the clue we had is that the DNA bar code was about what was over 5% different from this thing in Europe. And 5% is, is a pretty big percent. I mean, that's like what you might see between humans and apes, I mean, or in chimps? It's kind of the rule of thumb is that for every 2% in mitochondrial animal DNA, that's about a million years of no gene flow.

Roger Topp: 35:36

Separation.

Derek Sikes: 35:37

Yeah. Yeah. Where are these populations haven't exchanged genes in like, a million years. So that's, that's about that's 2%. And here, we are twice that. So we're looking at like 2 million years at least. And so that's definitely up at the different species level? Potentially, it's not, there's no guarantee you, there are some species that have a lot of genetic divergence within them, and yet they still interbreed freely. And make, you know, the hybrids are perfectly successful, etc. So, but those are fairly rare. The exception. Far as we know so far, the--This species is found only in Alaska. And that makes them pretty special. We, since we have the DNA and the DNA is in this DNA barcode database. If anyone else had DNA barcode, put sequence data in there from the same species elsewhere in Canada, for example, or somewhere else. So then it would pop up, we would find records outside of Alaska using the DNA. But we haven't, you know, so far, the only records we have that match this species are Alaskan. And that puts them in this category. I've been really interested in this group of what we call potential endemics. And we say potential because in the term endemic, it's, it has multiple definitions, but one is it refers to a species that's found in only one place, whether that's an island or a country or a state. But when you're dealing with short range endemics, known from a relatively small place, and Alaska is not relatively small, but it's, it's still smal--

Roger Topp: 37:41

Particular.

Derek Sikes: 37:41

It does have a, you know, a government, you know, boundary that and the people who are in charge of Alaska's biodiversity and and wildlife conservation are, you know, it is their mission to keep track of what's within the borders of Alaska. And these, this species is one of about 350, that we've identified so far of arthropods that are known only from Alaska. And I, I've been, I have a grad student who's focused on these, and I think they're of particular concern, because, you know, we have all these iconic animals that we think of

Alaskan: 38:26

the polar bear, the grizzly, or the moose, people come up here and hope to see these things. But those aren't. Those aren't unique to Alaska. They're they're widespread in the north, so you can go to Canada to see them, you can go to Europe. What is unique to Alaska are these animals that occur only here. Now, they're very tiny. But these insects and other arthropods that are found only in Alaska, you know, we want to know more about them. We want to know how healthy their populations are, how widespread they are. We want to know, you know what they do for living, you know, all the basic ecology.

And of course, we want to know: 39:10

do they occur outside of Alaska? For about a year we had an endemic butterfly, newly described species, Anaea tanana, that was found only in the Tanana Valley. But then a subsequent year was found just over the border in Canada. So it's a very narrow range for a butterfly species. But it is at least shared by two countries, instead of instead of being restricted to Alaska.

Roger Topp: 39:37

Not going to drive tourism probably but--

Derek Sikes: 39:39

Only a special kind of tourism. I can I can attest there was a group of entomologist who came up here looking for the rainbow beetle that occurs in Alaska. It's worth it. Yeah, exactly. It's like this big, flashy creature. But, you Do, did he spend some days sampling the food, seeing the know, entomology I've had--there was an anthropologist who came over from Europe to sample we have a flightless, blind, rove beetle, Chionotyphlys that lives in the mineral soil. And it's a giant for its its subfamily at over one entire millimeter. But a colleague of mine, Vladimir Gusarov, flew over from Norway to sample that, particularly because this is the only place in the world that genius occurs. And it's found right here in town, up in down into Nenana, and up in Chatanika. There's three sites known in the world for this genus. sights? Oh yeah. I'm sure yes, yeah. So well, so there's a little tourism there. Yeah. When we were doing the analysis for the paper, we found that there was a--there's a another record in China of a unidentified Sciara. And it's not a public sequence twtooo, it's a private sequence. So we can't even get much information about it. But um, that is closer to this one in Alaska than the one in Alaska is to the one in Europe. And the one in Europe is closer to the Chinese one as well. So the Chinese one is in between, and both geographically and genetically, the Alaskan and the European species. And we went, we were bold enough to say we predict this one in China is there's going to be an undescribed species of snakeworm gnat. Because it comes in between these two snakeworms that--

Roger Topp: 41:50

Go to fellow researchers!

Derek Sikes: 41:52

Yeah, yeah., The postdoc Thalles, he did a really nice comparative morphology of the male genitalia and found some good characters that agreed with the genetic differences.

Roger Topp: 42:06

That's we just look at them under the microscope and describe them.

Derek Sikes: 42:10

These have more setae here with a with a larger protuberance. I don't know what exact term the dipterists use, but so that that kind of clinched it. And and then we had the challenge of what to name it. And since we'd been so reliant on citizen science data, for a couple of things, not just reporting all these observations, but there's a beautiful database, social media, natural natural history, or naturalist social media thing called iNaturalist which connects people all around the world, they can make observations of any any kind of organism and interact with each other and get them identified. And it also generates data that is scientifically useful. So we went into iNaturalist and we found all this, these observations of snakeworm gnats in North America. And we didn't know what species they were because all we have are pictures of the larvae. But we were able to incorporate that into the paper that citizen science data. But then we decided, okay, for the naming. Let's, since I teach bug camps here at UAF, both adult and kid bug camps that we would give the students of this year before we were going to publish the campers the opportunity to choose the name, rather than, you know, had different ideas like maybe we would have them come up with their own name and put it in a hat or something, but we decided, give them choices. Yeah, we gave them three, I gave them three choices. And these were these were Latinized names that were, you know, relevant, you know, one referred to the location where it was collected, one referred to the fact that citizens were very involved, and one referred to its snake like appearance. And, and in the most votes came for the snake like name, so the name referring to snakes, and so Sciara serpens became its name. And citizens got to vote on that.

Roger Topp: 44:23

So, let;s talk a little bit more about the citizen science aspect of it and how useful that is to getting these projects started. The original call you got, and as I've talked to you many times before, I mentioned how many times something I've found or my son has found has seemed useful to ongoing research and maybe a bit of a call out to the

Derek Sikes: 44:45

Yeah, I love it when people contact me with public-- observations are what specimens they want to donate. You know, it's you get all types you get people who are really good naturalists who--They say, Oh, yeah, I, I've never seen this, this strange creature before. And they bring it in. And indeed it is something quite remarkable and unusual. That happens. Sometimes. I'm just doing a classroom visit and some kids have Yeah, I found this my backyard, what is it? I'm like, Ooh, that's a new record for the state of Alaska. Like, you know, like, just random luck kind of thing. You also get the situation where, oh, I've lived in Alaska my whole life for 40 years. And I've never seen this spider before. And it turns out to be a pretty common spider that just they hadn't encountered before. You know, like, but but we liked those records, too, because they fill in gaps in the distribution, you know, maybe they're calling from a remote location or something. So citizens are, are just a great, I love I love giving talks to them, encouraging them on this very topic. But they we have so many different specimens in the collection that were donated by by citizens or observations like photos where they send in photos. The whole might have remembered that the murder Hornets the hype about those during the pandemic. This is properly called the northern giant Hornet, Vespa mandarinia. And it's it seems to be eradicated from North America where we're down in northern Washington in southern BC where it had been some nests turned up years ago, but But here in Alaska almost every year, the since then get I and other other people like Cooperative Extension get calls from the public saying they have seen murder Hornets, right? In Alaska. And it's invariably a woodwasp, or some kind of sawfly. These are big kind of black and yellow insects that aren't stinging, they're not Hornets. But this is great. We love it when people make reports because that's how these things get detected to begin with.

Roger Topp: 47:31

How many calls you get about hummingbird moths.

Derek Sikes: 47:34

My favorite call about a hummingbird moth was a I think it might have been an email, but it was someone who said that they were they were sure this was a bird-insect hybrid because it was a bird with antennae. There's a hummingbird with antennae. They were convinced of this. And I just thought that was the cutest thing. Wonderful picture in my mind. But yeah, I love I love all--interacting with the public and getting all this information from them and helping them solve problems. And identify things for them. That kind of stuff is just a big part of my job.

Roger Topp: 48:14

Thank you for that. It's wonderful. I look forward to next, the next interesting paper that comes out.

Derek Sikes: 48:21

Well, I'm working on ants of Alaska right now. And that is going to be quite a story. That is like--I have been learning a lot about ants.

Roger Topp: 48:33

Thank you to Dr. Derek Sikes for sharing the stories of his and his colleagues research. Keep on the lookout. Keep tuning in. Coming soon, we look at the fine arts collection, the birds collection, a story about a humpback whale buried in the museum's backyard, and at some point, when he's ready, a story about Derek's ants. The museum and the University of Alaska could not conduct this work without public and private sector partnerships, and without individual gifts, and state and national funding. Be sure to explore the museum's website for the latest news on all 10 of the museum's research collections and the vast and all encompassing work of faculty, staff, and student researchers. A link to the paper on the discovery of snakeworm gnats in Alaska is in the show notes. The more you look is a production of the UA Museum of the North on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the ancestral lands of the Dene people of the lower Tanana River. UAMN illuminates the natural history and cultural heritage of Alaska and the North through collections, research, education, and partnerships, and by creating a singular museum experience that honors diverse knowledge and respect for the land and its peoples. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe, share, and rate the program. This helps other listeners discover more about not only the work of this museum, but quite possibly other museums in their neighborhoods. The more you look, the more you find.