Patricia
W Schefter
An amazing career as a researcher with Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
Caddisflies are aquatic insects, the larval stages specialized for feeding and developing in freshwater habitats. I wanted to locate the hydropsychid larvae I was to work with, and I traveled among streams with running water, and discovered many different kinds of caddisfly larvae living there. Larvae use silk glands to spin filaments from their mouth, enabling them to exploit different nutritional opportunities and create shelters from predators. To do this, they may gather and affix tiny sand grains into tube-like structures for shelter and feeding purposes, or attach themselves with silk to stones where they filter floating detritus from the current, or spin seine-like nets in the current to use as feeding structures and shelters. And these are just a few of the adaptations caddisfly larvae employ to earn a living in the water.
If one can look quietly into still water and spot the tube builders bustling around, or into an area with current to lift stones and spot many of the larvae affixed there, one can appreciate their diversity and industriousness leading to their successful exploiting aquatic habitats, and just waiting to be observed.
Aquatic
Entomology
At the time when I began my research, much of the published literature was concentrated on adult stages. The adults fly for a short lifetime, are captured and identified by their species, therefore giving geographic clues to their distribution. However, since caddisflies feed and grow as larvae, and their utility as indicator species in water quality studies was being recognized, I was challenged by the struggles to identify the larvae to species level. I soon became excited to realize that by isolating and illustrating previously unrecognized morphological characters of larvae in an innovative way, I could contribute to the growing Trichoptera literature base.
I was also fortunate to interact with many experts in this field, and traveled throughout North America as well as to Europe to collect and attend conferences. My collections augmented the ROM’s extensive materials, and through them I produced numerous publications, often in collaboration with researchers in Canada and abroad.
I produced one book and many publications as additions to the Trichoptera lore, and leave these as a retrospective of a successful career.
