What sparked your interest in studying insects?
You know how little kids like worms and bugs? I never grew out of it. I was born and raised in Japan and, in general, it seems that East Asian countries and Japan specifically have a much deeper connection to insects. For example, in Japan kids have to complete a summer research project and it’s very typical to make an insect collection. Even Pokémon was inspired by bug collecting. So I got into insects pretty organically.
What’s going on in UMMZ’s insect collection?
We’re wrapping up two National Science Foundation funded, Thematic Collection Network (TCN) grants. Like many of our museums’ collections, we’ve been working to digitize images of our specimens, so that we can share them virtually. While it takes a huge amount of time to capture the image, it's way better than actually sending the specimen. I am constantly getting requests for imaging holotypes, which are the name-bearing specimens, and those are irreplaceable. We’ve complied with every single one of those requests. And it also gives us the opportunity to actually have an image so that we can disseminate it to help other researchers.
For natural history museums and collections, there’s historically been this idea of “museum hopping” to look at a bulk of specimens. American researchers will typically visit European and South American collections, and those researchers will come to the U.S., and the circuit repeats. And now, with a network of digitization centers, we can share images of specimens virtually, and avoid that logistical hurdle.
Tell us about the date locality information project.
An important part of specimens is the date locality information; basically, the label data. It tells you when, where, who, and how we collected all this stuff. There's a lot of information there that rests outside of the physical specimen. For more than 20 years, we've been trying to liberate that data away from the physicality of the specimen. Early on, museums tried to individually digitize their collections. And I think that what we're doing with TCN is way more logical. Let's get data from all these institutions digitizing their specimens for a common thematic goal, such as pollinating bees, North American terrestrial parasites, which generates a wealth of data with a focused directive so researchers can actually take advantage of the wealth of data being broadcast. There's no such thing as too much data.
What sparked your personal interest in rove beetles?
I took Intro to Entomology in college, and I was looking at a leaf litter sample under a microscope and I saw all these beetles. I was trying to identify them, and I realized that the massive diversity of beetles I was witnessing were all rove beetles. So I was intrigued and enamored. I went to my boss, and lifelong mentor, Rick Hoebeke, a titan in his own right, and told him I wanted to work on rove beetles. He said, no, don't do it. And that's why I decided to do it. If someone discourages me from something, or if something is not trendy, or not popular, then I have to pursue it and see what it’s all about. I wanted to know, why isn’t it popular? Is it because it’s too hard? But what really solidified my interest is the fact that rove beetles look the same, generally speaking, but they just do everything under the sun.
What can rove beetles do?
They are amazing creatures. Rove beetles clock in at over 65,000 species. They thrive in unusual ecologies, those that other insect groups only rarely evolve to do. Those that are symbiotic with social insects and are intertidal are what grasped my curiosity. Rove beetles can have symbiotic relationships with ants and termites, and in extreme cases, dupe their hosts into taking care of them as if one of their own. And, in even more extreme cases, rove beetles will anatomically mimic their hosts to an astonishing degree.
Rove beetles are also intertidal, which means they live between the tides. During high tide, they’re underwater, estivating, kinda metabolically waiting it out. And at low tide, they're exposed; that's when they crawl around and do their thing. The cardinal rule is that insects don't go back into the ocean, because insects are just land crustaceans. They’re six-legged land crabs, and can’t compete with the crabs and friends that are already down there and have established their thing. Rove beetles are as close as you can get to becoming marine again. They have undisputable prowess in species level and ecological diversity. How this came to be as we see it in the present time – that’s what I want to strive to understand.
Who is inspiring you in the world of science right now?
Joe Parker at Caltech. He’s a good friend so I might be biased, but number one, he’s brilliant, and number two, he’s a wonderfully thoughtful and just an all around good person, which we need more of. Globally, there are just a few of us who work on this problem of beetles and symbiosis. Joe took the least traveled path to become a developmental biologist and circle back to his original passion in beetles. He brings a huge, novel perspective. Science rarely invents something completely novel, and most novelty comes from the melding of disparate ideas into novelty, and Joe is doing this in the most elegant way. He will visit and present a seminar here on April 17, so keep your eye out for that.
