Meeting 1140 Minutes

Minutes from the 1140th Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

President Jess Walden-Gray called the 1140th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club to order at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, February 14, 2012 in MCZ 101. Approximately 25 members and guests were in attendance.

New business: 2 perspective members, David Fitch and Marianne Espeland, were nominated.

Old business: 4 people were voted into membership.

Our speaker was Christian Rabeling, a Harvard Junior Fellow at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. His talk was entitled Of Martian ants and their asexual sisters

Dr. Rabeling’s two-part talk began with the subterranean “Martian ant”, Martialis heureka, found in the leaf litter in Brazil and almost lost in the wash. M. heureka, in the new subfamily Martialinae, is an early-diverging sister lineage of subfamily Leptanillinae. Morphological and phylogenetic evidence suggests that these ants are representatives of a lineage that arose early on and have persisted in stable tropical environments.

Part two, the asexual sisters, described Dr. Rabeling’s efforts to unravel the puzzle of Mycocepurus smithii, an asexually reproducing fungus-growing ant he first found in Brazil in 2004. Through population sampling, nest excavations, breeding experiments and various analyses, Christian ultimately found that M. smithii populations are a mosaic of sexual and asexual lineages, and that multiple asexual populations have arisen from the sexual populations independently.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:55 for discussion and refreshments.

Respectfully submitted,

Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary