D3148: Strepsiptera parasitism rates across taxa in American Museum of Natural History collections

Insect populations worldwide are undergoing rapid change alongside our climate, but we know little about these changes. This is even truer for the enigmatic twisted-wing parasites (Strepsiptera), of which we chose to study Paraxenos lugubris and its host, the thread-waisted wasp (Ammophila spp.). Studying any species of this parasite is incredibly difficult, due to the convolutions of their obligate endoparasitic lifestyles and rarity. Luckily, Strepsiptera are preserved in the bodies of their hosts when collected, allowing us to search through museum collections to find P. lugubris. Using museum collection locality data from the Bohart Museum at the University of California, Davis, and the American Museum of Natural History, we modeled how environmental change may affect different facets of this parasitism over time, and how that, in turn, may affect species distribution. The temporal and spatial data captured in these collections give us ecological and biological insight into this intricate host-parasite relationship, and allow us to model possibilities of how it may change in an unstable future.