Paper Uno!

Co-wrote a paper that is under review in the Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment after the first round of reviews. This was a study done in Chiapas, Mexico specifically in coffee farms. It's a broad overlook of the parasitoid population and we explored how local and landscape variables affect the distribution (in terms of abundance and diversity). The project could have been improved if we only looked at parasitoids that parasitizes only pests (borers, scales, etc. In our study, there are some families that are hyperparasitoids of wasps and of course you have members of the family Pompiidae that predates spiders, the fun generalist predators). Also, this paper would have been stronger if we looked at generalists/specialists. But c'est la vie, that's an idea for another time.

We found vegetation structure to have the greatest local effect on the parasitoids (higher biomass- more abundance). We also showed that there is a relationship between Azteca ants (specifically Azteca Sericaesur) and the parasitoids. In terms of landscape, highly-intensified farms (which we described as low-shaded) seem to have the most negative effect.

Hopefully, get something from the editor soon.

Will be writing another paper based on Puerto Rico. Similar methods but we're going to do a comparison between the two sites. See if Puerto Rico being an island have an affect on distribution.

We think that in Mexico, everything is so diverse that vegetation richness is not as influential... Perhaps in Puerto Rican farms, that'll be different?

Now wondering how to do a formal comparison.

Advice for people working on wasps:

You will have the strongest love/hate relationship.

Also you will decapitate alot of your samples.

Parasitism Rate (2/21/2015)

Currently in the lab working on identifying parasitoid wasps to species (ha!) or atleast to genus level. These parasitoid wasps were collected in Puerto Rico and some of them were retrieved from leaf-miners. I guess a future paper topic would be the effect of local and landscape environment on parasitism rate. 

Biggest family in the Puerto Rico case is the Eulophidae- having a hard time identifying to species- though genus Chrysocharis was easily founded.

The samples include Braconidaes (with a chelate) and  Encyrtidaes (not even going to bother with genus and species).