The Mayfly Newsletter Volume 23 Issue 2 Article 1 12-15-2020 The Mayfly Newsletter Donna Giberson [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mayfly Part of the Biology Commons, Entomology Commons, Systems Biology Commons, and the Zoology Commons Recommended Citation Giberson, Donna (2020) "The Mayfly Newsletter," The Mayfly Newsletter: Vol. 23 : Iss. 2 , Article 1. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mayfly/vol23/iss2/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Newsletters at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Mayfly Newsletter by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Mayfly Newsletter Vol. 23(2) December 2020 The Mayfly Newsletter is the official newsletter of the Permanent Committee of the International Conferences on Ephemeroptera In this issue Feature Photos Feature Photos Photographing living mayflies: Photographing living Mayflies: 2 Projects; 2 parts of the world! 1. Greg Courtney shares some photos from his project photo- graphing living aquatic 1. Greg Courtney shares some photos from his project insects....................................1 photographing living aquatic insects Greg Courtney, Department of Entomology, Iowa State University 2. Photos of living specimens and first photos ever of a livingBaetis tracheatus by Daan Drukker.......2 Greg Courtney has started a project with Steve Mar- shall at the University of Guelph to photograph living aquatic insects, both near his home in Iowa and world- Tales from the field: wide! In this issue, he shares some of his photos from My Field Trips in Israel: Not a mis- Iowa. take, just a strange twist of fate, Amercaenis ridens by Michel Sartori......................3 S. Skunk River, Iowa, USA, 2020.viii.06 Feature Article: What Do We Know about Rev. Alfred E. Eaton? by Peter M. Grant.....................4 Updates to Mayfly Bibliogra- phy........................................5 G.Courtney Reported Elsewhere: Danish Mayfly named 2021 Insect of the Year .......................................5 Zootaxa Update New co-editor and slightly differ- ent division of responsibilities G.Courtney from Luke M. Jacobus................5 Baetisca lacustris, S. Skunk River, Iowa, USA, 2020.vi.07 Megajournals excessively outclass Ephemeroptera taxonomy from Michel Sartori...................6 Notices: G.Courtney Research from our readers Hexagenia limbata, Boone River, Iowa, USA, 2020.viii.24 - New publications....................7 - Video project.........................7 Requests for Specimens............7 How to donate to the International Permanent Committee on Ephemeroptera Conferences............................8 G.Courtney Print copies of many issues still Callibaetis ferrugineus, Engeldinger Marsh, Iowa, USA, 2020.vi.10 available.................................9 Submissions to the Mayfly Newsletter ..............................9 Pseudiron centralis S.Skunk River, Iowa, 2020.vii.22 G.Courtney The Mayfly Newsletter is published (on-line) at https://dc.swosu.edu/mayfly/ (see link on Ephemeroptera Galactica: http://www.ephemeroptera-galactica.com/) contact: Donna J. Giberson, Editor email [email protected] Masthead image: Hexagenia sp. Andy Usher (Indiana University, Purdue University, Indianapolis) The Mayfly Newsletter 2 2. Photos of living specimens First photos ever of a living Baetis tracheatus Daan Drukker Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Department of Terrestrial Zoology, Leiden, South Holland, Netherlands Photos of living mayflies are undoubtedly rare. Relatively speaking that is, because of course there are lots of pictures to be found on the internet. It has been my goal for a while now to photograph as many mayfly species as possible before I collect them for identification. I have focused on the species of The Netherlands and Belgium for a key that I am working on, but I do this everywhere I go, so the rest of Europe is also in my scope. I have almost completed photographing the mayflies that occur in The Netherlands, so it was very special to finally find adults of the enigmatic Baetis tracheatus Keffermüller & Machel, 1967 in the late summer of this year (just in time to use it in my book)! It took me three years and eight visits to finally find them! To my knowledge, these are the first photos of this species of a living individual. The only photos that I am aware of are those of the genitalia from the type series published by Müller-Liebenau (1969). Until now, the only way of knowing what it looked like was to interpret the descriptions and redescriptions (both of which were excellent by the way). I caught ~20 male imagines from their only known locality in The Netherlands. The most important feature that is directly visible is the ochre/rustic colour of the turbinate eyes: just as in the descriptions, but now it is also clear how easy it is to separate them from the – often syntopic – Baetis vernus Curtis 1834. You can compare the photos here below: Fig. 1. First Fig. 2. Baetis photo ever of a vernus, same living imago of date and Baetis tracheatus, location as Fig. 20.ix.2020, The 1. Collected Netherlands. Col- afterwards for lected afterwards microscopic for microscopic examination. examination. Close-up: side Close-up: side view of the view of the forceps. forceps, note the differences with B. vernus and the slightly similar to B.buceratus D.Drukker And what about the larvae? I make photos of living larvae with just as much enthusiasm as I do with the winged stages, but the advan- tage of larvae is that photos of the larvae in alcohol have often been included in recent publications, and these do not differ much from the shape of a living larva. It is therefore less necessary than making photos of living adults. Making photos of living adults often shows us previously unknown characters. Did you know for example that winged stages of species of the Pseudocentroptilum subgenus of Procloeon almost always have their wings slightly separated? I tested this only on P. (Pseudocentroptilum) pulchrum and P. (P.) pennulatum, so it might be interesting if it is also the case in other species of the (sub)genus. Fig. 3. Larva of Fig. 4. Subimago B. tracheatus, attracted to light 5.ix.2020, same of Procloeon location as Fig. pennulatum, 1. Note the huge 19.vii.2020, gills. Collected Belgium. Note afterwards for that the wings microscopic are slightly examination. separated, which is always the case for all the specimens I have seen of the Pseudocentropti- lum subgenus. D.Drukker I hope to keep you updated on more findings about living mayflies every now and again, either through the Mayfly Newsletter, the Ephemeroptera Facebook or through a larger publication. Volume 23(2) December 2020 The Mayfly Newsletter 3 Tales from the field: My Field Trips in Israel: Not a mistake, just a strange twist of fate Michel Sartori Museum of zoology, Palais de Rumine, Place Riponne 6, 1005 Lausanne, Switzerland. [email protected] I made my first trip to Israel in spring 1990. I met Reuven Ortal (Nature Reserve Authorities, Jerusalem) the year before in Switzer- land, and he convinced me to sample again the main areas where Samocha collected mayflies in the late 60s (Samocha, 1972). This trip was mainly focused on the northern part of the country (Figure 1), and I was assisted by rangers, among them Hillel Glassmann and Avi Reuven. At the end of my stay, around mid-May, I spent a single day in the Dead Sea area with Reuven Ortal, where we collected a strange Lepto- phlebiidae, which turned out to be a new species (Figure 2). For the little history, I put two mature male nymphs in a Thermos flask I designed for rearing mayflies during travelling, and when I ar- rived home two days later, both had emerged, one as M. Sartori subimago, the other as a Fig. 1. Springs of the Dan River, some hundreds of meters from the Lebanon fresh imago (it was a time border, on May 8, 1990. in airplane cabin where you could bring liquids of more than 100 ml!). This prompted me to plan another trip the year after, in order to get more material of this Euthraulus species. Initially, I wanted to go earlier, in February – March, but the Gulf war, especially Operation Desert Storm, and the Scud missiles launched by Iraqi army against Israel, forced me to delay my trip. I arrived for the second time in Israel in spring 1991; I spent some time in the north, and after one week drove by car to En Gedi near the Dead Sea where I spent also one week collecting in M. Sartori Nahal Arugot and surrounding streams. Fig. 2. Nahal Arugot, upstream En Gedi, a stream which brings life into the desert, I published my results one year later (Sartori, 1992); and type locality of Choroterpes (Euth- except for the new species Choroterpes (Euthraulus) or- raulus) ortali Sartori, 1992, as on May 14, tali, I only mentioned for each species the total number 1990. of specimens per stage, and the localities where they were found. This was mainly driven to avoid long lists of material examined… not very clever indeed! No mayfly-focused research was conducted in Israel for the next 25 years. Last year, Zohar Yanai was a postdoc in my museum, and we discussed the opportunity to publish some notes on other mayfly species not mentioned in my 1992 paper. In fact, despite being well known to local ecologists, they had never been published to occur in Israel. This con- cerned two non-baetid species I had collected in 1990 and 1991, and which were collected again more recently by Zohar. When I prepared the list of specimens of Oligoneuriopsis orontensis and Prosopistoma oronti, I realised that there was a mistake on the labels, because, for instance, specimens were mentioned to be collected in the Jordan River, at a place called Dodot (Almagor) Bridge by H.