I think the long days of intellectually stimulating talks are starting to stack up against me, so I slept in an extra half hour today! I know, I know, lazy! I still made it to the plenary session on time, and I’m certainly glad that I did! William Eberhard was today’s speaker, and he was discussing several mechanisms of sexual selection. He showed some fantastic SEM (scanning electron microscopy) shots of weird Sepsidae fore legs modified to hold female’s wings during copulation, a short clip of X-ray video showing the internal structure and function of Tsetse fly mating (Glossinidae) and discussed the different ways in which female and male insects are constantly competing to increase their own reproductive fitness. A very informative talk, and one that I learned quite a bit of relevant information from. After the morning coffee break I sat in on some tachinid talks, and then headed over to the Syrphidae symposium to watch a streak of Ontarians give their talks. Gil, Andrew and Michelle all did a great job with their presentations, and I think each received some nice feedback from those in the audience. Lunch was a little different today, with lots of seafood and some Costa Rican dishes. Not as good as yesterday, but still ok since it was free! The early afternoon brought more Syrphidae talks, including Gil’s discussion of affordable technology for imaging fly genitalia, a talk which I was a co-author. Again he did well, and there were a lot of people who stopped in to see the talk. I believe we’ll be putting a note out detailing some of our methods in Fly Times, the newsletter for the North American Dipterists Society, in the near future. The best symposium of the entire conference followed the afternoon coffee break, with the Acalyptratae being on display! Of course I may be biased since I gave 2 out of the 7 talks, but I think it was still the best symposium. I presented my work on the Tephritidae of Ontario, the paper I submitted a few weeks back, as well as an overview of my Master’s thesis work. Both were well received, with several questions after each, and I had a couple of people come up to me afterwards to discuss some points further. I’m definitely glad to be done with my talks now, although I wasn’t too worried about either.
I had a bit of a rushed evening however when I realized that I hadn’t received a ticket to the banquet with my registration package. I ended up running back up the road to our hotel to find my receipt and make sure I had indeed paid for it, then scooping someone’s cab and getting back to the conference centre, only to find out it was no big deal and that they had a full checklist anyways! Oh well, at least I didn’t miss the bus at least. The banquet was a bit different than other conference banquets I’ve been to. The guest speaker was Dan Janzen, who is in the process of trying to identify every caterpillar, host plant, and parasitoid within the national park that I’ll be traveling to this weekend. Unfortunately he takes a fairly strong stance that DNA barcoding is the way of the future and that everyone else is stupid for not realizing it, almost reaching a crazy old man status. Not to mention his 30 minute talk ended up being 75 minutes, so there were a lot of hungry, cranky dipterists by the end of it! The dinner itself was pretty good, but the live Caribbean band had a very limited playlist, so we heard the same 3 or 4 songs over and over again. An open bar did create some rather funny moments however when a large group of researchers decided to get up and dance! Lets just say that perhaps some should stick to reserach… The only other unfortunate thing was the party ended at 11, only about an hour after the guest speaker finished, making for not a lot of time to socialize and even less time to take advantage of the bar! Only 2 more days of the congress left, and tomorrow should be a good one with a symposium on developing new technologies to help in the study of flies.
The X-ray video of mating flies was expanded upon by another researcher this afternoon. What a fantastic methodology and some fantastic footage of what goes on during copulation! Too bad they needed a large nuclear facility to carry it out…
I think that the entire Calyptrate symposium was recorded today, and there were some really good talks featured, so make sure to check out the videos of the congress today!
I think there is more that happened today, but I’m just too tired to remember right now, I’ll post an update tomorrow morning if I think of anything else.
MTC…