Today we took a break from writing our literature review to check out some of the wasps we are studying. They are pretty small, so we had to use a microscope that magnified the wasp so we could see it better. All the wasps have labels on them that tell us where, when and by whom the wasp was collected. Sometimes there are more labels recording how the wasp was collected (found on a type of plant, or caught in a trap), whether it is a male or a female, and what species it is. 

To work out what the wasps are, we are using a key. There are different sorts of keys, but we are using a dichotomous key, where each step asks you a question for which there are two possible answers.  

For example, if you wanted to build a key to tell you what each of the four objects below were called (if you had never seem them before) it might look something like this:

1. The object has eyes (go to 2.)
    The object doesn't have eyes (go to 3.)

2. The object is yellow (Mustard the dinosaur)
    The object is orange and purple (A spider)

3. The object is soft (a beanie)
    The object is hard (bamboo plant in red holder)

Each of these steps is called a 'character' and in a dichotomous key, each character can have two states. In step one, the character is eyes. The first state is having eyes, whilst the second state is not having eyes.

We are following dichotomous keys like this for the wasps - trying to work out what they are (even though these ones have labels on them) so that when we start finding new wasps we are used to using the key and can identify them easily.   

After lunch today our lab supervisor decided we'd all been sitting at our computers for too long and instigated a walk around the nature trail. 

Mustard and I brought along our new macro lens and took some snaps of the flowers. Scientists who study plants and flowers are called botanists. One of the plants we came across was a sundew, a carnivorous plant. Unlike the Day of the Triffids movie (if you haven't heard of this, watch it, it's a classic), sundews don't eat people... but they do eat insects.

Sundews have lots of sticky 'tentacles' that they use to catch tiny insects, which they digest and absorb nutrients from. Pretty cool! 

Mustard also helped the lab group through the adventure trail at the camp site, tackling swinging bridges and climbing frames.

Being part of a lab group and working with some really great, friendly people is one of the best parts of being a scientist. You get to hear about all the interesting things other people in your lab are doing, have people you can ask for help, and even make some new friends.

It’s the first day of lab group retreat. The 13 or so members of our lab are on camp, surrounded by beautiful bush, and freezing our toes off. It’s cold!

Most Ph.D. students are part of a ‘lab’ – a group of people who work on similar things and help each other out. In our lab group there are honours students (honours is a one year research project you do before a Ph.D.), Ph.D. students, post-docs (these scientists have done a Ph.D. and are now employed as researchers) and our supervisors (scientists who have a full time job at the University teaching, researching and supervising students).

Today we are settling in and working hard. We’re all just doing what we would normally be doing in our separate offices, but are sitting around a big table and having the chance to chat, share what we’re doing and have some more formal meetings.

Mustard and I are working on our literature review. We’re still reading scientific journal articles and writing our summary of what we've learnt. Mustard is keen to go look for wasps, but unfortunately being so cold, we are unlikely to find many.

Insects are ‘cold blooded’. This doesn't mean their blood is always cold, but that they can’t regulate (change or keep the same) their blood temperature. Mammals, like humans, can regulate their internal temperature to keep our bodies functioning in the cold. Insects are not able to do this, and if it is too cold they will not have the energy to move around, and therefore won’t be found by scientists and their dinosaur sidekicks. The best time to look for insects is on a warm, sunny day when the insects will have lots of energy and be moving around a lot! 

Today at lab group camp, a very exciting event occurred. Mike, one of the researchers in our lab, walked out of his room… and found a spider!

Whilst this may, in fact, be the least exciting thing you can think of happening, or perhaps exciting purely because of the adrenaline that would start pumping as you run back in the room and scream for help, Mike was ecstatic.

This was a very special spider. It was a male of the Aganippe genus, which Mike is currently working on. These rather large and impressive looking spiders are pretty cool – they can live longer than your dog, and build burrows in the ground from which they hunt prey (omnomnom insects). 

A female can be found by looking for her carefully disguised trapdoor in the ground, and very skilfully digging her out... but the males are much harder to find. Unlike the females, the boys leave their burrows once they are an adult and wander around looking for females to visit, so you really need to be lucky to come across one! To find a male just sitting outside your door is amazing!

Whilst Mike was very lucky, the spider was rather unlucky… since he was nearly dead anyway, he was sacrificed for science and collected in ethanol to preserve his DNA.

Another Ph.D. student in our lab, Sophie, works on trapdoor spiders too, so this awesome find spurred a night-time spider hunt out in the bush. Armed with as many layers of clothing as we could find, beanies, head torches, and optimism, we set off down the trail in search of male trapdoor spiders.

Unfortunately luck was not with us, and not a male trapdoor was in sight. We did find some cool burrows with wolf spiders in them, and a sweet huntsman, but eventually gave up and returned to camp for sticky date pudding.

All in a normal night of science Ph.D.!

We’re going to chat to Sophie about her spider research soon, so stay tuned! 

Just a quick update to say that Mustard and I are still reading journal articles and writing our literature review. We're starting to get a pretty good idea of what scientists have done in the past, and where our project could fit in. Not much new happening, although plans are under way for our lab-group retreat next week. All the researchers and students in our lab are going away together to have some time for meetings, insect collecting, and the chance to share what we're doing. Mustard is helping to make very important decisions like how much chocolate should be on the shopping list...

Today we are thinking about how we are going to sequence the genes of our wasps. Originally, a taxonomist (a person who finds and describes new species) would use the morphological characteristics (what it looks like) of an animal to work out how it is related to other animals, and whether it is a new species or not. For example, a lion looks pretty different to a house cat, so by looking at them we might guess they are different species. We would also probably be able to say that they are more closely related to each other than either of them is to an elephant. 

Scientists represent this as a phylogeny - like a tree of life. 




With insects it can be a bit trickier. For one, they can be really tiny! They also sometimes show a lot of convergence - this is when two insects have a body part that looks the same, not because they are closely related, but because they both needed that body part to do the same job. You've probably noticed this in birds, bats and bees - they all have wings, but they're not closely related! They just all evolved wings so that they could fly. So if we were to group animals just based on whether they had wings or not, we wouldn't get a correct idea of their relationship to each other. 

These days insect taxonomists often use the help of molecular data as well as morphological. Inside every living thing is genetic information (like DNA or RNA) and by comparing how similar the DNA of a group of insects is, we get an idea of how many species there are and how they are related to each other. There is so much DNA in an insect though, that at the moment it is impractical to use all of it. So scientists working with molecular data tend to use just a few genes (genes = particular lengths of DNA. Jeans = cool denim pants).

Up until a few years ago, most people working on insects would use between three and six genes to build a phylogeny. A journal article (what's a journal article?) published last year used 1,478 genes to build a phylogeny of the insects. 1,478! That's a lot of genes! 

Today Mustard and I are doing more reading, so I thought it was past time that I told you a little about the wasps that we are studying. We are looking at a group of wasps called the Microgastrinae. This is a subfamily within the Braconidae family of Hymenoptera (see our last post for an explanation on classification).  

The Microgastrinae are endoparasitoids of butterfly and moth caterpillars. A parasite is a living thing that must live on or in another living thing to survive. Some parasites you may have encountered before are animals like head lice, which live on human scalps and feed on blood. Mites, leeches and gut worms are other parasites you may have come across before. Parasites tend to keep their host (the living thing they are feeding from) alive.



Our wasps are endoparasitoids. Parasitoids, unlike parasites, end up killing their host to complete their life cycle, and the adult parasitoid is normally free-living (doesn't need a host to survive). The 'endo' part of their name means they live inside their host. An ectoparasitoid lives outside the host (for example on the skin or hair of animals). 

A female microgastrine wasp will lay her eggs inside a caterpillar (sometimes just one egg, sometimes lots of eggs) and then leave them to develop. The eggs hatch and the baby wasps (called larvae) feed off the inside of the caterpillar as they grow. When they are fully grown larvae they chew their way through the skin of the caterpillar and crawl their way out! This kills the poor caterpillar, but the baby wasps have grown big enough to form a cocoon and change from a larvae to an adult wasp, starting the cycle all over again. It's disgusting and reminds me of something from a horror movie, but also incredibly fascinating! 

Watch this amazing footage of a caterpillar infected with wasp larvae. The dialogue is in Spanish, but you can see the larvae burst out of the caterpillar, form cocoons and then emerge as adult wasps! 

Mooooore reading. And note taking. Mustard and I are learning that scientists have to read A LOT about their research project before they start. 

Today we are learning about viruses! Viruses are microscopic (really really tiny!), super fascinating things that infect living cells and can cause huge changes in their host. There is still a debate amongst scientists whether viruses should be classified as 'alive' or not, because they can't reproduce outside of the living cell they have infected. They can, however, pass on their genetic information (like their DNA, or another type of genetic information called RNA) to future generations, and they evolve through natural selection. 

You probably had a virus inside of you last time you had a cold - there are several viruses that infect humans and give us all those annoying symptoms like a runny nose and a sore throat. 

Isn't your Ph.D. about wasps, not viruses? (I hear you ask)

We are reading about viruses because the wasps we are studying (see our last blog post for a cool video of the Microgastrine wasps infecting a caterpillar) have a type of virus inside them, called a polydnavirus, that seems to help the wasp lay her eggs inside caterpillars. 

The virus doesn't seem to hurt the wasp at all, but they are passed into the caterpillar when a wasp lays her eggs. The virus does harm the caterpillar, by weakening its immune system. The immune system is what destroys cells in your body that don't belong to you and protects you from disease. The polydnavirus therefore protects the wasp egg from being attacked by the caterpillar's immune system. 

The wasp and the virus appear to have what is called a mutualistic association. This means that they help each other, without harming each other. The wasp provides a nice comfy home for the virus to live and replicate in, and the virus helps the wasp's eggs survive inside a caterpillar. 

Another well known type of mutualistic association is between clownfish and anemone, like in Finding Nemo! The clownfish are protected from predators by the stinging tentacles of the anemone, and in return the clownfish  clean the anemone, provide nutrients in the form of waste, and scare away the butterfly fish which like to eat anemone!

Unsurprisingly, Mustard and I are still busy reading scientific journal articles and taking notes. We will probably do this for many weeks yet! Today we also joined a few societies that relate to our research. Being a part of societies or organisations is a great way for scientists to connect with other scientists in their field. Most scientific societies are a bit like joining a club - they might have meetings you can go to or a regular newsletter or magazine that you can read.

We joined the International Society of Hymenopterists. A Hymenopterist is a person who studies 'Hymenoptera' - the scientific name for bees, ants and wasps. 

All life is classified on the basis of how it is related to other living things. Wasps are classified in the order 'Hymenoptera' which is in the class 'Insecta' (the insects), which is in the phylum 'Arthropoda' (animals with their skeleton on the outside of their bodies, jointed legs and a segmented body), in the kingdom 'Animalia' (the animals!). 

Today Mustard and I had our safety induction into the lab. In science, as with all jobs, it is important to know how to be safe when you are at work. We had to learn where the first aid kit is kept, where the fire extinguishers are, what to do if an alarm sounds and how to evacuate the building. We also learnt how to keep ourselves safe whilst sitting at the computer, so we don't strain our backs or shoulders by sitting in an uncomfortable position for a long time. 

Before doing an experiment or using the chemicals or equipment in a lab, scientists have to identify all the risks involved. This means thinking about all the things that could potentially be dangerous or go wrong, and how we can make it safer. Mustard and I learnt how to identify risks and remove any hazards we might see around the lab and in our office.