RJ Millena

Come be my comrade in bug butt parasites!!!!!!!!!

🌟🌟Interested in a postdoctoral project about host-parasite coevolution and/or underlying mechanisms? 🌟🌟

Check your eligibility for this fellowship & contact me. I am particularly interested in hosting scholars from the Global South (¡Arriba mi gente!). www.hfsp.org/funding/hfsp...

Warm welcome to RJ Millena, pictured with some team wasp members!

Despite all challenges, I'm feeling so grateful for my team & their amazing research progress.

Also, thrilled that Dr. RJ Millena @entomolrj.bsky.social has joined #teamwasp as our inaugural departmental postdoc fellow! #wasplove #strepsipteralove

Black in Natural History Museums in now open! See it on Floor 3 in the Museum's Gilder Center. Details: bit.ly/3KfbzTS

GhostParser: A highly scalable phylogenomic approach for the identification of ghost introgression A growing body of empirical research shows that interspecific gene flow is a widespread biological force that shapes evolutionary histories across the Tree of Life. Computational approaches designed t...

My very first post on here.
I am stoked to share lab's latest paper led by @ethantolman.bsky.social. Ethan developed a highly scalable pipeline to differentiate between various gene flow models, including ghost introgression in phylogenomic datasets. Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Big fan of the spinny mechanism 🙂‍↕️

Strepsiptera systematics: past, present, and future Abstract. The twisted-wing parasites (Strepsiptera Kirby) are among the most obscure and enigmatic orders in the Insecta. Strepsipterans are endoparasites

Our big review paper on strepsipteran systematics for Insect Systematics and Diversity is out! Hoping it's a helpful resource for anyone who needs it.

Taking this as a sign that I should just change my dissertation to gifs of every specimen I have in this state

I'm currently IDing about 1200 specimens from malaise in Madagascar and sorting them into genus or morphotype so my eye is practiced at this point haha!! If you want to send photos of the tarsi, mouthparts, and antennae I can get them to family at least

Nah it's honestly just really fun haha—at the most, one practical thing with it was making sure things are actually on the same enough plane for me to measure them in the figure reliably

If you need help IDing or describing 👀👀👀

how I feel using the keyence

Team members stand smiling and holding name tags in a conference hotel hallway

Team members sit up on the stage competing in the entomology games, celebrating after getting a question right

Team Larvae-MNH - PhD students Kate Montana, @mantodeology.bsky.social , Amanda Markee, and @entomolrj.bsky.social and coach @jessicalwarelab.bsky.social - made their Entomology Games debut at the Eastern Branch Meeting of
@entsocamerica
in Harrisburg, PA! #Entomology #EntoPOC #DiversifyEntomology

:^)

A tattoo of a male twisted-wing parasite (Elenchus koebelei) on my right forearm

A stacked-focus image of an Elenchus koebelei museum specimen, measuring about 1.5 mm across

This is my right hand man

Thank you for your interest :) Here's a male Xenos peckii for luck haha!

Over here in New York and in California I've had the best luck with vespids and sphecids on goldenrod, especially in Polistes spp. since they tend to be superparasitized. They're a lot easier to check than hoppers for stylopization while alive since parasitized ones fly a bit punch-drunk haha.

In NZ you might have best luck sweeping for leafhoppers (Stephen Thorpe on iNat has apparently captured a whole bunch of coriophagids in the cicadellid Novothymbris notata)! Other strepsipterans that infect hoppers are also known to come to UV and mercury vapor light traps so that might work.

Oh sure, thanks for asking! I'd recommend seeking out and collecting a ton of the hosts primarily—the streps that I've collected were always housed in their hosts, and any males I've captured on film were reared out of their hosts.