Kai's research thread/caddisfly geekout

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

YAY!

[Kai]

CADDISFLY NETS.







And the Little River.



More pictures coming but for now these four.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Oh, that's pretty!

[Kai]

ROUGH DRAFT OF PROPOSAL FINISHED! FUCK YEAh!

I'd post some of it here but its already too easy to trace me, the way I talk around this forum.

So, cause I just realized how spectacular the above pictures are,

MOAR PICTURES.











YAY!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

SWEEET!!!

[Kai]

Okay, so I just saw an exit seminar yesterday (would be today but it just passed midnight) and it was excellent. This woman is from a certain central Asian country and english is her second language. She speaks fluently, and already has a masters degree, but came to the US for her second masters degree on full ride. She is a very smart woman. Her presentation was on the taxonomic and phylogenetic revision of a certain genus of Trichoptera in that region of the world. Very interesting, and her drawings make mine look childish.

[Kai]

I just learned right now that Amanda is resigning from the grad program. Now that someone else is gone back to Asia, Michael has graduated, Ian is graduating in the spring, and Kevin isn't really even part of the lab.....

That makes me the only grad student left with this guy as their major adviser.



Srsly.



Can't even process this right now because it changes everything. I might get an assistanceship. I might get funding.  I might be able to extend my stay past two years so I have more time for my project and other things.

Its intense. I don't know how to process this info, I JUST DON'T.




....

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Oooooo! i hope it leads to GOOD THiNGS!

[Kai]

Oooooo! i hope it leads to GOOD THiNGS!

I hope I can go hide and let someone else handle it honestly, cause its freaking me out.

[Kai]

Well, good news, I just finished revising my proposal. Took long enough. 

[Kai]

More pictures of the research notebook. I've been working pretty intensely on setal arrangements as of recent. These pages are some days from the past several weeks. Note, most of them are just diagrams of setae with labels

[Kai]

Also, I don't even know if I want to talk about assistanceship opportunities at this point, because I've been told about several opportunities but nothing ever seems to come of it.

Gonna go look at some more stuff today after ex stats  I keep finding more and more little characters, some of which make me go WTF.

[Kai]

Don't mind me, just thinking out loud here.


Had a talk with a labmate today, a PhD candidate who has excellent microdissection skills, and he should, heh, he had to design a whole way of slide mounting trichoptera wings perfectly flat and hairless so he could see the coupling mechanisms.

I've said it before, but this project for whatever reason pulls out the worst panicky anxious reactions in me at bad moments, where I just want to give up on it. I blame myself, lack of intelligence, lack of motivation or discipline, whatever, I blame poor self qualities for the inability to figure this stuff out.

Whatever the reason, even when I race after the more recent setal characters and the possibility of a near automatic diagnosis, it keeps coming back to this damn anterior frontoclypeal margin (AFCM). The AFCM occurs along the front edge of the part of the head capsule called the frontoclypeus, usually some sort of scalloping and notching pattern with interspaced brushlike setae. The nice thing about this character set is that its obvious, part of sclerotized (hardened) tissue, so it stands up to damage quite well unlike setal characters, and it DOES seem to show some sort of variation between species (the problem being I don't even know what species I'm looking at  ). I already have two paper sources talking about this particular set, but thats it, no other investigations have been done.

Today, I decided to take the museum's collection of my organism into my own hands, and curate it. I've been going through vial by vial, checking the notches, placing these in different species complexes, at least in mind and notebook. Later when I have more specimens cleared I've got a plan for looking at the head sclerites. You know how my labmate had to find a way to see exactly what he needed to see on the wing? I have to do that with the head capsule, which means, more or less, /dissasembly/.

So, process as far as I know /so far/.

1. Clear specimen with hot KOH 1.5-2.0 hours, or overnight in cold KOH. Get it so the head capsule is just starting to lighten back up and become translucent. KOH is weird with hard cuticle, it tends to initially clear a bit and then darken the cuticle to opaque, and slowly lighten it again. If you leave it in long enough it dissolved the tissues to nothing and your head becomes far too see through. Not good. I need it just see through enough that the specimen will be translucent but not too far gone that the specimen becomes too flexible and all the setae fall off.

2. The clearing process also causes the soft tissue to break down, in fact, thats kinda the whole point of clearing. So, at the point that I detailed above, the soft membrane areas of the cuticle should allow for easy ripping. I can then proceed to take the head capsule appart, First removing the lower lip complex, then the mandibles and labrum. These can all be mounted separately in balsam for viewing. Legs, anal prolegs, notal sclerites and the rest can be removed in this manner too. The head, once the mouthparts are removed, can be dismantled by pulling the parietal sclerites apart at the gular sulcus on the ventral side of the head.

3. If I can do the above, the whole head capsule, all three sclerites (meaning the two parietal sclerites and the frontoclypeus) should unfold like a book, and I can then lay these together flat on a slide and mount them permanently in balsam.

The idea is to take photos using a camera affixed to a microscope. I can then have an easy record of the differences I see.

I swear, the AFCA, the Frontoclypeus and that damnned notch is gonna be the solution to all of this, along with some setal characters and possibly some morphometrics on the legs and such. Its like eating an elephant. I've got to learn how to clear, to dissect, I need to make some microtools from bamboo scewers and minutien pins, a microknife, need to learn how to make balsam slides, need to curate the rest of the vials of this organism in the museum (and there are possibly hundreds), need to write a chaetotaxy for this thing, NOT for all of Trichoptera, not for solving all those problems with the groundplan, but just with this organism, making up my own terms and names and whatever if I must. The plan that Mathus wrote up is no good for me, cause the drawings are of Limnephiloids and Rhyacophila. So, my own system, own terms, own setup and skills, own tools, own methods.

I'm inventing a diagnostic method. SHIT.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

SWEET.

[Kai]

Pictures of Cheumatopsyche near etrona using a scope. The two species its likely is either etrona or gyra.







Not sure if I want to post the drawing too...