But the more shallow nodes probably need more sampling, for both Geadephaga and Hydradephga; but mostly Geadephaga.

Either way, hopefully I can find the time in the future to refine my first bioinformatic pipeline into something more user friendly. For now, I need to focus on finishing my thesis 😅

We did this, in part because my thesis work uses this probe set in my Calosoma projects. But also because we need clarity in Geadephaga, more data is needed given the taxonomic bias. The deep phylogenetic relationships are consistent with recent research.

This lets us infer the most complete tree of Adephaga to date, using genomes, anchored hybrid enrichment, and two different kinds of UCE probe sets (the Coleoptera UCE and Adephaga UCE). And noting the bias of water beetles, we publisehd a new Geadephaga specific probe set.

The phylogenetic part is pretty exciting because by using just the targeted core region rather than including flanking regions you can integrate different capture approaches and partition targeted probes by genes with a well annotated genome.

Special Issues: they attract authors, giving them editorial power. Also it's easy for publishers to shrug off bad papers using the good SIs and heterogeneity as cover -- SIs are in when it's useful, out when it's not.

They are so widespread at Gold OA publishers that special is the new normal.

Wow... that's wild!

Hi! Entomologist and evolutionary biologist here. Close to the end of my thesis using systematics tonstudy trait evolution!

Ok but that brat pin is amazing