Beetles getting "to the point"

Beetles love fancy horns. This slideshow from the New York Times shows quite an array indeed. An article about Dr. Emlen studies with my old advisor Fred Nijhout.

Aztec insect good eats

The Aztec World exhibit is currently at Chicago's Field Museum, and one intriguing part (which I unfortunately missed) was the Aztec insect eating event.

Monica Eng - food writer for the Chicago Tribune - samples some of the dishes in this video!

Buggy Blagojevich?

Today our new governor of Illinois, Patrick Quinn, announced the following:

"We've had a body blow to our politics and government in the last seven weeks and two days but that's over," Quinn said at a news conference. "Today is a beginning, a start. ... We're going to start to fumigate state government from top to bottom to make sure it has no corruption."

For ex-governor Blagojevich, perhaps this is an appropriate metaphor - or should we say "metamorphosis"? Indeed, Rod-as-Bug seems to be in the collective unconscious right now, if this print for sale on Etsy.com is any indication.

Oh, but the insects do get a bad rap. Fumigate? Impeachment might be enough: I'll take a fly to the ex-governor any day of the week...

award winning photo of fairy fly

this image has received acclaim for the photographer capturing this fairy fly's wings. national geographic released a short article about it here.

-kara

Secret Society Of Superorganisms

NPR recently did a nice very interview of E.O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler on their new book on "superorganisms."

Beyond the audio, they also have a nice slideshow that they put together for the peice!

As many of you know, I am a big proponent of the superorganism concept; if you'd like to read a recent paper on the topic I wrote, feel free to check it out, available HERE.

andy

ouch!

As the semester finishes up and you are getting your insect collections together, something to think a bout more long term: pet management. Yes, even though your insects are dead, your collection can still (most unfortunately) generate insect pests.

Why mothballs in the insect cases? We talked about how dermestid beetles might try to infiltrate and eat your specimens - last night I found some first hand evidence of this phenomenon in a collection box I had neglected to protect. The pictures below show the damage:




















my poor bee mimic! You can see the pupal cases littered around as little yellow flecks...















my carpenter bee too.....




















the monarch as well!















And here is the culprit, at least one of them, that was sitting on the outside edge of the box. Protecting your insects from thee guys is something to consider if you want your lovely collections to survive in perpetuity...

andy

Ants at Work

Some remarkable footage of what ants can do - in this case recycling the biomass of a dead garden gecko in a matter of hours.

andy

super ants taking over world

the ant species lasius neglectus is taking over Europe and wiping out native ant species as well as local plants.

The species originated in the black sea region has invaded more then 100 areas across Europe and is on the move. read more at http://www.livescience.com/animals/081203-ant-invasion.html

-kara

If you'll recall much earlier in the semester we talked about the recent research showing the gold medal for the fastest mandible strike in nature goes to trap-jaw ants (video).

Now it seems my friend Marc Seid and his colleagues have found a termite has bested the record!

As Marc is quoted :

"Ultimately, we're interested in the evolution of termite soldiers' brains and how they employ different types of defensive weaponry," says Seid. Footage of the soldier termite's jaws as they strike an invader at almost 70 meters per second was captured on a high speed video camera in the laboratory at 40,000 frames per second. "Many insects move much faster than a human eye can see so we knew that we needed high speed cameras to capture their behavior, but we weren't expecting anything this fast. If you don't know about the behavior, you can't hope to understand the brain," Seid adds.

There is always a faster gun out their in the Wild West in the insect world....


andy

Leafcutter flag wavers (Donna Conlon)

Just a follow up on the artist I mentioned in class (Donna Conlon) that played with the leaf-carrying on leafcutter ants. To see an excerpt of the video:

http://www.donnaconlon.com/list_en.php?gal_id=62&cat_id=18

andy