PhD week 24: Back home

Gratuitous image: New Zealand weevils. From left to right:
Stephanorhynchus crassus, Ancistropterus prasinus, Rhicnobelus rubicundus, Novitas nigricans.
Modified from images on BioDivLibrary's Flickr Photostream.

As enjoyable as my Arizona trip was, it's great to be home in every way with one exception. The weather. The past week in Canterbury has consisted of cold and foggy, overcast days with very little sunshine or clear skies, and the horrible Christchurch drizzle or 'chizzle' as we've begun to call it—light rain that's accompanied by a breeze that whips it into your face and cuts through your clothing—has never been too far away. A far cry from the hot, dry, sunny days that I had started getting used to in Arizona.

Thanks to the workshop and my visit to Auckland, I've been inspired to start doing more dissections, and to try and slide-mount whole specimens of disarticulated weevils. Thus, a lot of the week was spent organising laboratory space to do such things, and ordering appropriate tools for the job. It'll be a couple of weeks before I'm able to start actually doing making slide mounts or using my fancy new tools, but I'm looking forward to it.

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Read:
   Fitzhugh K . 2006. The philosophical basis of character coding for the inference of phylogenetic hypotheses. Zoologica Scripta 261–286
   Vanin SA, Guerra TJ. 2012. A remarkable new species of flesh-fly mimicking weevil (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Conoderinae) from Southeastern Brazil. Zootaxa 3413: 55–63
   Vanin SA, Bená DC, Albertoni FF. 2012. Description of immature stages of Phelypera shuppeli (Boheman, 1834) with comments on natural history (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Hyperinae). Zootaxa 3423: 45–60
   Psalms 100–101

Websites:
Smithsonian guide to North American Mammals
Wikipedia—List of mammals of North America
Page ranges in awk
The Atavism—Measuring population differentiation in R