Graduate Student Jill Stockbridge has spent the past few summers working in the Tongass National Forest on Prince of Wales Island. The fieldwork netted lots of specimens for the museum’s entomology collection. One of them turned out to be a new species of snow scorpionfly.

1) Where were these specimens collected? The specimens were collected on Prince of Wales Island, which is a coastal rainforest with huge Sitka spruce, red and yellow cedars, and hemlocks. There is also a logging industry. Along with old growth forests, you see clear cut areas, as well as secondary growth where the trees are returning. Forest management has been thinning out the second-growth trees to try to speed up the recovery process, which can take more than 120 years.  

Caurinus tlagu are very small, less than 2mm. When I first saw one, I didn’t know if it was unique but I knew it was something I had never seen before and had no clue what it was.

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Graduate Student Kirsten Olson works in the ethnology & history lab at the museum. This summer, she was one of the first guides trained to lead visitors behind-the-scenes to see the collections and the labs where students and researchers from around the world make new discoveries.

1) Why did you decide to become a guide at the museum? What does it mean to show off Alaska to visitors from all over the world? I became a tour guide for several reasons. My family would visit museums when I was a kid and I was impressed with the displayed collections. A part of me always wanted to explore the mysterious basement and secret tunnels that held even more of those treasures.

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Graduate Student Thaddaeus Buser traversed Adak Island in the Aleutians this summer in pursuit of two elusive species of sculpin necessary for his master’s degree research.

1) Does your thesis have a title yet? What is the topic? The title of my thesis is: Exploring the Evolutionary History of Internal Gamete Association (IGA) in the Sculpin Subfamily, Oligocottinae. The general topics are evolution, biology, and molecular systematics. The crux of my thesis is a well-supported hypothesis of how the different species of oligocottin sculpins are related to one another. The development of such a phylogeny then allows us to map, explore, and statistically test different  scenarios of trait evolution (such as IGA) within the group.

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