Doctoral Candidate Zachary Griebenow: Exit Seminar on April 19

Doctoral candidate Zachary Griebenow will present his exit seminar at 4:10 p.m., Wednesday, April 19 in 122 Briggs Hall on "Systematic Revision of the Ant Subfamily Leptanillinae (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), Reciprocally Illuminated by Phylogenomics and Morphology."

His presentation also will be virtual. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672.

Zach, a member of Professor Phil Ward's laboratory, says in his abstract:  "Ants belonging to the subfamily Leptanillinae (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) are sister to nearly all other extant Formicidae. Miniscule and subterranean, little is known of them. Contrary to the collecting bias observed in most Formicidae, male leptanilline specimens are acquired more easily than workers or queens. The sexes are almost never collected together, and certain groups are known from males only—some of these being so bizarre as to not resemble ants at all. These restrictions obstruct our understanding of evolutionary relationships among the Leptanillinae."

"My thesis is aimed at leptanilline taxonomy that reflected phylogeny and integrated morphological data from both sexes. I here present the culmination of this work, reliant on phylogenomic inference from ultra-conserved elements (UCEs), supplemented by total-evidence inference from male morphological data and UCEs. I also here summarize my exploration of leptanilline male genital skeletomusculature, a surreal vista illuminated by micro-computed tomography, in collaboration with Ziv Lieberman and others."

Griebenow will be filing his dissertation before May 19. He joined the Ward lab in September 2017. He holds a bachelor of science degree (2017) in agriculture (entomology) from The Ohio State University. He graduated magna cum laude. He minored in music. 

At Ohio State, Griebenow was a member of the Rothenbuhler Bee Lab from September 2015 to August 2017, where he did independent undergraduate research with distinction. He researched species delimitation in Caribbean Heterotermes spp. (Blattaria: Termitoidae: Rhinotermitidae: Heterotermitinae).  Also at Ohio State, he served as a research assistant and later curatorial assistant for the Triplehorn Insect Collection.

Griebenow was a member of the UC Davis Linnaean Games team (now renamed Entomology Games) that won two national championships (2018 and 2022) at the Entomological Society of America (ESA) meetings. He also was a member of Ohio State's Linnaean Games team that won second place in the 2017 national championship.

His publication list includes:

Griebenow, Z. H., Isaia, M., and Moradmand, M. (2022). Discovery of a troglomorphic ant (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Leptanillinae: Yavnella laventa sp. nov.) in southwestern Iran, with the first description of the worker caste of Yavnella Kugler. Invertebrate Systematics, 36, 1118-1138. 

Griebenow, Z. H. (2021). Synonymisation of the male-based ant genus Phaulomyrma (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) with Leptanilla based upon Bayesian total-evidence phylogenetic inference. Invertebrate Systematics, 35(6), 603-636.· 

Griebenow, Z. H. (2020). Morphological and phylogenomic delimitation of tribes in the subfamily Leptanillinae (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), with a description of the male of Protanilla lini Terayama, 2009. Myrmecological News, 30, 229-250.

Department seminar coordinator is urban landscape entomologist Emily Meineke,  assistant professor.   For technical issues (Zoom), she may be reached at ekmeineke@ucdavis.edu. (See complete list of spring seminars.)