What I’m working on now?
At the present time I am involved in a few different projects, some small and some bigger. Starting with the bigger ones, I’m working on completing, with a valued Polish colleague Patrycja Dominiak, an overview of the biting midges of Great Britain. There are 174 species (only a few bite people or other animals) and we have keys to the various genera and species mostly completed. There is still some writing to do as well as figures to produce this Handbook, part of a series of works portraying the fauna of this country.
In 2019, my wife Annette, who accompanies me on nearly every trip, and I went to New Zealand, a part of Gondwana that separated early in earth history and therefore of great biogeographic interest. No ceratopogonid expert has ever collected there and the last overview was published in 1932 by J.W.W. Macfie, a British worker who had been sent some specimens. As one might expect, there were many more species discovered and representatives have been slide mounted by an expert slide maker Annia Picado. My hope is to see an overview of the New Zealand fauna, with descriptions of new species and an explanation of why only certain groups of biting midges occur there.
A major contribution will be a revision of the subgenus Culicoides (Monoculicoides) spearheaded by Phillip Shults who undertook this group as a Ph.D. project and who I helped supervise. These flies bite ungulates, like cattle and deer, and some species are vectors of Bluetongue and Epizootic Hemorrhagic Viruses to their hosts. There are now 26 species known (including new ones) in the Nearctic and Palearctic Regions and a couple in the Afrotropical Region. We hope to get this out as a publication in the coming year.
I also am preparing a paper describing a number of new genera and new species that are rare and unusual and need to be published as I have referred to them in previous publications and details need to be presented soon.
In October- December, 2024 I visited South Africa with my wife Annette to collect for 6 weeks there. We rented a VW camper van and hiked and explored extensively, sampling Ceratopogonidae in the wetter areas of that interesting and remarkable country (basically along the southern coastal area, the Drakensberg Mountains and the area east of those mountains). I found specimens of genera that were previously known from 2-3 specimens and some not seen for 80 years, squashed on microscope slides and badly needing fresh material to understand them better (similar to knowing that roadkill skunk may be different from other mammals but not being able to say much about its flattened carcass). Of course, there were many more undescribed species and several new genera. A very exciting field trip indeed. I am presently studying these to understand their phylogenetic position and will be publishing (if all goes well) on these in the next year or two.
I have previously published big catalogs of the species of the world and the latest was in 2020, giving a necessary list of each name, who published it, and when, with details of page numbers and where the species came from (see publication #134, published with Patrycja Dominiak). We subsequently published additional species and corrected various errors in 2022 (publication #139). In such a large work, filled with technical details, it is challenging to get everything right (opps, wrong page number reported!). As such, together with Patrycja Dominiak and Neal Evenhuis, we prepared another update in 2024 and report more corrections in our quest for perfection. Alas, there are now a few more errors noticed and new species continue to be described and so I continue to collect these for a future “corrections and additions” paper.
Taxonomists, as they age, start to accumulate numbers of projects that would be cool groups to revise, some weird species calling to be described, a fauna from a particular place (like tropical islands) and other interesting science to undertake and I have my fair share. If I live to be 130 I might have a chance of completing them all (assuming there are no new additions)! Regardless, there are nearly countless projects describing the biodiversity of Ceratopogonidae that are worth undertaking that could be completed by others. It is a remarkably interesting group!