Costa Rican Adventure – Day 8 – International Diptera Congress

Today was the first full day of the 7th International Congress of Dipterology, and were there ever a lot of flies discussed! The morning started with breakfast in the hotel restaurant followed by another group taxi ride to the conference centre (only $1 each this time). The plenary session this morning featured Dr. Lee Goff. Not many people likely recognize his name, but pretty well everyone will recognize the TV character based on him… Gil Grissom from CSI! Dr. Goff is a medical forensic entomologist in Hawaii and also works as a scientific consultant for CSI: Crime Scene Investigators. In fact, a few of the cases that he’s worked in real life have inspired episodes of the show, or rather the entomological evidence that he deciphered did. Let me tell you though, seeing true life murder photos and the ensuing entomological evidence is not as tidy as TV may have you believe. His talk was incredibly interesting and entertaining, but there were certainly some gruesome photos of victims in various states of decay that made me regret the ham and cheese omelet I had for breakfast! As an aside, it is absolutely horrible what some people do to other human beings. I can confidently say that I’ll not be looking to work in this field down the road!

Most of the rest of the day was filled with talks on the fly fauna of Africa, and included some really interesting discussions about how poorly the flies of Africa are known. Most of the major fly families that have hundreds if not thousands of described species in Central and South America are only known to have dozens or a few hundred species in Africa. Clearly there are orders of magnitude more species, but it just goes to show how understudied that area is. With the announcement of the new Manual of Afrotropical Diptera project (similar to the Nearctic Manual I discussed a few months back) the push is on to discover as many flies as possible and really get a hold on the Diptera fauna of Africa finally. Should be a busy few years for those dipterists who volunteered to undertake this massive project!

Nichelle had her presentation today, and did a really good job. Being her first scientific conference, it was a little like trial by fire, but she did well and had many interested people come to further discuss her work afterwards.

Torsten Dikow’s presentation of the Afrotropical Mydas flies (Mydidae) was great, and I’d recommend people check out his mydid information site for more info about his research on these huge and rarely collected flies!

The opening ceremonies featured an address by the Deputy Minister of the Environment of Costa Rica, who perhaps should have had her speech writers check what the congress is about before giving her a speech. Nothing too major, just that she went on about the importance of Drosophila and the role it plays in human genetics. Unfortunately for her, this sort of research isn’t at all what the people at this conference are concerned over, which is largely a meeting about the taxonomy of flies!

Had Subway for dinner at the local mall, felt really exotic…

Finally, apparently some of the talks being given this week will be recorded and streamed online for everyone to watch. It seems the talks are chosen at random to be “taped”, but there are already 20 talks online for you to watch. I’d recommend B.J. Sinclair’s talk on African Empidoidea, and A. Friedberg’s talk on the Fruit Flies (Tephritidae) of Africa to start. Check back to the site regularly (and possibly live, I’m not sure if they are streaming it or not) to see more fly research from around the world! Who knows, maybe one of my talks will make the cut!

MTC….