Learning in CNC (Canadian National Collection)

The place where the course is being held is Canadian National Collection, and yesterday we got a tour of the Diptera collections by one of the course instructors, Dr. Skevington. It is quite an amazing place to see all these wonderful creatures treasured by taxonomists who started these collection centuries ago.

Walking through the hallways where the insects are being kept.

One of the CNC staffs photographed these insects by painstakingly taking apart all the structures and photographed them one by one and then photoshopped the images to get a clear focus of the entire insect body. See the black dot near the wasp's foreleg? That's how small the wasp is in real life.

Checking out some of the enormous robber flies (Family Asilidae)

The insect with the long proboscis belongs in the family Nemestrinidae.

These are some of the notes from today's lecture.

A list of the most abundant Syrphid genera in North America.

Talking about the phylogeny of the subfamilies.

Evolution of the Syrphid head shapes.

Due to ImageShack posing restrictions on photo quantities, I have decided to upload some of my photos on a separate Flickr account. They will contain my "everyday" snapshots, as oppose to the "better" images that I upload to here.