NSF Grants CAREER Award to Andrew Short

The National Science Foundation has awarded entomology curator Andrew Short a grant of $700,000 for his proposal “CAREER: Teaching Modern Biodiversity Science from Fieldwork to Phylogeny: Diversity, Systematics, & Evolution of Ecologically Promiscuous Aquatic Beetles.” The grant includes resources for undergraduate and graduate student opportunities, including fieldwork in Suriname and Guyana.

Freshwater and terrestrial habitats demand dramatically different sets of morphological, physiological, and behavioral traits. Consequently, animals at each end of this habitat continuum exhibit starkly different morphologies and life histories, and lineages must overcome numerous challenges to transition between these divergent ways of life. Nevertheless, insects have repeatedly crossed the freshwater-terrestrial boundary in many independent groups. Despite this diversity and abundance, little is known about how insects evolve across this seemingly formidable aquatic-terrestrial boundary and how this affects the evolutionary trajectories of these lineages. Using the beetle family Hydrophilidae, a lineage which has diversified in a range of fully aquatic, terrestrial, and intermediate habitats and has transitioned between them repeatedly, Short and the students will examine (1) the ecological and morphological transitions associated with aquatic-terrestrial habitat shifts, and (2) both the macroevolutionary (e.g., changes in diversification rate) and intraspecific (e.g., differences in genetic structuring) consequencesof these shifts. By combining fieldwork, revisionary taxonomy, RAD-seq phylogeography and phylogenetics with immersive undergraduate coursework and graduate student training, this team will disentangle the evolutionary history of habitat transitions in water beetles.