Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The understanding of all life stages of insects is of critical importance to ecological and environmental management. However, encounters with immature insects are relatively uncommon compared with adults, yet larvae undoubtedly cause more direct injury to crops and other materials valued by humans than do adults. This is true because most feeding is done in the larval stage whereas adults are primarily involved in dispersal and reproduction. My research emphasizes study of larval morphology of aquatic beetles. Emphasis is placed on these insects because they are abundant, diverse and provide many challenging taxonomic problems. Although water beetles are among the most common insect inhabitants of freshwaters, knowledge of their larval morphology is scanty throughout the World. The identification of larvae is a continuing problem because the literature available to accomplish this is scattered, limited to certain groups, outdated, difficult to use or non-existent. This situation an obstacle to ecological works. Because of this, I developed a framework, which facilitates comparison among species. My system of analysis focuses on study of body sensilla (setae and pores). I demonstrated that characteristics of setae and pores are useful and important both for diagnosis and study of the genealogical (= phylogenetic) relationships among taxa. The study of larval features should allow more comprehensive classifications to be constructed. Most classifications of groups of insects are based on the study of adult stages only. Subsequent to publication, these classifications are rarely tested or evaluated. A way to test these preliminary classifications is to study larval morphology. Larvae are under differing selection pressures and therefore show quite different features. A long-term goal of my research is to produce a more rigorous and stable classification by combining characters from larvae with other data sets including adult and molecular characters.