Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Abstract

As readers of this newsletter are likely familiar, we and our collaborators have been working for the past several years on a family-wide phylogeny of the Tachinidae of the world (see Stireman et al. 2013, Winkler et al. 2014). We have already published a morphological analysis of tachinid phylogenetics (Cerretti et al. 2014), as well as an initial molecular phylogenetic framework for the family (Winkler et al. 2015). An in-depth molecular phylogenetic analysis of the Phasiinae led by Jeremy Blaschke (originally at University of Tennessee and now at Union University, TN) and Kevin Moulton (U. of Tenn.) is currently being prepared for publication, and we are making a final push to obtain the remaining sequences for our family-wide molecular phylogenetic analysis. This analysis will include nearly all recognized tribes of Tachinidae and a significant, if still small, fraction of genera (ca. 250–300). As part of this NSF funded project we have undertaken several expeditions to collect tachinids including South Africa (Cerretti et al. 2013), Australia (O’Hara et al. 2014), Ecuador and Costa Rica. In addition to material collected on these trips and from our home regions, many helpful collaborators sent us specimens from around the world. This past December, we completed our final grant-funded expedition to collect tachinids for the phylogeny project and this time we travelled to the South American country of Chile.

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