{"id":5466,"date":"2011-03-10T10:13:05","date_gmt":"2011-03-10T16:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/?p=5466"},"modified":"2011-03-10T10:13:05","modified_gmt":"2011-03-10T16:13:05","slug":"apsus-hamilton-publishes-long-awaited-paper-on-new-insect-species","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/2011\/03\/10\/apsus-hamilton-publishes-long-awaited-paper-on-new-insect-species\/","title":{"rendered":"APSU’s Hamilton publishes long-awaited paper on new insect species"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AustinClarksville, TN<\/strong> – In the eastern highlands of Brazil, near the densely populated city of Rio de Janerio, there exists many streams and rivers where caddisfly larvae thrive and over which the adults swim and mate. The tiny, drab-colored insects are related to moths and butterflies, but rather than having scale-covered wings like their familiar cousins, the wings are covered by small hairs.<\/p>\n

But human expansion and development, in an effort to make room for the region\u2019s millions of people, is threatening the habitats of these insects, and they are in danger of disappearing from the earth without anyone, even scientists, knowing of their existence.<\/p>\n

Twenty-five years ago, a young Ph.D. student at Clemson University named Steven Hamilton tried to remedy this problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one had yet discovered them, but a lot of it is no one had ever looked in these places,\u201d he said. \u201cThe species just hadn\u2019t been discovered. When it comes to insects and a lot of invertebrate groups, we know of far less than half of the species. This is about the discovery of the biodiversity that\u2019s around us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hamilton, now a full professor of biology and director of the Austin Peay State University Center of Excellence for Field Biology, identified nine new species of Polycentropus, a genus of caddisflies that formed the basis of his dissertation, a review of the 74 New World species of the genus. He intended to have his findings published in a scholarly journal, but soon after graduating in 1986, he took a job teaching at APSU.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really stalled when I came here,\u201d he said. \u201cDuties and responsibilities here were different. It just laid there. I\u2019d run into people who\u2019d ask how it was going. It was like a nagging ache, almost. Here I was, the world authority for this group, and the product of my several years of work just sat there.<\/p>\n

\"Steve

Steve W. Hamilton<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe fact is,\u201d Hamilton said, \u201cthere was no great pressure to publish the work because there are too few scientists conducting this sort of research. There are more than enough organisms to go around. I didn\u2019t need to worry about someone sniping \u2018my\u2019 species. In the caddisflies alone, a relatively small order of insects, there are more than 12,000 species known and new species being discovered and described every year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month, Hamilton and his colleague from the University of Minnesota, Dr. Ralph Holzenthal, finally published the results of their two-plus decades of work, \u201cTwenty-four new species of Polycentropus from Brazil,\u201d in the peer-reviewed journal, ZooKeys.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt ended up being 24 new species, so the nine new species from my dissertation were like yeast,\u201d Hamilton joked. \u201cThey grew.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hamilton found his way into the field of entomology when he was a graduate student pursing a master\u2019s degree from the University of Kansas. He took a graduate position with the Kansas Biological Survey at a time when the organization was conducting a statewide survey of freshwater invertebrates.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody was working on the caddisflies, so I said, \u2018I\u2019ll work on them,\u2019\u201d Hamilton recalled. \u201cThat\u2019s how I started. I developed my skills out there and then did my Ph.D. at Clemson, where I worked with John Morse, one of the world authorities on caddisflies.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was at Clemson that he met Holzenthal. The two shared a workspace in the university\u2019s insect museum, and they developed similar dissertation topics. But then life happened. Hamilton went to APSU and Holzenthal took a job in Minnesota as curator of that university\u2019s entomological collection. The research they conducted was in danger of being forgotten.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen in 2001, my stepdaughter Hannah started college. She chose the University of Minnesota because, as I joke, she wanted to go to a foreign country for college,\u201d Hamilton said. \u201cBecause I\u2019d be coming up there frequently, (Holzenthal) said, \u2018why don\u2019t we get to work on this again?\u2019 We started back on it \u2013 a week here, a few days there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their paper, published last month, formally introduced the unknown insects to the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clarksville, TN – In the eastern highlands of Brazil, near the densely populated city of Rio de Janerio, there exists many streams and rivers where caddisfly larvae thrive and over which the adults swim and mate. The tiny, drab-colored insects are related to moths and butterflies, but rather than having scale-covered wings like their familiar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[23,6633,262,6652,6857,6858,6862,6860,6856,6859,6861,6863],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xGYI-1qa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5466"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5466"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5468,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5466\/revisions\/5468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}