Dr. Darlene D. Judd of Oregon State University has been awarded a five-year CAREER grant that will support a novel research and training program for two Ph.D. students and two M.S. students to undertake systematics research on four families of understudied flies of prime relevance to human health. Each student's research will focus on one of the families in the Culicoidea (Diptera: Culicomorpha), or a small natural group within a family, for which we have little understanding of relationships. Monographs will provide comprehensive global coverage of each group and will include treatment of nomenclature, descriptions of species for all life stages, illustrations of informative character systems, and distribution and life history information. Identification keys and specimen/digital image databases will be made available on WWW. Each of these studies will contribute morphological and molecular character data that will be combined and analyzed using cladistics methods. These four fly families were chosen because the combination of characters they display suggests their positions within the Culicomorpha (the most important vectors of human disease) are unstable, yet of fundamental interest to higher classification and questions focusing on the evolution of blood-feeding in flies. Flies are one of the most successful taxonomic groups on the planet and figure prominently in discussions of agricultural pests, issues in human and animal health, nutrient cycling and biodiversity. Despite their importance, relationships among flies and their close relatives are controversial. Morphological studies to date in the primitive flies (e.g. mosquitoes, gnats, black flies, punkies) have relied heavily on groundplan coding in phylogenetic analyses, while molecular studies are often plagued by problems in taxon sampling. This CAREER grant will integrate modern methods in taxonomic research, graduate education and natural history collections into a program that provides a firm foundation for solving problems on one of the most important lineages of pestiferous flies.
