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Silas Bossert

I am an evolutionary biologist specialized in the biology of bees.

I am currently a Research Assistant Professor at Washington State University, collecting bees in the Pacific Northwest. Before I moved to the Palouse, I was a predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in the lab of Seán Brady. My research uses four main angles to study bee evolution and natural history. (1) I use phylogenies to study relationships among bees and wasps. This includes methodological studies on bioinformatics of phylogenomics. (2) Using the ‘phylogenetic lens’, I study traits and behavior, patterns and pollen use. (3) I am interested how genes contribute to these traits. (4) I describe previously unknown bees! In times of global insect decline, describing new species to science is more important than ever.

I hold a PhD in Entomology from Cornell University, where I studied the natural history of bees and plants in Bryan Danforth's lab.

You should also check out my colleague Elizabeth Murray's website!

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News

January 11 2022 — Our recent phylogeny paper on Andrenidae made the cover of Systematic Entomology for the year 2022! The depicted bee is Andrena (Taeniandrena) intermedia and was photographed by my friend & colleague Tom J Wood in Spain. Of course, the species is also included in our phylogeny.


 

December 21 2021 — A long running project on the phylogeny of the mining bee family Andrenidae came to an end with our latest publication:

"Phylogeny, biogeography and diversification of the mining bee family Andrenidae", published in Systematic Entomology: doi.org/10.1111/syen.12530

This is a comprehensive treatment on all things Natural History of Andrenidae: We construct a dense phylogeny for the family, study the diversification dynamics over the past ~70 million years, estimate their antiquity, biogeography, taxonomy and more. I plan to continue working on Andrenidae and I think that this is a good start! Visit the publication section for more info!


March 22 2021 — Over the past 1 1/2 years I’ve been tinkering on a large educational poster on bee evolution and the respective timeline. The final version is shown below. Please feel free to download the high-resolution version in the pretty bees section and use it for whatever you’d like (under CC BY-NC: i.e. non-commercial)! Please let me know if you like the poster or if you used it somewhere.

March 15 2021 — We have a new paper on bee phylogenomics! Gene Tree Estimation Error with Ultraconserved Elements: An Empirical Study on Pseudapis Bees. This is a methods paper in Systematic Biology and focuses heavily on gene tree analysis under the multispecies coalescent model. However, I was able to sneak in some bee phylogeny and the very first tree of Pseudapis, one of my all-time favorite genera of bees! They are an abundant group of sweat bees in the Old World with strangely large tegulae (see the uppermost bee in the figure below).

I submitted a cover suggestion, but I don’t think that they’ll take it. So here it is for sweatbee-fans to enjoy:

A phylogeny of Nomiinae with a focus on Pseudapis and closely related genera.


 

November 2020 (follow up) — Below are photos of the holotype of Schwarzia icipensis, a new bee species which I described in the paper mentioned below. I named this bee after the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), where my friend Bob Copeland works in the systematics unit. ICIPE is located in Nairobi, Kenya, and broadly supports entomological research in Eastern Africa, from pest management to medical entomology and insect taxonomy. They do amazing work. Last November ICIPE had its 50 year anniversary!

Schwarzia icipensis from Kenya, a new species of parasitic bees.

November 10th 2020 – I have a new paper on cool-looking parasitic bees. Three new species of Schwarzia and a revision of the tribes Biastini, Neolarrini and Townsendiellini. This was a really fun collaboration with my friend Bob Copeland from Kenya (ICIPE), Jakub Straka (Charles Univ., Prague), and others. German bee biologist Dr. Paul Westrich provided the cover photo for this issue of Insect Systematics & Diversity. It’s a sleeping female of Biastes emarginatus. Check the paper out here, it's open access!

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October 2019 – At this year’s beecourse, I found a few specimens of Pseudopanurgus aethiops that were stylopized. This means that these bees have been parasitized by a Strepsitera. These parasites feed on the host, but they also change their development. Stylopized Pseudopanurgus have different yellow markings than they usually have and stylopized females look much more masculine than healthy females. This depicted Stylopid was probably mentioned the first time by Cockerell (1921), and he pointed out that it is undescribed. And — surprise — it still is!

June 26 2019 – I wrote a blog post for the Methods in Ecology and Evolution blog. If you’re interested in UCEs, bait design, and large phylogenetic trees, it may be worth reading!

April 2019 – The best part of lab work is the part that the liquid handling robot does for you! (Luckily there is one at the Smithsonian LAB …)

Error messages – whatever!!

April 28th 2019 – Not a new species but still a previously unknown bee: The female of Maculonomia tigeri. This species was described by Alain Pauly during the course of the TIGER project, which was led by Mike Sharkey. The project led to a huge number of newly described insect species and M. tigeri was one of them. However, until now, it was only known from the male sex and from just two collecting sites!

This is the result of the photo shoot with Ms. Maculonomia tigeri:

October 14th 2018 – We have a new paper on the phylogeny of bees. We combined data from transcriptomes and ultraconserved elements (UCEs) to reconstruct the phylogeny of the largest bee family Apidae. It is again open access, so have a look at the MPE website or download the Pdf!

May 2018 – Last month I learned that I was awarded a 1-year pre-doctoral fellowship of the Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program (SIFP). I am going to study the evolution and diversification dynamics of solitary bees at the Natural History Museum in DC under the supervision of Seán Brady!

April 4th 2018 – Our new paper on the universality of UCE capture baits was recently published in MEE (Methods in Ecology and Evolution). It is open access so feel free to check it out online or download the Pdf!

This is a summary figure from our latest MEE paper.

January 25th 2018 – A few weeks ago, our Danforth-lab undergrad Erin Krichilsky left Cornell to work as a research assistant at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. Barro-Colorado Island looks awesome and you should really check out Erin’s blog!

July 24th 2017  – I just got back from the second ECN management workshop held at the Milwaukee Public Museum in Wisconsin. It was so cool! Read about it in my newest entry in the bee trips section. Thanks to the Entomological Society of America (ESA) for granting me a travel voucher!

May 4th 2017  – Have you ever seen the female of Clavinomia clavicornis? Well I hadn't until I recently found it in the collection of the Logan Bee Lab at USU. Have a look!

April 30th 2017 – Good news, someone is no longer single: My colleague Seb Patiny from Belgium and I found the previously unknown male of Systropha macronasuta from KenyaI will soon upload a photograph into the gallery!

April 4th 2017 – Our new MPE paper on GC bias in phylogenomic data sets is out. I can't tell how it happened but we were awarded as Editor's choice!

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