This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The study of biodiversity has immense scientific and social value, especially today as it is under serious threat. This project deals with the species diversity, biogeography, and evolutionary relationships of three families of true flies (Diptera): flower-loving flies (Apioceridae), robber flies (Asilidae), and mydas flies (Mydidae). The focus of this project are those species which are restricted to the arid environments in the southern Hemisphere and western North America, areas that are part of global biodiversity hotspots. Particularly flower-loving flies and mydas flies are rare and have not received the scientific attention they deserve. Field work in Australia, Chile, South Africa, the USA and other countries will allow the investigators to collect and preserve specimens for morphological and molecular research techniques that will be used to describe newly discovered species as well as provide hypotheses of the evolutionary relationships and biogeography and propose a timeline of evolutionary divergence. Previous hypotheses of relationships and biogeography will be tested by incorporating additional recent species and newly studied fossil species.
This project will help to understand the diversification of these flies during the Cretaceous period coinciding with the diversification of flowering plants. In addition to scientific journals, the investigators will publish their results online on the project web-site and in the Encyclopedia of Life, both of which are openly accessible. Tools will be developed and made available online to allow future scientists to identify species of all three families. Four undergraduate students will be trained in the taxonomy of true flies and molecular laboratory techniques. A graduate student from Brazil will spend part of her dissertation studies at the Field Museum of Natural History working on taxonomic and phylogenetic projects on an entirely New World group of mydas flies.
