Biodiversity Blog
It got really cold. What does that mean for Texas biodiversity?
The February winter storm “Uri” saw temperatures drop into the single digits and stay below freezing for days. The last time Austin had single digit temperatures was in 1989, the year the Berlin wall fell, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out, and Taylor Swift was born. So, yeah. It’s been a while. Uri not only caused havoc for Texans and ou...
UT Spring Bee Competition
USDA Photo by Jack Dykinga We have a winner! Katie Elston is the winner of the UT Spring Bee competition. This competition was for submitting the first Travis County mason bee of 2021 to win a copy of the book “The Bees In Your Backyard”! Rationale: One measure of our changing climate is the shifting dates of emergence of our earliest spri...
Kinsey's Wasps
A 1953 issue of TIME magazine had this to say about biologist and sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey: “Kinsey...has done for sex what Columbus did for geography.” Kinsey’s influential work on human sexuality happened at a time in the US when openly discussing, much less researching, what went on in the bedroom was quite shocking. Nonetheless, h...History of UT Entomology, Part 4: Screwworms
Photo: Judy Gallagher (lCreative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
Few people want to be a screwworm fly (Cochliomyia hominivorax) for Halloween, but maybe this should be a valid costume choice as what they do is pretty horrifying. In the early to mid-20th century, this obligate parasite, often called just “screwworm” for ... 
History of UT Entomology, Part 1: It Begins with Ants
From Ants: Their Structure, Development, and Behavior (1910) When UT opened its doors in 1883, biology was not part of the curriculum, despite that faculty at the time pushed for representation of botany and physiology. “The new State University organized in 1883 had more ambitions than resources,” wrote Geneticist and UT professor Clarenc...
UT’s Non-Digital Biodiversity Specimens Join the Global Digital Revolution
The prestigious journal BioScience just released "Natural History Collections: Advancing the Frontiers of Science," a compilation of recent natural history collection-related papers that sheds light on the importance of digitizing and publishing collections data, and the substantial obstacles confronting collections staff working on that. This come...The Challenge of 1%
Dung beetle (Photo: Alex Wild)
Natural History collections hold material going back centuries, but the digital revolution means their holdings are now open to everyone, pending the process of digitization. Properly digitizing specimens consumes enormous resources, particularly the one we all have so little of: time.
But the Entomology Coll... BACK YARD BIODIVERSITY: Fireflies
Photo: Alex Wild
Austin sits at the far southwestern corner of the range of the Eastern Firefly (Photinus pyralis), the species that gives eastern landscapes the characteristic dusk light show in early summer. This insect is common in neighborhoods around Austin, with large flights in April, May, and June and a smaller emergence w... Austin’s Other Orange Butterfly: the Gulf Fritillary
by Dr. Alex Wild (Curator of Entomology, Biodiversity Collections) and Nicole Elmer (Biodiversity Center)
Adult Gulf Fritillary (Photo: Alex Wild)
Austin is a butterfly town. About 150 kinds are known to occur in our area, a mix of temperate and tropical, desert and deciduous forest species. Although many people know the famous... Austin Spring Insects: Crane Flies
A female Tipula crane fly in an Austin garden
Spring continues to roll through Austin, paying no heed to our human worries of viruses and lockdowns. Rains fall, trees leaf out, bluebonnets speckle the roadsides, and crane flies flutter clumsily across our lawns.
Crane flies?
Few insects are as strongly evocative of the Texan sprin... New wasp species named after UT Entomologist
Glyptapanteles alexwildi is one of 136 new tropical wasp species that have been recently discovered. This species is named after Entomologist Alex Wild, curator of Entomology in the Biodiversity Center.
Glyptapanteles is a genus of small, often inconspicuous parasitoid wasps containing hundreds of species found worldwide. The genus is&nbs... Creatures of Halloween: Scorpionfly (Panorpa nuptialis)
By xpda - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64833118
Donning the colors of Halloween, this is the Scorpionfly (Panorpa nuptialis). It’s a common insect in Texas in wooded areas and ravines with dense vegetation. They are up to an inch long. Their wings are orange with defined angulate black ba... Insects and Art
Pencils in hand, erasers in reach, students huddle over cases of butterflies and beetles. The room is quiet, save for the “scratch scratch” of the pencil lead, the occasional rub of an eraser on paper.
This is a scene from “Core II: Drawing,” a class in the First-Year Core Program at the Department of Art and Art History. On September 12t... A Rodeo of Insects
By Jen Schlauch, Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Senior
Freshman Research Initiative students
A large steel barn lay hidden from the February cold, framed in a banner of painted bluebonnets and the words, “Texas Wildlife Expo.” Within, javelinas, porcupines, and longhorn cattle shuffled in front of curious children and their ... Explore UT 2019
Photos: Alex Wild
Explore UT is an annual event that encourages students to become excited about higher education and the research opportunities at The University of Texas. And what better way to elicit curiosity than with rows of animal skulls and live snakes, spiders, and cockroaches?
The UT Entomology Colle... Playing With Fire: Ant-Agonists
CLICK ON IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO.
Biodiversity Collections, specifically the Entomology Collection team, are collaborating with researchers from UT's Brackenridge Field Laboratory, University of Georgia, and more to produce a series of SciComm videos that aim to expose people to the decades of research that have gone into what we know abo... Sprinting for Dung Beetles
Photo by Alex Wild.
February 2nd was an unusually warm Saturday for winter, even in Central Texas. Many took the opportunity to work in the yard, exercise, lounge in the sun, but in Welsh Hall on campus, about 20 UT undergraduates were instead hovering over 3000 dung beetles.
This was for an event called “Science Sprints,” one-day intensives tha... Insects Unlocked Video Wins an Emmy
A promotional video the College of Natural Science completed about the Insects Unlocked project recently won a Lone Star emmy. The Lone Star EMMY Chapter is chartered by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and recognizes excellence in the television broadcasting industry.
Insects Unlocked is a public domain project from the Biod... Playing With Fire
Click on image to play video.
Biodiversity Collections, specifically the Entomology Collection team, are collaborating with researchers from UT's Brackenridge Field Laboratory, University of Georgia, and more to produce a series of SciComm videos that aim to expose people to the decades of research that have gone into what we know about o... 
