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This article has a chequered history. First an unpublished manuscript in my PhD thesis. Then rejected by a journal. Now reviewed and recommended by PCI Zoology, and likely to also appear in Peer Community Journal (I'll get back to this).

https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.08.23.554460

It's on the rhyssine wasps. Why this small (though amazing) subfamily? Because we've collected well over 100 000 wasps in Uganda + Peru, and it'll be centuries before we process the whole lot.

So now we did a "global comparison lite".

What I *want* is to collect lots of wasps all over the Earth, and find out where there are the most species.

What we could do, was to try this for rhyssines at our two sites. To show it'll be possible the day we've got the (collected and processed) material.

Results:

More species at Peru. We don't know how many more, because we still haven't found all the species at either site

But we got more species for the same number of wasps caught in Peru. So Peru wins the "more species" contest.

Uganda wins the "more wasps caught" contest. Hands down: 444 versus 90 wasps.

We reckon this is because there are two dry(ish) seasons in Uganda. The wasps fly more when it doesn't rain = caught more by traps.

Luck we had rain data for both sites, really.

For more details, read the longer thread on Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/tapani-hopkins.bsky.social/post/3kndnrhyvbk2k

Or even better, the actual article. It's not actually boring by scientific article standards, I promise:
https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.08.23.554460

But main conclusion: this works. If we can collect enough wasps at enough sites, we'd find out how species diversity is distributed on our planet.

And a note on that publication process with @PeerCommunityIn

It's great!

This article was free to publish and is free to read. It's also open, you can read:
- all versions of the manuscript
- reviewers comments
- our replies to reviewers

And it's nice and straightforward. Still took a while to review, but the manuscript was available as a preprint the whole time.

How it basically works:
- Uploaded manuscript to preprint server and sent in to review
- When reviewed, it got "recommended" = accepted.
- Preprint server updates to show that it's been reviewed.

https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.zool.100249

Thread ends. Sorting thousands of wasps continues

Anyone want to collect more while we spend a few lifetimes sorting? DRC, Brazil, Malaysia would be nice. But almost anywhere on Earth really..

Look up the methods from our article so you get data which can be compared to other sites!