Normal Biology

Adventures in Entomology: Taiwanese Tenacity

2012-03-18T11:44:00.000-04:00

I like to emphasize how science (and entomology in particular) is a field focused on curiosity and exploration. When I'm talking about entomology, I like to call it "the great equalizer." Why? Because it's so easy to make your own discoveries and find something notable. You don't even need an advanced degree--just an interest.

Case in point? A Taiwanese shopkeeper named Hsu Kun-chin who likes gardening. This article is from July 2011 (I'm a little late on getting this posted) and is a great story. Hsu Kun-chin discovered new information about the mating habits and molting process of the ogre-faced spiders in the genus Deinopis.

Ogre-faced spider: photo by Hsu Kun-chin

I suppose I can understand why they call it ogre-faced. It's not as cute as the jumping spiders, but it's still neat.

I feel like Hsu Kun-chin and I would get along pretty well; we seem to share some common traits. For example, his family wasn't too keen on him keeping these spiders in his house. My roommates and parents can commiserate.

Hsu Kun-chin's story also highlights the importance of basic research. Studies about the habits of animals are necessary to inform questions that scientists can research with future experiments. If we're missing knowledge or have the wrong information about how an animal acts, that needs to be fixed. Fortunately, it's not a losing battle: as this story illustrates, this is research that anyone can do, no fancy laboratory required!

Such research may require dedication and a heck of a lot of tenacity as well. This quotation illustrates it best:

“Though I often encountered boars and poisonous snakes on those trips, I never wavered from my goal." -Hsu Kun-chin

A Calm Millipede's UV Fluorescence

2012-03-14T12:05:00.000-04:00

Let's talk about millipedes! You may have read my entry on a millipede that fluoresces under ultraviolet light I found this past fall that grabbed my attention. I've since done some more research, and after working on a poster a few weeks ago for the Ohio Natural History Conference, I have more information and motivation to summarize what I've learned.

How did I find out about these UV fluorescing millipedes in the first place? I was on a night hike with some friends last fall and had the foresight to bring a UV flashlight along, just in case there was anything neat to look at under UV. It was a bit chilly, and we weren't finding much.

Then I turned the flashlight on.

As we passed by areas with fallen leaves, I started catching glimpses of blue-green light: millipedes were fluorescing while milling about in the leaf litter. If you haven't seen this, you owe it to yourself to grab a UV flashlight and check it out. As it turns out, the millipedes I was seeing were one species: Semionellus placidus. This millipede is in the family Xystodesmidae and is about an inch and a quarter long. Many Xystodesmid millipedes are known to fluoresce under UV, and one genus contains the only bioluminescent millipedes known to exist (note that bioluminescence, when an organism produces its own light, is different from UV fluorescence).

I was intrigued by this millipede, but didn't know anything about it at that point--not even its species. I keyed it out to family with the help of an unpublished key by Bill Shear, and posted it to BugGuide, where Rowland Shelley helped me with the species. It's in the tribe Chonaphini, which is mostly restricted to the Pacific Northwest. Breaking the mold, Semionellus placidus ranges from "Minnesota and Michigan east to New York, south in the mountains through Maryland and Virginia to Fort Benning, Georgia" (Chamberlin & Hoffman). It is also described as sporadic in its range, rather than blanketing it uniformly.

S. placidus under low UV light.

S. placidus under normal light.

I finally had my ID for this species! I started checking the literature to find out more and discovered....there's not much published on it. Oh. To make sure I wasn't missing any hidden information anywhere, I did a thorough job of Googling my enigmatic millipede, which turned up some old publications that are a little difficult to interpret. It's that 100 year gap in English, you know? My research is also made trickier by the synonyms this species has. Here's the list:

Chonaphe michigana
Leptodesmus borealis
Leptodesmus placidus
Polydesmus floridus
Polydesmus placidus
Trichomorpha placida

Millipedes don't have the same PR and research dollars behind them as a group like the butterflies (big insects, pretty colors and all that jazz), so that leaves me in the position of doing the research myself. Of course, that's exciting! I have a figure of the male gonopod hanging up on a board in the lab (see below), with the main things known about the millipede written beside it in dry erase marker as motivation for delving deeper.

Figure 1 from "Some Records and Descriptions of Diplopods Chiefly in the Collection of the Academy" by Ralph V. Chamberlin. (Currently hanging up in my lab.)

Let's take a moment to talk about the above picture, Figure 1. You'll notice that number 3 is what we're interested in: that's the gonopod of Semionellus placidus. The gonopods are a pair of modified legs the male millipede uses during mating for sperm transfer to the female. These structures can be pretty elaborate and sometimes don't look like anything that ever could have been a leg. To really get a feel for what the gonopods look like, check out the three pictures below.

Millipede flipped on its back, camera looking down at the gonopods.

Same as before, but the millipede has been turned slightly to get a side view. The gonopod on the right was overlayed from a picture with better focus.

Side view.

I've successfully kept some of these millipedes I collected from the field station alive since October, and a few females have laid some batches of eggs in their container. The eggs fluoresce under UV as well, which is pretty neat. They're laid in a soil cavity, which the mother excavated at the bottom of her plastic container about 1.5 inches down. UV fluorescence in a life stage other than the adult hasn't been reported before, so that observation might be important in figuring out why/how the millipedes fluoresce.

Next steps:
It's time to do some research! With capstone looming ever closer on the horizon, I must devote my research time to finishing that, but I'm hoping to hit the field station during the summer with a UV light to see if this millipede is active yet. I've encountered it during September and October, but so far that's it. I'm also going to work on some type of publication based on what's known, and I'm waiting for another reference to come in. If my plans work out and I'm available during the summer, I hope to try to observe the assassin bug Rhiginia cruciata's relationship with this or any other millipede to quantify its feeding habits. (Remember: R. cruciata is an assassin bug in a subfamily known to feed on millipedes.)

A dish of millipedes under UV light. Most of the ones fluorescing in blue are Semionellus placidus, while the two fluorescing red are Pseudopolydesmus serratus. Red fluorescence under UV hasn't been reported before in arthropods, to my knowledge.

References:

Chamberlin, RV. 1920. A new leptodesmoid diplopod from Louisiana. Proc. Biol. Soc. Washington, 33: 97-100. Link.
Chamberlin, RV. 1947. Some Records and Descriptions of Diplopods Chiefly in the Collection of the Academy. Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 99: 21-58.
Chamberlin, R.V. & Hoffman, R.L. 1958. Checklist of the millipeds of North America. Bulletin
of the US National Museum, 212: 1–236.
Wood, HC. 1864. Descriptions of new species of North American Polydesmidae. Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philad, 16: 6-10. Link.

My First Research: Assassin Bug and Millipede Invasion at the ONHC

2012-03-12T00:45:00.000-04:00

My posters from the Ohio Natural History Conference are now online! I've updated my post from the conference with links, and also wanted to post them here for easy reference. I was the lead author on my first poster, "A Biological Survey of the Assassin Bugs (Hemiptera: Reduviidae) at the Barbara A. Beiser Field Station", which is posted below. Click this link or right click on the picture and choose "view image" for a larger (and readable) picture.

I was a contributing author on the second poster, titled "UV Fluorescing Millipedes from Southeastern Ohio." There's a lot of interesting questions raised from this research that I would like to investigate. Hopefully it will inspire others to take an interest in millipedes as well.

Note that there is a typo in the first paragraph of the Conclusion section. E. leachii is always found in decaying wood, not in leaf litter.

For more information about the conference, you can read over my first blog post (which has a link to my tweets from the conference), and some news stories from my college here and here.

They are coming...

2012-03-11T23:20:00.000-04:00

It's been warm the past few days, and Spring Break has started, so I went out tonight to see if any insects were flying around. I also left a porch light on, which returned some results.

This pretty moth was attracted to the porch light I left on, and seemed content to hug the side of my house.

The above wasp seemed to have suffered from damage and was limping about, which made it easier to get some pictures of. It looks to be a parasitic wasp.

The scales on the wings probably help this moth be active before it has become consistently warm, and judging from the antennae, it's a male looking for a female.

I'm thinking that this insect is a species of caddisfly, but I have yet to get a picture good enough to really say for sure. I'll have to put it under a hand lens or microscope to figure it out. Its long antennae have an interesting curl at the end.

Hopefully I'll have an ID for these insects sometime soon, but I'll probably take this week off to relax a little.

I also saw a lot of slugs and earthworms out tonight, sliding through the moss. I also caught a millipede, saw a few spiders, an earwig, and a green lacewing. Not too bad of a haul for this early in the year, and just a taste of what's to come. Now to wait for the fireflies to emerge!

Science Video Friday - Firefly Double Feature

2012-03-02T01:39:00.000-05:00

Science Video Friday comes to you today as a double feature! One of the neatest topics within entomology is bioluminescence, the process by which insects can create their own light. The first insect you probably think of when you hear that is the firefly. Those of us in the eastern US are fortunate enough to live in areas where fireflies also live: west of the Rockies, you don't really find them.

Fireflies can flash in a variety of colors, including orange, yellow, and even blue! The color of their flash is one way they recognize their own species in the dark, so if you see fireflies in your yard at night and there are two different colors flashing, you have at least two separate species.

Now it's time to learn a bit more about fireflies, with the wonderful series "Meet the Lampyridae." Enjoy!

Tree Lobsters

2012-03-01T22:45:00.002-05:00

I love me some good science writing. Yesterday, I read an amazing example from NPR about a gigantic insect that was thought to be extinct. Read it immediately, then come back!

Wasn't that a fantastic read? Just, wow. The story exploded on Facebook and Twitter, and I read it after being told by a few friends that I would love it; they were correct. It's always uplifting to read about an organism that was thought to be extinct reappearing somewhere else. More than that, when the conservation efforts converge and are successful like in this example, I just can't help but smile. Life will find a way, and humans can help.

Sometimes even after we caused the problem in the first place.

Mission Complete: Skunk Cabbage

2012-02-28T01:12:00.001-05:00

A year ago, while I was in Costa Rica studying abroad, I heard about the mythical skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus. This magical plant was said to flower during late winter and early spring, and to even have the powers to melt snow around it and attract some of the first insect pollinators of the year.

After seeing some marvelous pictures of this legendary arum, I resolved to find this plant myself. Unfortunately, I was in Costa Rica. (Yes, I'm aware that this is probably the first time that sentence has ever been said.) By the time I returned to the United States, the flowers were gone.

But now, after an entire year, we're in the correct season and all the elements have come together to form perfect skunk cabbage weather. Today, my class schedule even worked out, resulting in my Lower Plants lab taking a trip to search for the prize.

Ladies and gentlemen: we have skunk cabbage!

As we entered an area with a natural seep to look for the cabbage, we were teased with the...."distinct" smell of skunk cabbage. It was either that, or sewage. At any rate, I was mad with a feverish yearning to find this most desirable of cabbages. Descending a hill, we entered a wet area and knew we were close. My eyes scanned past a growth of cattails to discover standing water.

My mind was racing.

I searched for any characteristic feature: mottled red on green, bright green leaves...anything not familiar to me. And th--HOLY CRAP, THERE IT IS!

Like a beautiful green sentry, there the skunk cabbage leaf stood: curled up, surveying its territory from CENTIMETERS above the water. Truly, this is royalty. I jumped up and down and shouted for joy, much to the chagrin of my lab companions. However, manners were secondary to my cause at this point. After about five minutes of bolting from plant to plant, I finally settled down enough to examine the Hope Diamond of plants.

Being in the arum family, skunk cabbage has a spathe and spadix. The spathe is actually the fleshy, modified leaves surrounding that weird-looking ball in the middle of the plant. That pimply ball is the spadix, which has small, white flowers that are pollinated by insects such as flies, bugs, and beetles. Since the flowers are so inconspicuous, they aren't in charge of attracting the pollinators. Rather, that delectable stench is the attractant. It worked pretty well on me, so it must be good enough for all those pollinators, eh?

I was positively giddy once we found the skunk cabbage--probably to the point of freaking everyone else out. My long year of waiting was well worth it: I was not disappointed at all with what I found. This is truly a remarkable plant...from the smell to the colors to the message. If you find skunk cabbage, it means Spring surely isn't far away.

Get out and look for skunk cabbage while you can still see the flowers: you won't be disappointed. Snow won't even kill it at this point, thanks to its thermogenic qualities (it's somewhat of a dragon really), so you have no excuses not to get skunked.

Seriously, go. It's so amazing!

Insect Explosion: Parasitoid or Bird?

2012-02-26T23:21:00.000-05:00

When I first started to become interested in insects two summers ago, I had a lot of inspiration thanks to the Catalpa trees in my backyard. I've always loved Catalpas: their flowers bloom starting in June and are spectacularly beautiful. They also smell really great.

One of the insects that can be found on Catalpa is the Catalpa Hornworm (Ceratomia catalpae). This caterpillar in the family Sphingidae can grow quite large (~3 inches) and goes through boom and bust cycles. During the summer of 2010, it was definitely a boom year for this caterpillar, which provided me with ample specimens.

There are also ample caterpillars for parasitoids to have a field day. Braconid wasps are especially prevalent, resulting in many of the caterpillars dying as they become vessels for broods of wasps.

Here you can see a Braconid wasp crawling on the cocoons.

This was a common sight, so I got used to seeing it after a few days. But once I found one that looked dramatically different (even from the cocooned ones), I took notice.

Yeah, I'd say that is dramatically different.

So....what happened? Good question! This guy lost the lottery in a spectacular way. He just exploded and that was that. Obviously, this is not like the parasitoidism of the Braconid wasps. If I were to venture a guess, I would blame a parasitoid fly maggot bursting out of the body: you can see a trail of liquid that comes out of the caterpillar's body and curves down by its head that looks like it could have been made by a maggot dragging itself along the leaf.

I haven't researched fly parasitoidism enough to put too much confidence behind that hypothesis, however. It also could have been a bird or other predator that decided to have a little snack, but wanted to leave a warning for the other caterpillars.

I would love to have the answer to the question, so I'll have to check for more caterpillars this summer. Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll find a maggot this time around, or see something else that explains it.

An Unfortunate Cicada

2012-02-26T01:06:00.001-05:00

I've been reading about cicadas and entomogenous* fungi lately, which reminded me of a picture I had from back in September when I was at the field station working on my capstone project.

*This is an awesome new word I learned today-- it means growing on or in the bodies of insects.

I found this annual cicada, still in its larval stage, before it emerged as an adult, with fungus growing from it. I was thinking that the fungus itself might have killed it, but that's tough to say for sure. The cicada could have died before the fungus came along, of course.

Still, it would be interesting if it was the fungus that killed the cicada. So many fungi associate with the roots of trees, upon which cicadas feed while they're underground. Maybe some species attack the cicadas to protect the tree. Someone should investigate that.

...but not me, currently. I'm focused on capstone for now.

Firefly Mimics - A Crafty Click Beetle

2012-02-23T00:36:00.000-05:00

I learned two things during my Investigative Studies Project last summer concerning mimicry:

Fireflies get mimicked a whole lot
It's super tricky to separate some of the mimics from actual fireflies, especially when you get into the soldier beetles (family Cantharidae).

A group I wasn't aware mimicked fireflies is the click beetle family, Elateridae. During my research I spotted a pretty example of one of the representatives from this family:

Unless you were to get on this click beetle's level, you would think it's a firefly. I'm quite pleased with this picture, though it could use a little more touching up later. Denticollis denticornis is this beetle's name, and it was making its way across a moss and lichen-covered log, providing a great background.

This is the only species in its genus in North America, and its mimicry of fireflies is a predator defense. I haven't found any information about whether or not the beetle itself is toxic, or if it's just getting a free ride thanks to the fireflies. A predator would see it and be all "I'm staying away from that beetle, it must be toxic!" and D. denticollis would chuckle to itself and walk away.

Winter's Zebra Assassins

2012-02-19T17:50:00.001-05:00

If you live in Ohio, you would probably agree that this winter has been a strange one. In the southeast, we haven't gotten much snow (much to my own chagrin). While this stops me from sledding down the available hills on campus, the mild weather at least means that you're more likely to encounter insects than you would be under two feet of snow.

A few weeks ago, on January 27th, a friend brought me a nice little surprise:

This little dude clad in zebra stripes is the assassin bug known as Pselliopus barberi. This species, like other assassins, is predaceous (just check out that beak!) and this one overwinters as an adult, explaining why it was found in January. It's not too large, just about 14 millimeters, but it's quite striking.

There are two species in this genus that you're likely to encounter often in Ohio: P. barberi and P. cinctus. P. cinctus is slightly smaller, and is a duller orange color. Before getting this one, I hadn't bothered too much with identifying them to species because it can be subtle differences that distinguish them, but the easy way to go about it is this: P. barberi is larger, brighter, and doesn't usually have a dark spot on its anterior pronotal lobe. Another character: the back margin of the pronotum on P. barberi is straight, while P. cinctus has a bisinuate margin. Let's use some pictures to explain those terms.

Pselliopus barberi

The back of the pronotal margin is straight, that's pretty easy to see.

Pselliopus cinctus

Now you can see the difference and understand what bisinuate actually means (I wasn't sure at first myself): the back margin of P. cinctus looks slightly flared out. You can also see the dark spot.

I've seen both species and one of their nymphs: their orange color really makes them stand out. My yard seems to be a pretty good place for them, as I've found the nymph on Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus carota) and an adult P. cinctus prowling around on Smooth Sumac (Rhus glabra) near some leatherwing beetles.

Keep an eye out during the warmer days of winter and you might spot a few. I've been keeping mine alive on fruit flies and will set it free during Spring if it can stay alive until then--I have high hopes!

2012 Ohio Natural History Conference

2012-02-13T22:59:00.001-05:00

Columbus, Ohio was THE place to be this past Saturday, for one reason: the Ohio Natural History Conference. Yes, this meetup for natural history enthusiasts was indeed a blast and well worth the wait. This year's theme was citizen science, and all the presentations centered around that theme. There's never been a better time to be a naturalist, considering how easy the Internet is making it (especially if you're interested in Entomology).

This year was the 9th year for the conference, and it marked the 100th year of the Ohio Biological Survey, which sponsors the conference along with the Ohio Division of Wildlife. OBS publishes some great literature on the natural history of Ohio, especially the insects. It will be exciting to see the direction OBS goes in the next 100 years, and you can expect more great research coming from it.

Brian Armitage, former direction of the OBS, speaks about its history.

I was enthralled by every talk, it's extremely exciting to see the barriers between hard science and the general public breaking down. The keynote presentation was given by David Bonter, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He's the assistant director of citizen science there, and gave a fascinating account of the projects the Lab is doing.

The biggest takeaway from his presentation was that citizen scientists are gathering solid scientific data on a scale that would be impossible otherwise. On top of that, the participants are volunteers, so that data is free.

I was livetweeting the conference, which forced me to furiously switch between taking notes and grabbing my Droid to send updates to Twitter. That stream is a better summary of the conference than I could offer here, so head to the Storify link I made for the tweets to read about the presentations that were given.

My favorite part of the conference was presenting my own research in the form of a poster. I've mentioned my summer research on assassin bugs before, but haven't blogged at length about it before. During the process of making the poster, I finally wrote everything down concisely, so I'll make a post about that soon. My poster was entitled "A Biological Survey of the Assassin Bugs (Hemiptera:Reduviidae) at the Barbara A. Beiser Field Station" and I highlighted the seven species of assassin bugs I encountered. I also assisted in the preparation of a poster about millipede fluoresce under UV, "UV Fluorescing Millipedes from Southeastern Ohio."

I had a great experience talking to other interested people about my research, and I'm looking forward to doing it again. I feel like I had a strong poster with interesting research (I mean, how can you beat assassin bugs and millipedes?), and hopefully I'll be talking about it more in the future.

If you couldn't make it out to the conference this year, start planning for next year! There's not a date set yet, but it's usually held during early or mid-February. Maybe I'll present research again next year, what more could you want?

Science Video Friday: Fungi Edition

2012-02-10T06:39:00.001-05:00

Fungi are pretty important. In fact, without fungi, forests as we know them probably wouldn't exist. Why? Because fungi form mutualistic relationships with plant roots that help the plant grow. There are a couple different ways that fungi can do this, but it has the same result: aiding plant growth and stabilizing the health of the plant.

Unfortunately, many people don't know about fungal-plant relationships and how important they are to the ecosystem, and fungi are shunned. Some mushrooms are considered pretty, but for the most part, fungi don't receive the recognition they deserve. Paul Stamets is working to correct this, and judging from this clip, he's doing an amazing job.

Caterpillar Life Choices

2012-02-08T19:58:00.000-05:00

I'm currently in a scientific imaging class so that I can learn how to take better insect pictures and use Photoshop. Some of the assignments are a bit bland, so I've been trying to spice them up a bit. Yesterday's assignment was to create a flow chart of....anything. With that free reign, I decided to tackle parasitoids and the tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta). After 20 minutes of a Twitter back and forth with Morgan Jackson and Crystal Ernst, I had a name for my subject: Randy. He had two paths to go down during his life--the choice was up to him.

Insects Galore: A guest blog for Explore the Outdoors

2012-01-31T00:16:00.000-05:00

This post was written as a guest blog for Explore the Outdoors, a program started by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources that endeavors to educate people about the natural wonders of Ohio. I highly recommend that you check out their website--it has great information on outdoor activities and state parks and reserves you can visit in Ohio. You can see my original post here.

Winter can be a beautiful time of year (when the weatherdeigns to give us snow), but if you're like me, it can also be pretty drearyfor one important reason: there aren't many insects about. Sure, you might getlucky and find some stink bugs crawling around inside your house or come acrossa camel cricket or spider (not actually an insect, but an arachnid, of course)in your basement, but the assorted stragglers can't quite satiate the need tosee our many-legged friends like the other seasons can.

If you haven't noticed yet, this post is going to emphasizehow amazing the insects and other terrestrial arthropods are. First, let'sestablish some background. If you aren't already a fan of insects and wouldrather step on them than appreciate them, ponder this: out of all livingorganisms on the planet, over half areinsects. Furthermore, out of all the animals, almost 75% are insects. When you include the other arthropods, itincreases to 86%. Keep in mind that these are only species we have described sofar: estimates predict that over 90% of all animals are insects. The sheeramount of diversity among the insects shows us that this is one important group.Keeping that in mind, let's explore the diversity of insects in Ohio.

Nature, and in turn, insects, are not things you have todrive to the outskirts of civilization to experience. It is (obviously)literally all around us, and this is especially true with regards to theinsects. When I first learned of the total insect diversity, I was a bitskeptical. After all, I hadn't really noticed too much variability in theinsects, other than mosquitoes could suck my blood, bees could sting me, andscarab beetles had a penchant for flying into porch lights during the summer.It wasn't until a few summers ago that I truly started looking for insects andobserving the mind-blowing amount of variability there actually was. I starteda personal project documenting the terrestrial arthropod diversity in my ownbackyard (I didn't want to make the spiders and millipedes feel left out) andhave kept at it for three summers. I went through my yard a few times a week,taking an hour-long walk examining the trees, shrubs, and other vegetationduring the day and night, just taking pictures and finding what I could. Mycurrent tally surprised me: to date, I have found over 100 different species.

The kicker? All of these insects, spiders, and millipedeshave been found in an area only one acre in size. Now that's impressive! Thephrase "backyard biology" has never been more relevant! But that'senough talk, it's time to look at some of the beautiful and interesting insectsthat Ohio has to offer.

First up is an ant.

Well, not exactly. If we take a closer look, we learn...

...that it's not an ant at all! This is actually a jumpingspider in the family Salticidae that mimics an ant, Synemosynaformica. I start off with this spider to illustrate two points. Firstly,that Ohio has some interesting and surprising diversity. Secondly, that it isimportant to pay attention. You'll find that these little critters can besurprisingly crafty, in a variety of ways. For example, a spider only has twobody segments: the cephalothorax (head) and abdomen. In this species, its bodyis constricted to make it appear to have three body segments like an ant. Inaddition, it holds its front legs in front of its body, mimicking the antennaeof an ant. You can see how small the spider is from the first picture: at most,these spiders will grow to just under six millimeters long. When I found thisspider in my backyard, I thought it was an ant. That is, until it declined torun away like the other ants in the area. Instead, it stayed on the undersideof the leaf I found it on, unmoving. This isn't ant-like behavior, so I caughtit on the hunch that it might be something different.

Next up is an insect that afriend described as looking like "a Balrog that got hit with asneeze of tie-dye." It may look ferocious, but it's actually harmless tohumans. Other insects....well, not so much.

This is likely the biggest wasp you're going to find inOhio: the giant ichneumon wasp, Megarhyssamacrurus. In this photo, it's inserting its three inch long ovipositor intothe dead wood of a tree, in search of one thing: the larva of another wasp, thepigeon tremex horntail (Tremex columba).It can detect the wasp larva's movements in the wood, locate it, and then layan egg next to the larva. Once the ichneumon wasp has done this, it will thensting the horntail larva, paralyzing it. Later, the ichneumon wasp larva willhatch and devour the horntail wasp, and continue to grow to adulthood.

With a lifestyle like that, it's a good thing this wasp isharmless to humans! It's difficult to convey in a picture just how beautifulthis wasp truly is: the mixture of amber and yellow blend together to createone of the most jaw-dropping insects around. If you're walking in the woods andcome upon some dead trees in a sunny area, search around a bit and you might belucky enough to find one.

This next insect is a personal favorite of mine. It's amember of a fascinating family of bugs called the assassin bugs, a predaceousfamily that preys upon other insects. They are generally considered beneficialinsects and are currently being studied for use in biological control regimes.Something called an assassin bug probably isn't going to be too peaceful,obviously, and these insects earn their name. They're ambush predators, andonce some prey comes into their hunting ground, they creep up behind the preyand strike. They have a mouth like a straw, which they plunge into theunsuspecting victim, pumping it full of digestive fluids to paralyze andliquefy the insides of the unfortunate insect before sucking it out. Notexactly the most polite thing to do, but it's a way to make a living.

In Ohio, we're lucky enough to have the largest terrestrialtrue bug on the entire continent in our backyards: the wheel bug, Arilus cristatus. The picture aboveshows its namesake: a structure on the top of the thorax that looks like acogwheel. This particular wheel bug has just emerged from its final instar (thefancy word for a juvenile stage in the life of an insect), hence the prettysalmon color. After a few hours, the color fades into a grayish black thatcamouflages the wheel bug against trees. The wheel bug can grow a little largerthan two inches, making it a formidable predator. Its size allows it to take onlarge prey and equips it with the weapon to do so: its beak is longer than itshead. This can be intimidating to humans, and the gut reaction of many peopleis to either run from it or squash it. This fear is not well-founded. While thewheel bug can indeed inflict a painful bite (being bitten by an assassin bugisn't even an entomologist's idea of fun), it will only bite when provoked. Eventhen, it might not bite. I've handled many wheel bugs and have yet to bebitten: the key is to respect it and handle it with caution. I wouldn'trecommend handling a wheel bug, but it makes an interesting insect to keep inan enclosure (it's in a butterfly cage in the picture) and observe its habits.It's best to only do this temporarily and then release it to go on about itsbusiness, but it's a valuable learning experience.

No mention of Ohio's insect diversity would be completewithout what many would argue to be the most beautiful moth in our area, theLuna Moth (Actias luna). I had amassive stroke of luck in my adventures this summer, with regards to this moth.I was researching assassin bug diversity at Marietta College's Barbara A.Beiser Field Station in early summer when I heard a strange sound coming fromsome grass. I bent down and searched for the source of the noise when somethingcame crashing through the undergrowth.

A newly-emerged Luna moth was crawling towards me. There wasno question that it had just emerged: its wings weren't yet pumped up, so itwas in search of a tree to crawl up where it could safely expand its wings.Seizing the opportunity (as well as the moth), I placed it on a nearby mapletree and observed it for the next three hours. It takes a while for the moth tocomplete this task, and moths are at their most vulnerable at this stage: theycan't fly away, and are nice protein-rich meals for any other animals thatmight happen upon them.

You can tell that this individual is a male, due to thethick antennae, which he uses to detect pheromones from the female: chemicalsthat let the male know where the female is located and if she is ready to mate.Adult Luna moths don't feed, focusing solely on mating to usher in the nextgeneration. In fact, adults don't even have functioning mouthparts. Due tothis, they only live for about a week, so mating is the top priority in such ashort time.

The Luna moth is in the moth family Saturniidae, a groupthat includes the biggest moths in the world. The Luna moth is no exception,with a wing span reaching up to 4.5 inches. The wing span of the Cecropia moth,North America's largest native moth, is over 6 inches. Once you've seen thesemoths, you're not likely to forget them. They're attracted to lights, and aremore abundant near forests, so start your searches there!

This is just a small sample of Ohio's insects: some are evenmore colorful and have novel life histories. I haven't even mentioned thebeetles, which are the most diverse group of insects. In fact, one out of everyfour living things on Earth is a beetle. Isn't that marvelous?

In a few months, winter will be over and the insects will onceagain grace us with their presence. I encourage you to go outside and lookaround your own backyard to see what you can find. If you want to go furtherand identify what you've found, BugGuide isthe best resource for North American insects on the web. If you want to gofurther than that, Nature 2.0 websites like Project Noah allow you to uploadphotographs of the organisms you find, and are great for keeping a record ofwhat you've found.

What should you do if you want to find insects now? Well, the winter stoneflies should be coming out pretty soon...

Science Video Friday - Vampire Moths!

2012-01-27T17:39:00.001-05:00

You may have read in a textbook that moths and butterflies feed on nectar from flowers, or don't even feed at all. When reading about science, however, it's important to remember that things aren't simple. It's difficult to neatly fit everything into one classification, and this holds true with the Lepidoptera as well.

In this instance, it means that we should say most moths and butterflies feed on nectar. Some feed on fruit, for example. One moth in particular does something much different. It's related to a species that feeds on fruit, but gets its food from another source. No, it doesn't feed on vegetables, but instead...blood.

Wait, what?

National Geographic has you covered for this week's Science Video Friday!

Marine Debris: One Huge Problem

2012-01-18T22:02:00.001-05:00

Do you ever stop to think about where the trash you throw out each day ends up? A landfill, you might say. Or, if you live near the coast, you might consider the chance that your trash could end up in the ocean. That's a pretty good guess. Literally tons of garbage enter the oceans and rivers each year, including plastics.

To illustrate this problem, Woods Hole Sea Grant created a poster detailing how long trash remains in the environment, and where the trash is coming from.

Link to larger PDF version

This is one reason why recycling is so important: it keeps trash like this out of the environment. Once trash items enter the environment, it can take a while until they go away. While time works its toll on these items, they don't stay in one place. In the ocean, this results in the trash being moved around by ocean currents.

Image from the NOAA Marine Debris Program

In the Pacific Ocean, this has created what is known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch." In the above picture, the area marked "Convergence Zone" is where much debris accumulates. You can't actually see much of the patch with the naked eye, as it's composed of bits of trash (mainly plastic), and there are separate "patches" of garbage within the convergence zone. A good description of what you can see at the garbage patches can be found here.

But not being able to see the plastic does not mean that it isn't causing problems. These tiny bits of plastic enter the found chain, due to being ingested by marine organisms such as fish. The chemical composition of the trash that animals eat can mess with the animals' organ systems: affecting their quality of life and even reproduction rate.

Algalita Marine Research Foundation - 2008 North Pacific Gyre Expedition

As illustrated in the above photos, the bits of plastic that fish eat can be quite significant, leading to problems. A pressing problem for the fish is a nutritional deficient: if its stomach is full of plastic, it feels full, so it doesn't continue feeding, but it hasn't actually gained the correct amount of nutrients it needs.

Even though the garbage and plastic that makes its way into the ocean is invisible to us, it obviously has an effect on marine organisms.

To wrap this up, the following 4 minute video illustrates the harsh life of the organism that is perhaps most affected by this pollution: the plastic bag.

References:

Update on Fish Ingestion Study

Interagency Report on Marine Debris Sources, Impacts, Strategies and Recommendations

Gregory M. (2009). Environmental implications of plastic debris in marine settings– entanglement, ingestion, smothering, hangers-on, hitch-hiking and alien invasions. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 364(1526): 2013-2025.

Muncke J. (2009). Environmental Hormones in Food Packaging: Migration into Food and the Environment. PDF.

Pichel, W., J. Churnside, T. Veenstra, D. Foley, K. Friedman, R. Brainard, J. Nicoll, Q. Zheng, and P. Clemente-Colon. (2007). Marine debris collects within the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone. Marine Pollution Bulletin 54: 1207-1211.

Rios L.M., Jones P.R., Moore C., Narayan U.V. (2010). Quantitation of persistent organic pollutants adsorbed on plastic debris from the Northern Pacific Gyre’s “eastern garbage patch.” Journal of Environmental Monitoring. 12(12): 2189-2312. PDF.

Further Reading:

NOAA Marine Debris Program

De-mystifying the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch"

Algalita Marine Research Foundation - FAQ

Altered Oceans: Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas - L.A. Times

The Amber Flame Tree

2012-01-13T17:39:00.000-05:00

It has now been a year since my journey to Costa Rica as part of a semester study abroad experience focusing on Biology and Spanish. I returned last May, and one of the things I was most looking forward to was fall: I needed to see some explosive leaf colors. Don't get me wrong, the plants I saw in Costa Rica were beautiful and vibrant green, but it's difficult to compare that with the leaf colors you can see during an Ohio autumn.

As fall came and went, I saw some wonderful colors, and gradually came to the realization that one of my favorite trees is the American sweet gum, Liquidambar styraciflua. Even its scientific name is beautiful and rolls right off your tongue, it's fantastic.

The leaves of the tree are palmate to be technical, but I would rather describe them as five-pointed stars.

The colors of these leaves are astounding and range from green to purple, with yellows, reds, and oranges in between.The maples have nothing on this tree!

Leaves of a young tree.

Notice the variability in leaf color and shape.

Not limited to just the leaves, the fruit of the tree is interesting as well. It's a spiky capsule that every kid on the playground in my elementary school days knew about: we called them monkey balls and threw them at each other.

Sometimes they could hurt. Then we would get in trouble.

The dried fruit. If you look closely, you can see a spider web.

The fruit is composed of many capsules (according to Wikipedia, 40-60), which contain the seeds. Many of the seeds from the fruit end up being aborted, and fall out of the fruit as chaff. The seeds that develop fully and are released, however, are small and look like small wings. I have a few fruits in the lab, I'll get a picture and update this entry later with pictures of the seeds and chaff.

I recently learned that the young bark of the sweet gum has a warty appearance, something I had never seen before: until I was shown a young tree at the Kroger Wetlands during a flowering plants class.

The sweet gum is easy to identify during the winter (woohoo!): all you have to do is look for the tree with spiky fruits hanging off all its branches: there will be many. Some people don't like the tree because of all the fruits it produces, which can make a lawn lumpy and not much fun to walk across, but that's a small price to pay for a tree as beautiful as this.

Sadly, I've yet to nab a picture of the flowers, but that gives me a goal for the coming spring!

Further Reading:

USDA PLANTS Database

Flora of North America

Wikipedia

Science Video Friday - Macoto Murayama's "Inorganic Flora"

2012-01-06T16:37:00.001-05:00

This week's Science Video Friday features some interesting art. It's a visualization of the orchid Cattleya warneri, shown in a way you haven't seen before. To learn more, check out the article on Tree Hugger.

The Luna Moth: A Photo Essay

2012-01-05T02:49:00.000-05:00

One of my goals for this past summer was to find as many moths in the family Saturniidae as I could. The saturniids are the moths that give moths great publicity: they're huge, they're colorful, and they make their presence known. In fact, this family includes North America's largest native moth: the Cecropia moth.

The Cecropia moth: Hyalophora cecropia. With a wingspan of up to 6 inches, it is a HUGE moth.

I was out at the Barbara A. Beiser Field Station often during the summer, and on my first day there, in late May, I struck gold. As I knelt down to examine a Clubtail dragonfly (Gomphus sp.), I heard a strange rustling in the grass nearby. I took a few quick snapshots of the dragonfly and turned around to see what was causing the ruckus. I could hear it, but due to the dense, wet, matted grass, I couldn't quite find it.

And then I saw it.

But...what was it, exactly? My eyes darted around, surveying the yellow, white, and maroon mass crawling towards me. At first, it looked like two beetles wrestling and falling through the undergrowth. Confused, I took a closer look and realized what was actually coming at me.

Trust me, that totally looked like two beetles when I first saw it.

Full of glee, I realized that I was looking at a Luna Moth (Actias luna), one of the saturniids I was searching for! However, it did not look like what the Lunesta commercials had led me to believe what a Luna moth looks like. First of all, it did not glow. Secondly, its wings were shrunken, and the abdomen looked distended.

Not yet ready for flight.

There could be only one explanation: this individual had just emerged from its pupa! That's even more exciting than finding an adult flying around! I knew then what I had to do.

Need a hand?

To avoid accidentally stepping on it, I picked it up and placed it on a nearby maple tree.

That's not quite what you're used to seeing from a moth, huh? The abdomen was bulging with that green stuff, which I assume is hemolymph that it was planning to use to pump up its wings.

Notice the antennae and how plumose they are: that indicates a male. The males need huge antennae to pick up the pheromones of the females, a surefire way to find a mate!

After placing it safely upon the tree, I waited. Not wanting to waste all day watching a Luna Moth pump up its wings (it's like watching paint dry, but more beautiful), I went along to find assassin bugs and other marvelous insects, returning at times to check up on my Luna Moth.

After three minutes of being on the tree, the Luna Moth has already set to work! You can see the wings are starting to flare out and enlarge, while the abdomen has contracted a great deal. It's becoming much more plump and much less thin.

Just nine minutes later and the wings are hanging like trendy curtains. The eye spots on the forewings give it a look akin to the face of a wrinkly old man.

15 minutes later and you can definitely see the face of an old man. The eye spots have really come out now. Speaking of which, have you ever wondered what those eye spots look like under a microscope? Or, where the term "Lepidoptera" (the name of the order that includes the moths and butterflies) is derived from? Well, thanks to Wikipedia, your questions can now be answered!

Source

This picture by Peter Znamenskiy shows what those eye spots really look like. You see, "Lepidoptera" is derived from the Ancient Greek words lepís and pterón, the words for scale and wing. Put those words together, and you get an order of insects that have scales on their wings. Those colorful structures that look like paintbrushes are the scales, and they give this moth its awe-inspiring colors.

20 minutes later, and we return to the Luna moth. The abdomen is now obscured by the wings, so we go in for a side view. Yep, that is one plump abdomen. But what's this? The hind wings look a bit wonky. You didn't forget that moths have two pairs of wings, right?

30 minutes in, and the moth seems to be imitating a butterfly: its wings are held above the body vertically, rather than horizontally. What gives? Well, he still has a second pair of wings to pump up, wouldn't it be easier to do that without the first pair holding them down?

After 35 minutes, it looks like the second pair of wings have a comma at the end. They probably need to pause before they finish their sentence.

Well how about that? At 55 minutes, the hind wings bring with them some nice streamers. The Luna moth is ending its sentence with an exclamation point, for sure!

He's still working hard at 1 hour and 15 minutes. Art takes time, after all.

After 1 hour and 40 minutes, you might be asking yourself: "What's with the streamers? Is the moth going to throw a fancy party?" The answer to that question is yes and no. Here's the reason for answering no: The hind wings also have eye spots, and combining the eye spots and the tapering ends of the wings might be just enough to confuse a predator (such as a bird) into aiming for the rear quarters of the moth, rather than its head. If the bird grabs the streamers, the moth still has a chance to get away. Now, why is the answer also yes? Well, the adult Luna moth does not eat. Therefore, it only has a lifespan of about one week. Due to this, the adult Luna moth lives its adult life like it's one big party. Its sole raison d'être is mating, and it devotes itself to this debauchery at full throttle. If it doesn't pass on its genes, it has literally failed at life, hence why the males have such big and sensitive antennae. If you pick up the female's pheromones, you win the game of life.

2 hours and 10 minutes later, the moth is still preparing for his fancy party: putting up streamers, acting chill, and making sure he looks good for the ladies.

Finally, after 3 hours, he's......still not ready for that fancy party. I, however, am famished. After about 7 hours at the field station, I must head out, eat, and rest.

I loitered around for as long as I could, but I could not stay and watch the Luna moth finish up. It was fascinating to watch it progress from stumpy little cushions to bona fide tapering wings, and I found a new appreciation for these Moon moths. This was definitely a check on my list of saturniid moths I needed to see.

So, as I often say, if you think Ohio's diversity of insects is nothing to praise, think again!

Summer Research 2011 - A Biological Survey of the Assassin Bugs (Hemiptera: Reduviidae) at the Barbara A. Beiser Field Station - Other Insects

2012-01-03T02:44:00.001-05:00

This past summer, as I mentioned a few times before on this blog, I had the opportunity to carry out a field survey for assassin bugs at the Barbara A. Beiser Field Station. This field station is used by the biology classes at Marietta College for lab sections, such as Zoology and Aquatic Biology.

I knew that I would have a good portion of free time during the summer, and I wanted to get a head start on my capstone project, and do some more research with insects. Out of that grew a project during which I would research the abundance, diversity, and ecology of assassin bugs (insects in the family Reduviidae). I wrote up an application for an Investigate Studies Grant for these types of student-led projects from the college, and I received one to carry it out.

It took place during six weeks in May and June, and I found a lot of different species--both assassin bugs and other insects. I focused on the assassin bugs most of the time, and presented on my findings (I'll elaborate on that in another blog post, but I found 7 different species of assassin bugs) in October. Since then, I've been focusing on all the other insects I found during the project. In order to save time and keep focused, I didn't collect every insect I found, but I did try to snap some pictures whenever I found something I hadn't seen before.

Like this, for example. A scarab beetle, the Emerald Euphoria - Euphoria fulgida.

Fast forward to this past week, and I've been focusing on identifying all the insects and other arthropods I saw. Assisting me with that has been Project Noah, an amazing website that anyone can submit their pictures of wildlife to, upload them to a map, and essentially crowdsource nature with others. (It will receive its own blog post in the future.) I just finished uploading all my pictures from my Investigative Studies Grant project, which gave me a lot of time to reflect on everything I encountered.

It also gave me a number: 137 separate species of insects, plants, spiders, fungi, slime molds, and miscellaneous other groups of life just from those 6 weeks.

That's not too shabby, if I do say so myself. Since it's the time of year to write reflections, I figured that now is as good a time as any to briefly highlight some of my favorite photographs and organisms I encountered. I'll limit myself to five to keep the length of this post reasonable.

This was the first insect I encountered--right on the gate leading to the field station. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I would be seeing A LOT of soldier beetles (family Cantharidae). This particular one is Podabrus tomentosus, which I didn't see many of in the interior of the forest. You know what I did see a lot of? Firefly mimics. Firefly mimics EVERYWHERE. It wasn't even until I was reviewing my photos that I even figured out that most of what I thought were fireflies were actually soldier beetles in disguise. That being said, that is some amazing mimicry. (Consider that paragraph a cliff hanger, I'll cover these mimics in another post.)

Serendipity is better than skill! I got lucky on my first day at the field station and stumbled upon (literally, I almost stepped on it!) a luna moth (Actias luna) that had just emerged from its pupal stage and was crawling along in the grass. Adult luna moths only live for a week and do not only: they only live to reproduce. I had never encountered a luna moth before, so I was excited out of my mind when I found this male (notice how large the antennae are, that's how you can tell the difference between males and females). Not wanting to step on him, I picked him up and placed him on a tree so that he could pump up his wings in peace. I returned every so often over the course of three hours to watch and it was just a beautiful sight. It's a real privilege that we have such a majestic moth in Ohio.

This is the Orange-patched Smoky Moth (Pyromorpha dimidiata), a rare case in which the common name describes the organism extremely well. At first glance you might be reminded of a net-winged beetle in the family Lycidae. It's suspected that this moth is a mimic of those beetles (check out the genus Calopteron for comparison), but may also have its own chemical defenses. Due to this, the mimicry exhibited by this moth and the net-winged beetle is characterized as Müllerian mimicry.

Since both species are toxic and have similar aposematic (fancy word for bright warning color) patterns, the mimicry works to the advantage of both organisms: predators leave them alone since they're distasteful. This is opposed to Batesian mimicry, in which a model toxic species is imitated by other non-toxic species, which obtain the same benefits without needing to be toxic themselves. It's the insect equivalent of putting your purchase on someone else's tab. For more information about this species, you can check out Ted Macrae's entry at Beetles in the Bush.

Next up is a beautiful firefly I found crawling on a decaying log.

Or is it?

Fireflies must be awesome beetles to mimic: even the click beetles (family Elateridae) are getting in on the action! Here we have Denticollis denticornis. Sorry, no common name here, but for simplicity we can refer to it as the firefly mimic click beetle. I mistook it for a firefly when I first saw it, but upon closer inspection, the flared pronotum that fails to cover the head gives it away as a click beetle. Simply a beautiful specimen, I wish I had taken the time to get some more pictures and see where it was going. Now, which mimicry would this click beetle be exhibiting: Müllerian or Batesian? For a nice discussion about mimicry's benefit to this species, check out this link to BugGuide.

Finally, we come to one of my favorite beetles: the pleasing fungus beetle Megalodacne heros. It's in the family Erotylidae and looks as if it should be coming out around Halloween. Unfortunately, this beetle is on the wrong calendar and is restricted to the summer months.

As you can guess from the common name, the beetle feeds on fungus. In this case, I found it chewing on some bracket fungus as night was falling. It's a large beetle (two centimeters long) and its elytra are quite smooth. After I captured it and took it back to the lab, I was watching it move around under the microscope. As I watched it move its leg (it had flipped itself on its back), I was awed by how smooth its movements were.

Truthfully, this beetle showed me how beautiful insects could be, just by something as simple as their movement. It was a "Eureka!" moment for me, and has ensured that this beetle will stay at the top of my list of favorite insects.

Too often we recoil at insects and other small arthropods because they look ugly or creep us out. Casting them down in judgement is ignorant and quite offensive to how elegantly they go about their lives, however. Not until you take the time to immerse yourself in their world (that is, what life is like for organisms that are measured in inches at most) can you truly appreciate the beauty and real magic that nature exhibits.

If you're interested in seeing more of my photographs from the Beiser Field Station, you can find my collection on my userpage at Project Noah.

Science Video Friday - Glowworms

2011-12-30T22:39:00.000-05:00

In lieu of a full blog post, it's time for another Science Video Friday! This week's video is a spectacular 10 minute documentary on Britain's glowworms, from Christopher Gent. Enjoy!

Earth-Born Stars: Britain's Secret Glow-worms

Science Video Friday - Large Longhorns

2011-12-16T22:52:00.001-05:00

I just received my copy of Field Guide to Northeastern Longhorned Beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) by Douglas Yanega today and it is beautiful. It has a classy cover and is filled with useful pictures and identifying information about longhorned beetles. I've already used it to identify a few of the beetles I found this summer, which led me on some Youtube searches.

For as neat as our longhorned beetles are in Ohio, this one from Japan is pretty wicked...

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to find a reason to fly to Japan for some beetle research.

This Isn't Your Father's Daddy Longlegs

2011-12-14T23:08:00.003-05:00

While on a night hike looking for fluorescent millipedes and whatever else I could find a few months ago (September 16th), I came across a most interesting arachnid. Now, it's important to note that Arachnids aren't just spiders: Arachnida is a large class that includes other organisms like scorpions, ticks, mites, solifugids, and harvestmen (or daddy longlegs, if you prefer). It's the harvestmen (Order Opiliones) that are most important to this post, and while the popular perception of harvestmen is a small-bodied organism with long, thread-like legs, this is not always the case.

There's a surprising amount of diversity in the harvestmen: it includes 6,411 described species (estimates of over 10,000 total species have been put forward!) and 45 families. After spiders and mites, it's the third largest order of Arachnids.

Which brings us to the specimen found on that cool September night:

Not exactly what you were expecting, eh?

This is probably the largest harvestmen I've encountered, and it's definitely much different from the other species I've seen. From what I can tell, this is a species in the genus Vonones, in the suborder Laniatores (we'll tackle the significance of that later) and the family Cosmetidae. I'm a fan of the colors on this one, the red, brown, and yellow blend nicely together.

Was I hesitant to pick up this harvestmen at all? Nope--harvestmen don't have venom glands! I scrambled to catch it before it could get away, as I had just lifted up a stone. I screamed, sure, but that was a scream of joy, not of fear: I had found this neat organism, AND an assassin bug as well!

Black Corsair - Melanolestes picipes

An assassin bug along with an interesting harvestman? TOTAL SCORE! There's some interesting life hiding under stones, so I made a mental note to add that to my routine while walking through the forest. I had been checking stones before, but this was one of my first night hikes, giving me the chance to find different organisms.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find too much information about Vonones, but I'm still searching. One odd piece of information I've come across is that they fluoresce under UV light, according to this thread on Arachnoboards. I'll be checking that out next time I encounter one.

What secrets do you hold?!

I mentioned earlier that there's a significance to Vonones being in the suborder Laniatores. It seems as though harvestmen in this suborder exhibit paternal care for eggs after they are laid--unique in the Arachnids, and restricted to this suborder. It would be interesting to investigate if this behavior holds true for Vonones, and how it affects survival. Perhaps daddy longlegs are more loving than you first thought...

References

Beccaloni, Jan. 2009. Arachnids. Berkeley: University of California; 320 p.

A Charismatic.......and Sometimes Drunk Weevil

2011-12-03T03:11:00.001-05:00

Usually when I find weevils (Coleoptera: Curculionoidea), they're tiny, relatively bland, or....."otherwise occupied."

Tulip Tree Weevils (Odontopus calceatus), otherwise occupied.

While researching assassin bugs this summer at the Barbara A. Beiser Field Station, however, I came across a much more charismatic weevil, the oak timberworm (Arrhenodes minutus).

Not quite on an oak, this guy was picked up during sweep netting.

If you compare the oak timberworm with the tulip tree weevils in the previous picture, you'll probably notice quite a difference in size and body shape. The oak timberworm doesn't have elbowed antennae, either. So what gives?

The oak timberworm is a species of primitive weevil (Subfamily Brentinae), which look very different from other weevils. They're characterized by their straight snouts (their family is the straight-snouted weevils, Brentidae, after all), antennae that aren't elbowed, and the tendency of their body shape to usually be flat and elongated. The only primitive weevil you're going to find north of Florida is the oak timberworm, others have a tropical distribution.

The oak timberworm can be an economic pest of oaks, as the larvae feed on the wood during their development. Despite this, it's quite a pretty beetle, mostly red with short yellow longitudinal lines on its elytra. Males and females look very different: females have elongated snouts that look almost like a straw, while the males have relatively large jaws at the end of their snouts. These jaws aren't used for hunting prey, since the adult weevils feed on sap, however. Rather, the jaws are used for catching females, helping females drill egg holes in wood, and for fighting other males.

Why would males want to use their jaws to catch females? Well, scroll up to the other weevils which were "previously occupied."

Yep.

The males prowl around looking for some fine females to mate with, and when they find them, the females don't always want to mate. So, they'll run. The males don't appreciate this, so they give chase until they can grab the female's rostrum (the elongated mouth tube). After the male grabs the female, she stops running and he will try to mate with her.

......and the female might try running again. At this point, one of two things will happen: the male will give chase and try again, or he'll give up. If the female keeps resisting, the male is likely to take the latter choice.

The males aren't always focused on mating, of course. They also defend the females and help them with their egg-laying. The males will set up a territory around the female by walking around the females in a circle, while the female works on boring holes in the wood in which to lay an egg. If another male approaches and tries to interrupt the female (with intentions to mate with her), the other male steps in and the two males throw down. Their fights can last for ten minutes or more (30 minutes or more if they're drunk, but we'll come back to that later), and the winner achieves victory by getting his jaws underneath the other male and throwing him off the wood. Size is an important factor in this game: larger males have the advantage. When one male is substantially larger than the other, things can get crazy. Sanborne (check the citation at the end of this post, his paper provides some great observations on the oak timberworm) noticed this and thought it was hilarious: the smaller male he saw fighting with a larger one was thrown 10 centimeters away, soundly defeated. This aggressive behavior by the males is quite helpful for the females, giving them time to drill their egg holes. Each hole can take up to an hour to drill, and the last thing the females want is to be constantly accosted by male suitors--they wouldn't get anything done!

I mentioned something about drunk weevils in that last paragraph, so while we're still on the topic of aggressive behavior in males, let's go back to that. As I said earlier, adult beetles feed on sap. Knowing this, Sanborne made a sap to feed his weevils on by boiling oak leaves, twigs, and bark in water, then added sugar to the mixture. He successfully kept his weevils alive on this mixture from June to September, without problems. Eventually, he noticed something interesting about his sap and the weevils' reaction to it: the higher the degree of fermentation of the sap, the more aggressive his male beetles became.

Essentially, the weevils would become drunk on the fermented sap, and proceed to get into weevil bar fights. The weevils actively searched for fights, tumbling all over the rearing cage once they found another male to fight with. The fights lasted a half hour or more. Sanborne doesn't report why, but I suspect that the weevils didn't have the coordination to get their jaws underneath the other combatant in order to throw it in the air: after all, that's tough to do when the room is already spinning! If the sap was fermented too much, the weevils would just pass out for a while before getting back up.

Sanborne could not conclusively determine if they had a weevil hangover.

When male oak timberworms aren't getting drunk or mating, they help the female drill her egg holes. When the female gets her rostrum stuck in the wood, they will position themselves to help leverage her out of the hole--described as tool use. The female then continues drilling. When their mandibles get clogged with bits of wood, they use their antennae to clean it out.---when you don't have a toothbrush, you need some way to take care of those little pieces! Once the hole is completed, one egg is laid, then the female plugs the hole with the pieces of wood trash she excavated and secretes some sticky stuff to hold it together.

When oak timberworms need to rest, they find hiding places under bark. Males defend their spots from other males, but are chivalrous and will allow females to join them.

You may have already surmised that oak timberworms are hardy: it's sort of required with all that fighting.Their exoskeleton is quite strong ("heavily chitinized" is another way to put it) and resistant. Since they feed on tree sap, they compete with other insects to obtain this food, such as ants. Despite the attempts of ants to chase them away by biting the weevils, the weevils are protected and can continue to enjoy the delicious sap, and the ants can't do anything about it.

An alcoholic weevil that likes to fight....how's that for charismatic?

References:

Sanborne M. 1983. Some Observations on the Behaviour of Arrhenodes minutus (Drury) (Coleoptera: Brentidae). The Coleopterists Bulletin. 37(2): 106-113.

Primitive Weevils of Florida - by Michael Thomas
BugGuide - Species Arrhenodes minutus - Oak Timberworm Beetles in the Bush - Different Jaws for Different Jobs

A Native Ladybug AND Ant-mimic?! No way!

2011-11-23T16:50:00.001-05:00

It's not all that often when I find a ladybug (or to be more correct, lady beetle, since it's in the order Coleoptera and not Hemiptera) that isn't the invasive multicolored Asian lady beetle. So when I do, I get pretty excited. I get pretty disappointed when I see invasive organisms dominating the landscape, but when some interesting natives that I've never encountered before pop up, I'm apt to jump up and down in joy (ask anyone who's been out in the field with me).

Last month on a botany trip around campus, our group stopped to examine a black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia). My attention quickly wandered away from me and I found myself examining the other plants around the black locust, leading me to find some arthropods (woohoo!). One looked like an ant, but my previous experience during the summer taught me not to be too certain, so I caught it and pulled out my hand lens to take a closer look.

Imposter!

Not an ant, but rather an ant-mimic! This is actually a jumping spider (Family Salticidae), Synemosyna formica. It looks like the spider has three segments of its body like an insect, head-thorax-abdomen, but since it's a spider, it only has two: a cephalothorax and an abdomen. In order to look more like an ant, the cephalothorax is constricted, giving it the illusion of having three body segments. Now that's some fine Batesian mimicry!

The second arthropod I found hanging around the underbrush was one of our native lady beetles: Psyllobora vigintimaculata. Let's break down that etymology! Psyllo is Greek for flea, and it is quite small; bora is Greek for northern, referring to its habitat distribution. (This is the only species in the genus that you can find in the northeast.) The specific epithet vigintimaculata simply means 20 spotted. If we put it all together, we learn that this species is a small lady beetle that has a northern distribution (though it also occurs in the southern US) and has 20 spots. That's some useful information to know.

Not the largest lady beetle you'll find...

It wasn't exactly the easiest insect to spot, but it was crawling around on the same leaf as the spider, so it was easy to catch both of them. Now, that picture doesn't really help you understand what this beetle looks like....sure, it's white with black spots, maybe a touch of orange, and small, but come on. A hand lens isn't going to cut it. To the dissecting microscope!

Now that's what I'm talking about!

Now we can make more sense of what it looks like. You can see the 20 spots, the texture of the shell, and what it looks like underneath. The anatomy can only tell us so much about the species, so to learn more about how it lives, let's turn to a paper published in 2009 by Sutherland and Parrella (citation can be found at the end of this post). It turns out that this lady beetle (and the others in its subfamily Halyziini) isn't predacious like most other lady beetles, nor does it eat leaves: it feeds on various mildew fungi. These are fungi in the order Erysiphales, which cause powdery mildew diseases in plants, hence their common name.

Powdery mildew disease is of economic importance in agriculture, and is the main reason why Sutherland and Parrella undertook their study. They found that P. vigintimaculata is a generalist that feeds upon a range of fungi species, and that its density in the environment increased with a greater density of mildew. That's pretty good news for an integrated pest management plan, according to their paper.

They also had a figure showing the beetle's life cycle, which follows. Note that in this study, they used a subspecies, Psyllobora vigintimaculata taedata, so that's what is being referred to.

Figure 1 from Sutherland and Parrella. (Click to enlarge)

If you see any of those crawling around on your plants, then you've got this species. Note that the adults overwinter under leaves and other secluded spaces (and warmer areas....well, as warm as you can get during winter), so you could be finding them in early Spring.

Just in case you notice some plants showing signs of mildew disease, look around for this little lady beetle. It's another way in which insects are working in our favor without asking anything in return. Isn't that great? Be sure to keep this in mind the next time you encounter multicolored Asian lady beetles seeking shelter in your home and remember: not all lady beetles are a nuisance!

Citation:

Sutherland, Andrew M.; Parrella, M. P. “Biology and Co-Occurrence of Psyllobora vigintimaculata taedata (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) and Powdery Mildews in an Urban Landscape of California.” Annals of the Entomological Society of America, v. 102 issue 3, 2009, p. 484-491.

Hackberry: The Teenage Years

2011-11-19T14:19:00.001-05:00

I was going through some of my photos from this past summer (preparing to organize and identify them), when I came across a picture of a tree with some very interesting bark.

I had a vague feeling of recognition when I took this picture, but I couldn't quite pin it down. After being a teaching assistant for a botany class this semester, however, I remembered what it was the second time around: American hackberry (Celtis occidentalis).

What's the easiest way to remember this tree? Definitely the bark: it's gnarled and warty, with furrows. As the tree gets older, it gets more warty and just a tad bit smoother. It hasn't reached this stage yet, so I would call this tree a teenager.

The leaves are serrate (they have little teeth on the edges), and are alternatively arranged on the stem.

American hackberry is found in the West and Midwest, and is relatively common in Ohio. When its leaves fall off in the autumn, you can sometimes find galls on the leaves caused by a Psyllid insect (it's related to cicadas and aphids). Due to these little insects, the leaves can become as warty as the bark! For more information about the galls, check out the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension site.

Interestingly enough, this tree has been in my backyard for a while now and I never noticed it before. If you haven't found a theme from my blog yet, consider this: get out there and start observing! There's still so much to explore.

Chronicles of Ignorance: Wheel Bug Edition

2011-11-12T00:08:00.001-05:00

Regular readers should know by now: I freaking love wheel bugs.

Click that picture to enlarge it, sit back, and really look at it for a while. There's no way you'll ever convince me that's not one of the most beautiful creatures in the world.

So when I catch wind of the wheel bug being talked about in a negative light, I try to set the record straight. Unfortunately, this time, I could not set the record straight. This link will take you to the website for a local news station serving Pittsburgh, WTAE. The video on the page talks about the wheel bug and how one resident discovered one in her yard and was a little frightened.

Rather than trying to dissuade her of her fears, however, the news team proceeds to FLIP OUT. In what can only be described as an egregious example of shoddy journalism dipped in a vat of ignorance, the video goes on a two minute rampage warning about the dangers of the wheel bug and showing pictures of it to random people on the street, delighting in their faces of horror.

If you're a fan of insects and nature, or can at least appreciate their merits, you should be offended and disgusted. The video makes no attempt to cast the bug in a positive light, focusing on the slight chance that it can bite people. It's obvious that this was simply a filler story to scare people about the next "insect menace," after the bed bugs of this past summer.

A news organization should have more integrity than this, focusing on education over fear mongering. It's a disservice to the general public and should not be tolerated. Allowing media like this to be broadcast will only increase the general public's lack of knowledge and misconceptions about the enormous importance of insects.

In pursuit of remedying this, I have contacted the news station to express my discontent. If you feel the need to follow suit, just click here. The only information they request from you is your name and e-mail. Just make sure to tell them that you would be more than happy to assist them in setting the record straight, or you can redirect them to me.

Fluorescent Millipedes? Sweet!

2011-10-04T03:18:00.000-04:00

Just a quick post here to highlight one of the more interesting things I've found lately: millipedes that glow under UV light. I've been busy with my Investigative Studies Project, Capstone, and other related endeavors, so I'm essentially stockpiling a lot of photos and information for blog posts during winter, when I won't be finding nearly as much arthropod stuff.

You think you have to go to the rainforest to find neat stuff? HA!

I took a UV flashlight out to the field a few weeks ago and looked through the leaf litter--it was crawling with these many-legged critters. I could barely contain myself, it was just so neat. There were a few species fluorescing under the light, which is a result of a chemical in their exoskeleton, and the fluorescence was at bright as firefly bioluminescence.

The millipedes were a nice size, hovering around one inch, and had chemical defenses. I grabbed a few to hold in my hand and could smell a slightly sweet scent on my palm after I returned them to the leaf litter. Chemical defenses, UV fluorescence....will millipedes ever stop being exciting? Nope.

Update (Jan 7, 2012): This millipede is Semionellus placidus, which is in a tribe that occurs mostly in the Northwest of North America. I'll try to gather more information and put that together for another post.

One of my next projects? Research the relationship between assassin bugs of a certain subfamily (Ectrichodiinae) and millipedes. Why? Some species in this subfamily are known to be millipede hunters. Maybe this holds true for our local species as well. The only genus around here in the subfamily Ectrichodiinae is Rhiginia, and I had the pleasure of finding the species Rhiginia cruciata during early summer. That gives me a good six months to prepare. Perhaps the millipedes have some dangerous predators to watch out for.

Scarlet-bordered assassin bug, Rhiginia cruciata. Millipede hunter?

A Strange Place for a Centipede

2011-09-07T00:37:00.000-04:00

I had an unexpected encounter with a centipede today around lunchtime. I walked into the restroom and glanced down at the floor, where I found an inch-long centipede....and I was pretty excited. Unfortunately, it was dead, probably due to being stepped on. If nothing else though, that made collecting it easy for me. Have you ever tried to catch a fleeing centipede? They're ridiculously fast and not an easy catch.

After putting it in a plastic bag for safekeeping and eating some lunch, I headed off to the lab, grabbed my centipede ID guide, and threw it under a microscope.

It's a little intimidating, measuring out to about an inch long.

Earlier this summer, I attended an advanced naturalist workshop at the Edge of Appalachia preserve in West Union, Ohio that focused on the centipedes and millipedes (and isopods), which gave me the skills I needed to tackle Myriapoda identification. It was led by Bill Shear, from Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, and boy did he know a lot about the Myriapods. He was kind enough to hand out some ID guides, which is what I've been using since then to figure out what all these leggy creatures are.

I'm always impressed with what I see when I put a centipede under the microscope. There are so many little structures that you completely miss out on until you magnify them, and they're super interesting. It's almost like you're looking at an entirely new animal.

That's a lot of legs. Centipedes have one pair per segment, while millipedes have two pairs per segment.

This centipede has 15 pairs of legs, and even more antennae segments--more than 35 (I haven't been able to get a final count yet). Not all of its legs are there: a good number broke off, including some of the posterior legs, which are important for identification purposes. An interesting fact: centipedes always have an odd number of leg pairs.

A close-up of the centipede's maxillipeds, which have fangs on the end of them that inject venom. You can see an oval outline on the left side of the maxilliped, which I believe is the centipede's venom gland.

Centipedes are predators: they're quick, and they also have fangs. These fangs are found at the end of the centipede's maxillipeds, which are actually a pair of modified legs (whoa!). The venom glands are contained within these maxillipeds, and work in short order to paralyze and kill its prey. Generally, a bite from a centipede from North America won't hurt too much since they're relatively small compared to a human. But there are some species in the southwestern United States and Mexico that are more dangerous, such as those in the genera Bothropolys, Lithobius, and Neolithobius, which are large centipedes.

The fangs and coxosternal toothplates, with teeth.

Due to the rough shape this centipede was in when I found it, I haven't been able to nail down its ID further than Family Lithobiidae. Currently, family designations for the Order Lithobiomorpha are in flux, with only two families officially recognized--Lithobiidae and Henicopidae. There's definitely room for improvement, and the group is waiting for someone to tackle it.

Ventral view of the centipede, with coxal pores circled.

An interesting part of centipede anatomy (and a useful characteristic for identification) are the coxal pores, located at the bases of the posterior legs. These pores are connected to coxal glands, which are used for nitrogenous waste excretion.

Make sure to be on the lookout for centipedes and millipedes where ever you are: once you start looking, you'll start seeing them everywhere. The world of the Myriapods is surprisingly vibrant: chemical defenses, parental care, and even bioluminescence characterize many species. It would be a shame to ignore it.

References:

Shear and Weaver. 2007. Keys to the Centipeds of Virginia and Adjacent Regions.

Centipede Anatomy (Scolopendromorpha)

Centipede - Wikipedia

Science Video Friday: Neil deGrasse Tyson on the future of science funding

2011-08-12T23:33:00.000-04:00

If you're looking for someone who's passionate about science, you don't have to look any further than Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. This week's Science Video Friday features him articulating why the government funding science is important, even in tough times.

Aquatic Beetles in a Wheelbarrow

2011-08-06T17:57:00.002-04:00

When I think of beetles, what comes to mind are ladybugs, ground beetles, fireflies...maybe stag beetles. All of these are terrestrial beetles and are pretty neat, but why stop at land? There are a number of aquatic beetles that are just as cool, and can be found in rivers, streams, and standing water.

I was canvasing my yard the other day when I came upon a wheelbarrow that was full of standing water. I've checked it a few times before for insects, but usually only find mosquito larvae. Last summer I did find one aquatic beetle, but I never got around to investigating what it was.

When I checked it this time, however, I found a much more diverse assemblage of creatures.

Acilius mediatus

The orange you see in that picture is rust, while the green gelatinous stuff is an egg covering from one of the species of aquatic beetles in the wheelbarrow. Either that or it's algae or something similar. The beetle Acilius mediatus is in the family Dytiscidae, the predacious diving beetles. You can see its hindlegs, which it uses as oars to swim through the water. I watched the beetle for a little while, and from time to time it would swim up to the water surface, thrust the back of its abdomen out of the water, then swim back down to the depths, hiding under debris. By doing that, the beetle grabs an air bubble and traps it under its elytra, using it as a physical gill. That's wild! The word for this bubble is also one of my favorite biology terms: a plastron.

A brighter picture, with size comparison to a penny. The beetle about 12 mm long.

This isn't the clearest picture, but you can see more of the green gelatinous stuff. You can also see small black beetles. I'm not sure what those are, so I'll probably collect a few specimens soon.

I was also able to learn a little more about the aquatic beetle I saw in the wheelbarrow last summer and collected one of them. Contrary to what I thought at first, the second beetle is NOT in the family Noteridae. Rather, like the previous beetle, it's in the family Dytiscidae.

A small beetle, only about 5 mm long.

This beetle also has its hind legs modified for swimming, and utilizes a plastron as well. It might be in the genus Laccophilus, but that remains to be seen. UPDATE: This beetle is indeed in the genus Laccophilus, it's the species Laccophilus fasciatus.

As I was watching these beetles, I started wondering how they got into the wheelbarrow in the first place. I hadn't figured it out, so in the meantime I was trying to get a better picture of the beetle I collected. I had it in a small dish of water and picked it up, causing it to slide around frantically in my hand.

Then it spread its wings and flew out of my hand.

Oh.

So that's how they get around to new bodies of water. Yeah, that makes sense.

Beetles in the family Dytiscidae are predacious in the adult stage, so who knows how much longer they'll all be alive. Especially the smaller beetles, with that huge Acilius mediatus hanging around. I'll have to go back in a few days and see.

Unfortunately, this treehopper (Membracidae: Thelia bimaculata) was not able to thrive in the aquatic environment as well the beetles do.

Science Video Friday: The fastest living thing on the planet

2011-08-05T17:16:00.000-04:00

This one threw me for a loop. I figured it would be something small, but really? Huh, how interesting.

I can't embed this one onto the page, unfortunately, so here's the link for the video. It's a clip from the BBC program Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds, which I haven't seen before, but it looks like I probably should check it out.

I don't want to ruin the surprise of the video, so I'll just leave things at that.

A Rare Developmental Anomaly

2011-08-03T23:19:00.001-04:00

I was researching some literature on millipedes today (spoiler alert: there's not a whole lot of it) and came across an article with the title "Report on a Rare Developmental Anomaly in the Scorpion, Centruroides vittatus (Buthidae)."

Obviously, I had to read it. When you come across a title like that, how can you not? If there's one thing scientists know how to do very well, it's how to hide something extremely interesting behind a hideously boring title. It's very important to learn how to recognize those titles and see what glittering treasure is hidden under their grotesque exterior.

So I grabbed my explorer hat and started reading. It was only three pages long (with the bibliography), so it didn't take long to read. But 30 seconds after I started, I struck gold. Well, it was more like gold with diamonds embedded in it.

Holy crap!

Look at that picture! A rare developmental anomaly indeed! The authors found this specimen while "perusing" (nice word choice) the Emerson Entomological Museum of Oklahoma State University. It was collected by L. Feldick at Kinta, Haskell County, Oklahoma on November 4, 1988, so good job L. Feldick! I would have loved to be collecting with him or her that day to see the look on their face when they come across this one.....along with the ensuing struggle to collect it. I collected some scorpions in New Mexico last summer, and it was a bit nerve-wracking with just one tail and stinger. The stakes certainly would have been raised substantially when dealing with two. It's sort of like the difference between a snake and a hydra.

Less terrifying than a showdown with a two-tailed scorpion. Just ask Heracles.

Image via Wikipedia.

The article reports that it was "quite probable" that both tails were fully functional. Also, the scorpion had two anuses. Interesting, what those genetic mutations can do.

If you want to check out the full article for yourself, here's the citation:

Sissom DW and Shelley RM. 1995. Report on a Rare Developmental Anomaly in the scorpion, Centruroides vittatus (Buthidae). Journal of Arachnology: 23(3). pp. 199-201.

Whence a caterpillar crossses your path

2011-07-27T20:27:00.000-04:00

I came across a caterpillar today that was too cool to pass up sharing. You're in for a treat.

I was walking to the science center on campus today and looking around the fringes of the grass, as per usual, when I spotted a caterpillar on the sidewalk. It was serendipitous because I was just thinking about how as an entomologist, I've been training myself to focus on small things and watch for movement that might be overlooked by someone who doesn't constantly look for bugs. It was an interesting moment.

I noticed a small green thing that looked like a leaf, and at first thought it was. A breeze had just blown some leaves across the path, but this was a little different. It's a good thing I don't have a habit of crushing leaves, or this story would be sad.

Sidewalk is not its natural habitat.

A-ha! My first thought: "Definitely not a leaf." My second thought: "Sphingidae." This caterpillar has very pretty colors, like a grape popsicle shoved into a lime. The first thing to notice after the colors is the horn at the end of its abdomen--that's an identifying feature for the sphinx moths, family Sphingidae. Sphingidae is easily one of the coolest (if not THE coolest) families of moths, and they're easily identified by the posterior horn that the caterpillars have. (Unless you're dealing with Abbot's Sphinx - Sphecodina abbottii. In that case, the caterpillar will be staring right back at you with its raised knob that resembles an eye.)

Hemaris diffinis - Snowberry Clearwing

This Sphingid caterpillar is the Snowberry clearwing, Hemaris diffinis, which turns into a beautiful moth. When it reaches that stage, it will have clear wings (hence the common name) and look similar to a bumblebee. How cool is that? Notice the black dots around the spiracles on the side of the caterpillar, and how the horn changes colors from yellow to black towards the tip. Marvelous! While I was moving the caterpillar (first by stick, but when it wouldn't cooperate, just by picking it up), I turned around and noticed another person coming up the sidewalk behind me, looking at me like I was crazy. I tried to explain that I was moving a caterpillar so that it wouldn't be squished, but I'm pretty sure it didn't make me seem less crazy to him.

This is a common occurrence in my life.

Science Video Friday: Invasive species are a nuisance

2011-07-22T01:53:00.000-04:00

Invasive species: from North America to New Zealand to Antarctica, they're a problem. Invasive species, when transported to a new environment, have the capacity to overwhelm the ecosystem and throw it off the natural balance that has been reached by the indigenous organisms. This causes severe damage to the ecosystem, and can have many unforeseen consequences: among them local extinction of native organisms and even increased flooding due to increased storm water runoff.

Here in Southeastern Ohio, some of the more common invasive organisms I see are Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), and the dreaded Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica). From what I've seen, Japanese honeysuckle and knotweed are especially nasty invaders, and can take over forests and other areas without prejudice. In the case of Japanese knotweed, it spreads via rhizomes, making it even more difficult to eradicate. One of the major problems of invasive plants, and also the reason why they can propagate so efficiently, is that they don't have many insects that feed on them. The native insects don't have the machinery to digest the invasive plants like they do for the natives, so the invasives spread without much stopping them. Some insects do feed on these invasives, but it's not to the extent of the number that feed on them in their native environment.

Interestingly enough, I've observed Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica) feeding on the leaves of Japanese knotweed. Unfortunately, Japanese beetles themselves are an invasive species, so that's not really a solution to the problem.

While much of what's published on invasive species is about their detrimental effects on the environment, they're not all bad. As discussed in this article from Penn State University, some invasive species can have positive effects for birds. Unfortunately, this positive effect is inconsequential when compared to all the harm invasive species bring to the environments they colonize.

While many of the examples I used were invasive species native Japan, it of course doesn't mean that that is the only place our invasives come from. We have invasive species from all over the world, these examples were just the most well-known to me. Besides, our indigenous North American species have become invasive on other continents as well. Ah, globalization!

The Wheel Bug Emerges

2011-07-20T22:21:00.000-04:00

I came home today to the most wonderful surprise I've had in a long time:

Arilus cristatus, the wheel bug, in all of its salmon-colored glory.

For those of you who aren't familiar with my love of this particular insect, the wheel bug is my absolute favorite insect. Why? To list a few reasons, it's an assassin bug, it's the largest terrestrial true bug (Order Hemiptera) in North America, and it has that ridiculously interesting cogwheel protuberance on its pronotum. This bug is unique and when you see it, you know what it is and that you shouldn't test its patience.

The fresh new bug on the left, with its out-of-style skin on the right.

Anyway, what we're actually looking at here is the wheel bug right after it has molted out of its 5th instar. Wheel bugs go through a nymph stage of life with five separate growth periods (instars), and it sheds its skin between each period, growing as it does so. At the end of its fifth instar, it has finished its nymph stage and emerges as a fully-formed adult: with wings and its characteristic cogwheel. This wheel does not appear in any of the nymphs. If you're lucky and can catch the wheel bug soon after it has molted its final larval skin, you're in for a treat. It emerges as a beautiful red/pink/orange color....let's call it salmon.

The wings still have a leathery sheen to them, and are clear enough that you can see the white and red-striped abdomen.

Unfortunately, this salmon color doesn't stick around forever, and fades to jet black within a few hours. Though I suppose in the long run, it's better for camouflage reasons. It's not as striking as the red of course, especially after its yellowish-gray pubescence overtakes its body, but it's functional.

If you want more information on wheel bugs, you can check out a previous post of mine here.

Cedar Bog....well, it's a fen

2011-07-11T02:56:00.000-04:00

This weekend placed me in Dayton, Ohio for the Midwest Native Plants Conference. It was beyond spectacular and I was bombarded with new information everywhere I turned. The conference committee was gracious enough to award me with a scholarship to attend the conference, so I tried to squeeze all the information I could out of the three short days the conference took place. The conference was very well-planned and went smoothly, by the end of the weekend I was exhausted. Really though, I would make sure all my weekends were filled with biology like this one if I could.

The conference hosted some amazing speakers, particularly Steve McKee and Jim McCormac. Steve talked about Botanical Detective Work and his adventures with searching for plants in Richland County that haven't been looked for in over 100 years, which lit a fire under me to go explore Washington County some more. It's amazing what can slip under our noses due to simply not paying attention to what's growing (or crawling!). Jim gave a talk about hummingbirds and the ones we're likely to see in Ohio, very neat stuff. There were some beautiful pictures included to boot.

On the last day of the conference, Sunday, everyone split up into small groups to head into the field. My particular group headed to Cedar Bog, south of Urbana, and I lucked out with who else joined the group: Steve and Jim were both there, with Jim leading it, and we also had Cheryl Harner and Nina Harfmann. The group was in very capable hands. Essentially, if we passed by a plant, one of them would know what it was. Needless to say, I was writing down names like crazy.

Now, Cedar Bog is actually a fen. What's the difference? A bog is acidic, low in minerals, and doesn't really drain. A fen, however, is fed by water, neutral or alkaline, and supports more than Sphagnum moss. But, it was called a bog before it was recognized as a fen, so the name sticks.

Anyway! We found a massive amount of plants and animals during our trek, and it was extremely rewarding. It was the best use of a morning I've had in quite a while. By the end of it, I had taken pictures of 59 different species. That's pretty darn good, I'd say. Having said that, it's time for some pictures.

She has all her limbs, it's just a weird angle, don't worry!

This beauty descended on a single strand of web and hung around long enough for us to get some nice shots of her. It's a female dark fishing spider, Dolomedes tenebrosus. You can tell it's a female from the sheer size of it: males are smaller. Due to their size, they can take out some pretty sizable prey.

This guy's tricky.

What at first looks (and sounds) like a bumblebee is actually a robber fly, family Asilidae, Laphria species. Robber flies can be quite large and are vicious when they take down their prey. This one is a bee mimic, which is pretty evident, and if you want to know more about its mimicry, head over to Jim's blog: he's written a good summary of it. Robber flies are my favorite example of why it's important to pay attention to insects. You might think it's a common insect at first, but if you look closer, you'll often be surprised. Something I always look at when I hear a loud buzzing sound from an insect is the eyes. A robber fly's eyes will be very different from what you're used to seeing on a bee's body, so that's the quickest way to separate them. This one happened to be at eye level and caught me off guard after I turned away from the fishing spider. I scrambled for my camera and it flew off the leaf, but thankfully it landed on another one nearby. I'm glad I didn't scare him off, especially since I had already let an assassin bug get away from me a few days before, and later this day a tortoise beetle would escape from my lens. You can't win them all, but when you win one of these huge charismatic flies, you feel a bit better.

This is Michigan lily, Lilium michiganense, and just too beautiful to pass up. This picture turned out very well, and it's such a treat to run across a flower as vibrant as this one.

So that's where the Valentine's Day heart comes from.

Our group reached an open area in the fen and was taken aback by the plants and insects we found hanging around in the sun. I saw my first Elfin Skimmer, Nannothemis bella, darting around, and also these Seepage Dancers, Argia bipunctulata. The dragonflies were much tinier than what I'm used to, which was super cool. Both species are endangered, making Cedar Bog a very important place for the survival of these two species.

Female Nannothemis bella, a wasp mimic not only in color, but in movement.

I still have 54 species to cover, so this Midwest Native Plant Society/Cedar Bog story arc will be elaborated upon in future posts, for sure. The diversity of the place is astounding, it still wrinkles my brain. If you haven't been there before, make sure to add it to your list, it's well worth the trip.

Science Link Dump

2011-06-30T23:12:00.001-04:00

I spent about an hour today after work reading a variety of science articles I found and wanted to aggregate them all here for those of you who feel inclined to read some of them. Sometimes I'll post them to Twitter, but 140 characters isn't really enough to explain some of them.

So let's start it off with a gastropod video:

The video was taken by Kerry Weston with the New Zealand Department of Conservation and I certainly was not expecting it to go the way it did. When I think of snails, I don't normally think of words such as stealthy, carnivorous, and brutal as associated with them. But apparently I have been shown the error of my ways. It's so great when that's demonstrated in such a blunt way.

This next video is from NPR and we switch our focus onto the hydrogen bomb.

A Very Scary Light Show: Exploding H-Bombs In Space

If you want a larger video, you can click on the embedded one and you'll be taken to the Vimeo website. I'm always interested in watching old footage of nuclear explosions. It's from a vastly different time, when we weren't really sure of the effects of radiation. We've come a long way since then. I also get the feeling from some of these videos that the US government (and the Soviets as well) were treating their nuclear tests like a kid with a new toy--wanting to see how big of an explosion they could produce, and how many islands they could destroy. I have a nifty chart from a 1996 issue of Popular Mechanics that seems to confirm that:

The following link is for you fans of mathematics out there: MathematiciansWant to Say Goodbye to Pi . Math isn’t my forte, which is why I’m studying Biology, but I try to appreciate it. I’m curious to watch arguments unfold over different concepts, it shows that the science is still changing and the ways of expression are being shaped even today. The article lays out some good arguments for using Tau over Pi, and I’m inclined to agree. It seems akin to an argument about using the Metric system over the United States customary system.
But really, I’m mostly interested so that I can watch and read the arguments over which system is better unfold amongst the mathemeticians. It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to listen to informed people argue. Especially over a core science.

Moving away from the specialized subject-specific material, the next article is a wonderful piece about science’s place in diplomacy that’s from Scientific American’s guest blog: LindauNobel Meeting--Peter Agre and Torsten Wiesel: Nobel laureate scientificdiplomacy builds bridges.

I love reading articles that tackle where science intersects with other areas of life. Frankly, there’s not enough being written about that subject, which is a shame. Science hits every area, even if it’s not so obvious at first. There’s a real potential for science to do good in all areas of life and for it to work with other professions. Many times, it will be possible in a surprising way that’s pretty darn novel.

To add another link from Scientific American’s guest blog, I think it’s time for some trivia: Lindau Nobel Meeting--Sentences That WinNobel Prizes.

Obviously there isn’t such a thing as “Nobel Prize-winning sentences,” but it’s neat to compile a representative list from the papers of Nobel Laureates. My favorite is the one from Sir Harold Kroto:

"We are disturbed at the number of letters and syllables in the rather fanciful but highly appropriate name we have chosen in the title to refer to this C60 species."

Science and humor in the same sentence? Blasphemy!

I’m finishing this post with a webcomic from Abstruse Goose, a delightful comic that focuses on many topics, including science. When the topic of the day is science, it’s always insightful, and can be uplifting. This particular comic combines science, maps, and The Lord of the Rings, so where can you go wrong with that? Nowhere, that’s where.

Permanent link

Boy do I love nature quotations

2011-06-22T00:49:00.000-04:00

So I have another post started that will explain what I've been up to with my research project, but in the meantime, I have this one.

I was reading Richard Conniff's blog and came across his post Learning to Feel at Home. It's filled with great quotations about nature, but one quotation in particular struck me as outstanding. It's lent me a nice springboard for my eventually presentation about my project, and so I'm thinking about starting it off with this picture as the first slide.

It's simple, which is part of the reason why I like it. I also expect my audience to not quite understand assassin bugs (or even know anything about them) when I start my presentation, so I think this will help them to understand where I'm coming from and why I chose to pursue my project.

The Summer of the Reduviidae: The Beginning

2011-05-20T00:37:00.000-04:00

Let's just say that my summer project with assassin bugs is going well so far.

More to come soon!

Late Night Beetle Collecting

2011-05-09T00:53:00.000-04:00

I decided to turn on the outside lights for about a half hour tonight to see if anything would fly up, and I got some good results! Right now I'll post the pictures that I took tonight, and I'll elaborate tomorrow. I caught a few of the beetles and am keeping them to hopefully identify later and get a closer look under better light conditions. It was about 52 degrees tonight, so still a bit chilly for more insects to be flying about, but once summer warms up more, there will be all sorts attracted to lights.

A Triumphant Return

2011-05-02T18:59:00.000-04:00

I've now been back in the United States for three days now, and each day I have made time to go out looking for insects. I've missed the familiar plants and temperate weather, and on top of that, I've had a lot of success, especially today. So far I've confined myself to my backyard, but that hasn't limited what I've found.

I pulled off some dead bark from some staghorn sumac, and found some ants which had set up residence inside the plant.

They quickly grabbed the ant larvae and ferried them away from view, and ran around feverishly trying to figure out what had happened. I was hoping for some beetle grubs, but this was fine too.

I also found a firefly crawling around in the grass. It's still a bit chilly for most of the fireflies to be out, but I've seen a few. Hopefully it will only be a few weeks until they're out in abundance and flashing. Speaking of fireflies, if you haven't yet, check out Firefly Watch, a project to look at firefly abundance and gather data on fireflies. It's a project you can help out with: just register your location, habitat, and watch fireflies for 10 minutes. It's great fun, and you'll learn a lot while you're collecting data.

Next on my list was finding a caterpillar. "Awesome!" I thought, being the first caterpillar I had found.

After taking a closer look, however, I realized that this wasn't a caterpillar at all: it has way too many prolegs. I'm not sure what exactly it is, but the only other group I know of that are similar to caterpillars in their larval stage are sawflies. Well, you also have beetles, but this is definitely not a beetle grub. So I'm leaning towards sawfly, and I'll see what I can figure out.

I next found something super cool: a molted spider skin. Until a few months ago, it never even occurred to me that spiders shed their skin. Of course they're arthropods, but it just never crossed my mind. Sort of like the clover thing, I suppose.

That's pretty awesome.

I came upon a tree which had its leaves full of small holes, and soon found the (alleged) culprits: weevils. There were many all over the tree, most of them mating. I'm not sure of what species of weevil they are, nor what species of tree they were on, so if anyone knows, leave me a comment. UPDATE: Thanks to Tricia, this mystery has been solved: they're a pair of mating Tulip Tree Weevils (Odontopus calceatus) mating on a tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera).

Once I was nearing the end of my romp around my yard, I came upon a particularly unfortunate beetle.

Its right wing and elytra didn't look to be in the best shape, but it was persevering. I'm pretty sure it's Atalantycha bilineata, the two-lined leather wing, but I need to look at it a bit closer first to be sure. I haven't ever seen this beetle before, it's great to know that I haven't found anywhere close to all the insects in my yard yet. We'll see what tomorrow brings!

All of these pictures were from yesterday, so I'll post my pictures from today's hunt tomorrow.

The Summer of the Reduviidae

2011-04-24T02:28:00.000-04:00

A wheel bug from Costa Rica, preserved at the Museo de Insectos, University of Costa Rica, San José.

Let it be known that I am extremely excited for this summer.

I applied for a few internships, but those didn't work out. I was disappointed, of course, but other opportunities popped up, ensuring that I won't be idle during my time off from classes. I applied for a grant from my college, and received it. Thanks to that, I will spend six weeks during the summer carrying out a project I designed. This will involve me romping around the college's field station with my exploring hat, bug nets, and a bag full of bug collecting equipment, investigating the assassin bug diversity at the field station.

This is awesome for a number of reasons:

I'll be investigating a question no one has yet researched
I'll be acquainting myself even more with assassin bugs, a group of insects that is quickly becoming my favorite
I will have ample time for exploration
I'll find more than just assassin bugs
With six weeks, I won't be rushed
I'll have the opportunity to present my findings to the public, spreading my love of insects
I'll be doing all of this on my own

It's a time to prove just how much I've learned so far, in addition to doing something outside of a class. I've done some insect collecting at the field station already, as part of a Zoology class, but our time was limited, resulting in me not having enough time to do all I wanted. This time around, I can be at the station essentially all day.

I can also tackle the project knowing what to look for and where to look, meaning that I should have a lot more success than I did during the class in finding assassin bugs.

Then, once I finish the project, I can use what I learn to inform how I carry out my capstone project, which will be an investigation into the life habits of the wheel bug, Arilus cristatus, again at the field station. I'll be doing that project for a grade, and it will be essentially the most important project I undertake during my undergraduate career.

So that's quite critical.

I've been doing a lot of research for the past few months, looking for general information about assassin bugs, insect collecting methods, and planning for the summer. In a few weeks, I'll be able to start the culmination of all that work.

I'm going to hit the ground running.

Another project I'll be doing this summer is an herbarium indexing project for the college. It will involve scanning pictures and data sheets into an online database that will catalog plant species from Ohio, an area I need to brush up on. Between that and my assassin bug projects, I feel as if the next few months will be full of productivity.

I plan to keep a field journal during my projects as well. I've kept a few in the past: when I was in the Southwest for a desert ecology class, and in a few places I've been in Costa Rica. I hope to make my summer one much more detailed, and in that vein, more useful. Not to mention the fact that it will make it a lot easier to remember my methods, where I find certain insects or habitats, etc. Speaking of which, I need to see about getting a giant map of the field station...

Assassin bug (Zelus sp., possibly Z. luridus) that has captured a fly

Colorful Katydids

2011-04-11T03:50:00.000-04:00

Nothing in Biology is ever as simple as it seems. That’s the beauty of it, and this is especially true whenever insects enter the picture. Last June, I was scouting out my backyard for insects and other things, and came across a small, brightly-colored insect: vivid green and orange, it was almost neon. So what did I do? I snapped two pictures of it and moved on, not thinking much of it.

Scudderia sp. on a leaf of Vitis sp.

Obviously I wasn’t thinking very well that day. Returning to the pictures a little while later, I started to investigate to figure out what exactly it was. Truthfully, when I first saw it, I thought it was an assassin bug nymph. Actually, it’s a nymph of a bush katydid, genus Scudderia. An easy way to identify a Scudderia nymph is from their white and black-banded antennae.

Unfortunately, that’s about as far as I’ve gotten with this particular nymph. According to Bugguide, there are eight species of Scudderia (in North America at least). Ohio has five of them:

S. curvicauda
S. furcata
S. fasciata
S. pistillata
S. texensis

Master of the Grape Leaf

Right now I’m leaning towards Scudderia furcata, the fork-tailed bush katydid, but I can’t say for sure until I get my hands on an identification guide. S. furcata and S. cuneata look similar, and based on pictures I’ve seen, this one looks like one of those species. And since the latter is distributed in the southeastern United States, the one in my picture seems likely to be S. furcata.

At any rate, even if I don’t know which species it is, it’s still a beautiful specimen. It’s interesting how colorful some insects can be—and how bright they can be. The adult form isn’t anything to go crazy over: it’s usually a plain green color, though sometimes you find a pink morph, which is pretty darn neat. It’s kind of sad that the adults lose the vibrant colors the young have...maybe as they grow, they shed their rebellious phase and go mainstream. Probably better to avoid being eaten.

Algal Symbiosis & More Solar-Powered Sea Slugs

2011-04-07T16:52:00.001-04:00

I stumbled across a very interesting article the other day, via Wired. It elaborated upon a study on the spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) and its relationship with algae. I hope you’ve got a good grip on your chair, because you’re liable to fall out of your seat otherwise. It’s pretty sweet news.

Algae is quite useful. It’s food for smaller organisms, and photosynthesizes, providing the rest of us with oxygen, which is a good thing. In the case of the spotted salamander, it’s an even more intimate relationship. The salamander lives with algae within its cells, which is the truly exciting news. Symbiosis between salamanders and algae isn’t anything new: it was even known in this salamander before the new study. But the crux of the matter is the degree of the symbiosis. Since the algae are within the salamander’s cells, that is a darn close relationship. In fact, such an intense relationship was previously thought to only occur between algae and invertebrates. This is the first time that it’s been shown between algae and a vertebrate, proving that creatures with backbones still have some tricks up their sleeves.

So how do the algae associate with the salamanders, and when?

The algae occur within the embryos of the salamanders, so the symbiosis starts early, literally in the womb. The scientists involved with the study think that algae get inside of the cells of the embryos via two routes: being passed down from the mother salamander (akin to a starter set of algae) and by obtaining the algae from the environment. So essentially, the salamanders have a small amount of algae to start them off, and then are able to obtain more from the vernal pools in which the egg masses are laid. An algal bloom is triggered inside the embryos (they’re not sure why this happens), and BOOM! Now the salamanders have a whole bunch of oxygen-producing algae. And that’s exactly why the algae are so important to the developing salamanders: oxygen. You know how some people say all you need is love? Well, oxygen’s important too.

If you’re a developing salamander embryo, just hanging out in your egg mass, you have a lot of support—about 100 other salamander brothers and sisters. To put this into perspective, here’s a picture of the egg mass:

Photo by Roger Hangarter, source: Live Science

Kind of cute, isn’t it? Sort of similar to a frog egg mass. So now that we know what the egg mass looks like, we can imagine the problem with it. When you have so many small salamander embryos packed in there, and you have the luck of being the embryo in the middle of the whole mass, you’re going to be starved for oxygen that’s being used up at the edges. But wait, there’s still hope! You have algae from your awesome mother salamander that are photosynthesizing, giving you free oxygen. All you have to give them is your nitrogenous wastes, which you didn’t want in the first place anyway. That’s the beauty of this symbiosis: both algae and salamander benefit, and on top of that, it’s recycling!

Thanks to the oxygen produced by the algae, the embryos are more likely to survive: developing in a healthy manner, and they’re bigger than salamanders that weren’t provided with oxygen from the algae. The embryo stage is when the algae seems to help the most, though the algal cells stick with the salamanders throughout the rest of their lives.

As befitting any other scientific study that’s in the least bit interesting, this one raises a lot more questions. Other salamanders have associations with algae, so where do they fall on the symbiotic spectrum? Are the associations as intimate as this one, where the algae are within the cells, or do the algae play a smaller role? Is more than one species of algae involved, and are different species better partners? And what about other amphibians? If salamanders have these relationships, what about other amphibians: frogs? Caecilians? It’s all very exciting.

Since we’re on the topic of algae symbiosis, this post is going to shift gears a bit and focus on sea slugs and nudibranchs. Besides, I have some cool pictures from Costa Rica I want to include here. Let’s get to it!

As I mentioned earlier, such an intimate algal symbiosis was known in the invertebrates already. In particular, some striking examples come from the Gastropods, especially sea slugs.

The sea slug Elysia chlorotica, found along the east coast of the United States, not only uses stolen chloroplasts from algae, but stolen genes as well. First, the sea slug seeks out some delicious algae. It has the chloroplasts that the slug needs, and to get them, the slug sucks them out of the algae—like it’s using a straw. This is called kleptoplasty, and this sea slug is able to take it even further. The slug has genes from the algae incorporated into its own genome. Again, it has genes from an alga in its own genome. This calls for a quotation.

“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C. - Wired.com

What does this fusion mean for the slug? Well, it’s now an autotroph, essentially. The genes allow the slug to produce a photosynthetic pigment, chlorophyll a, meaning that it’s able to photosynthesize: it’s solar-powered. Without the pigment, the slug wouldn’t be able to utilize photosynthesis, since the pigment is what allows it to use sunlight as part of the photosynthetic process. It absorbs a certin spectrum of light, and is actually just one of a variety of pigments. There are others, such as carotenoids, chlorophyll b, and xanthophylls, which all absorb a different spectrum of light.

Source: University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Pigments other than chlorophyll a are called accessory pigments, because they absorb other wavelengths that chlorphyll a can’t use. Accessory pigments allow plants to take advantage of the entire spectrum of visible light.

So since the sea slug now has functional chloroplasts, and is producing chlorophyll a for said chloroplasts, it can produce its own food, and doesn’t have to feed anymore. All it needs is some sunlight, and it’s set for life.

A similar sea slug that I’ve had a personal encounter with is Elysia diomedia, which is in the same genus as the previously mentioned sea slug, but is found in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Central America.

This little guy is quite pretty: it has a brilliant green body, white and black stripes along its sides and head, and an orange and black folded parapodial edge (or if you prefer, lettuce).

They’re found in warm tide pools that get a lot of sun. Since it’s a species that is kleptoplastic, that’s a no-brainer.

It’s not the fastest creature you’ll come across, it’s content to move around with no hurry. It can stretch its body out pretty far, as I found out after watching it move through its tide pool. It’s sort of like a slinky in that respect.

In this picture, you can see some bright blue specks in the middle of its lettuce ruffles: that’s where it keeps the chloroplasts: way cool.

If you’ve only thought of algae as disgusting pond scum that you have to deal with when walking through a wetland, you’re mistaken. And you obviously are not a sea slug or salamander, having that attitude.

References:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/symbiotic-salamander/

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/green-sea-slug

http://www.livescience.com/13568-green-algae-salamander-embryos-110404.html

http://www.seaslugforum.net/find/elysdiom

http://dwb4.unl.edu/chem/chem869p/chem869plinks/gened.emc.maricopa.edu/bio/bio181/biobk/biobookps.html

The Humble Clover

2011-03-06T20:01:00.001-05:00

While using StumbleUpon yesterday, I came across a gardening website that was discussing Red clover (Trifolium pratense), a plant native to Europe that has become naturalized in the United States. While reading a little bit about it, I realized that I had never actually associated the small pink flowers with the actual clover itself.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Red_clover_closeup.jpg

Now, this realization was embarrassing, because I should have made the obvious connection and paid attention to my surroundings. But it was also eye opening that I have been surrounded by clover and these pink flowers all my life, but had never before thought about any connection between the two. Clover has been ubiquitous in my yard, and essentially any other place I've gone in my life, so it's not like this was just a small anomaly.

Red clover itself is pretty interesting. It's part of the legume family, Fabaceae, which includes soybeans, peas, and peanuts. One of the most interesting characteristics of this family is their nitrogen-fixing roots. Many species have root nodules on their roots, which host bacteria that can fix nitrogen from the air, thereby enriching the soil. It's a symbiotic relationship that confers advantages to the bacteria and the plant, and makes the soil more fertile at the same time. The plant itself is eaten by grazers.

Bumblebees are pollinators of the flowers, and I've seen butterflies drinking the nectar from the flowers as well.

Great Spangled Fritillary (Speyeria cybele) on red clover

So, moral of the story: pay attention to the plants and animals around you. Especially the ones you've had around you for your entire life.

References:
USDA PLANTS Profile

Science Video Friday: Solar-powered Sea Slug

2011-03-04T23:48:00.000-05:00

What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the phrase "solar power?"

Nudibranchs? Yeah, I thought so. Today's Science Video Friday introduces an amazing little sea slug with some brilliant colors and a unique energy-gathering strategy. Elysia diomedia uses kleptoplasty: ingesting the plastids from the algae it eats without destroying the plastids, and then using those photosynthetic plastids to produce energy for itself. That's one of the coolest things I've ever heard of.

For more information, check out The Sea Slug Forum.

Suspense and Scorpions

2011-03-02T01:06:00.000-05:00

While a longer post will have to wait until after I have taken care of applications and other scholarly pursuits, here's a sneak peak at what a later post will cover:

Yeah, it will be an action-packed post.

Science Video Friday: Neil deGrasse Tyson

2011-02-18T18:06:00.000-05:00

Just a quick blog post to leave you with an interesting video to watch. It was filmed back in April, when there were some questions about the future focus of NASA.

Neil deGrasse Tyson makes some good points about why we should be continually exploring the universe.

Exploration at La Selva Biological Station

2011-02-18T01:26:00.010-05:00

I recently had the amazing opportunity to visit La Selva Biological Station, operated by the Organization for Tropical Studies, on a class trip. The station was established in 1971, and is one of the most important biological stations for tropical rain forest research in the world: every year 250 scientific papers are published from research done at the station. Pretty impressive for a station only 15 square kilometers in area. It's operated by a consortium of 63 universities, and they do a great job of managing it.

Unfortunately, due to the massive amount of pictures I took while there, I can only select a few to elaborate on, so I'll make those count. Let it be said, however, that there are a massive amount of interactions, plants, animals, and so many other organisms at the station, and in the rain forest as a whole. It's no wonder that so much research comes out of the place.

Bridge over Río Puerto Viejo, containing crocodiles and fruit-eating piranha.

I had a lot of time to explore (yet, not enough), so I took full advantage of that. I found a lot of birds: hummingbirds, toucans, huge birds that reminded me of turkeys, and others that reminded me of a raptor from Jurassic Park. I have yet to identify them, but I'm pretty sure they weren't dinosaurs. (Unless you agree with the people who think that birds are in fact dinosaurs, according to systematics. And I do. So more accurately, they weren't scaly dinosaurs that I would have to worry about hiding in tall grass.) One of my favorite birds I saw was a Cherrie's Tanager (Ramphocelus costaricensis). When resting on a branch, it looks like a black bird with pretty red feathers near its tail, but when it takes flight, it's an unexpected explosion of red and quite beautiful.

Of course, Biology isn't all about birds. Almost everywhere you looked, there were epiphytes on the trees. Epiphytes are simply plants which grow on top of other plants. Mosses and lichens? Sure. (Lichens aren't technically plants, but you get the idea. Something growing on something else.) In the rain forest, you get even more variety with epiphytes. Many species of bromeliads (some more than six feet across, depending on how large the tree is) and orchids are epiphytes, and they were abundant. Bromeliads have a central tank in which water is stored, and these tanks are ecosystems in their own right. While at La Selva, I found katydids, mosquito larvae, spiders (More like Shelob than Charlotte. Seriously, that thing erupted from a small bromeliad and was a monster--as big as my palm.), and more hanging out in the tanks. Some species of frogs even use them as nurseries for their young. The eighth episode of Planet Earth, "Jungles," shows the relationship between species living in a pitcher plant, and it's the same concept, very neat.

That's a lot of bromeliads.

One of the most exciting things I found in La Selva was also one of the smallest. It's also an example of why you need to take the time to slow down and examine the things around you, rather than running around only looking for the big organisms. Upon looking at the underside of a leaf (I believe it was a species of Heliconia), I found a small ant. It wasn't a normal ant, however. It was stuck to the leaf, obviously dead, and had something growing out of its head. Looking closely, I was astonished to find that it was a fungus! Its fruiting body, a small mushroom, was growing out of its head, and another stalk was growing from its abdomen.

It was one of the most exciting things I've ever seen. And thanks to Planet Earth, I knew what it was. Also in the "Jungles" episode, Sir David Attenborough talks about a particular type of fungus, of the genus Cordyceps. This fungus is an endoparasite (a parasite that lives inside of another organism), and it has a unique way of carrying out its life cycle. It infects a host, then sends out its mycelia (think of those as the roots of the fungus), which eventually replace the host's own tissue. Some species are able to change the host's behavior (zombie ants!), causing it to climb to a high leaf or branch and attach itself there. After the host has died, the fruiting body of the fungus (its stalk and mushroom) grows from the dead host and releases its spores, which land in different places around the forest, waiting for the next unfortunate host to step on them and get infected, to continue the circle of life. If that's not beautiful, then I don't know what is. Parasitism at its finest. Though really, it's more like parasitoidism.

Note: While I'm not entirely sure that the fungus is in the genus Cordyceps, it's the assumption I will go by until I find conflicting information. Disclaimer: I could be entirely wrong on the identification, but the process of fungal infection is most likely the same.

The segment of Planet Earth with the Cordyceps interaction can be viewed below:

Venturing forth across the bridge, I found even more. Spiders of many sizes and colors (with some neat webs), moths, a cockroach, katydids, fungi (just taking part in detrivory, not parasitoidism this time), metallic flies, many mating millipedes (actually, almost every millipede I saw was mating...), and a peccary (think wild pig). In addition to this, I had an encounter with a poison-dart frog. In this case, the blue jeans morph of the strawberry poison-dart frog (Oophaga pumilio). This one is the most toxic species in its genus, but isn't the most poisonous of the poison-dart frogs. Still, I didn't touch it. It probably wouldn't have appreciated it anyway.

I assume you now realize why it's called the blue jeans morph.

This trip being part of a Tropical Ecology class, I had a hike with a guide next, which was pretty sweet. Slight interjection: the food at La Selva is top notch. It is not a Biological Station where you will go hungry or dislike the food. Delicious. Anyway, we hiked into the forest. Starting off, we saw some spider monkeys (genus Ateles) and heard howler monkeys bellowing (oddly enough, they sound like a large dog. Except this dog is hanging out high up in the tree canopy.) La Selva has three species of monkeys, so two out of three before we had really started our hike wasn't too shabby. Howler monkeys are pretty interesting, and they lead tough lives from birth. Female howlers will attempt to kill young howler monkeys of other females in order to increase their own offspring's success. How.....sweet. Howler monkeys live in troupes, and in La Selva usually band together in groups of about 15 or so individuals, which have an alpha male. That alpha male will sometimes attempt to kill the offspring of the females, so that he can mate with the females again. Priorities, I suppose. Add to that the fact that howler monkeys usually have only one or two offspring, and it's a bit of a hard life for baby howler monkeys.

The most interesting thing we found on our hike was a small group of Honduran white bats, Ectophylla alba, huddling together in a tent made from a Heliconia leaf. They're tent-making bats, one of 15 species in Latin America. They do it by cutting the side veins of the Heliconia leaf to the mid vein, which causes the sides of the leaf to fold over, creating a tent. Being small, the little white marshmallows huddle together for warmth and can be in groups of a dozen. In the little group we found, there were three. Usually the groups consist of one male, with a harem of females. Make of that what you wish.

For some clearer pictures of the bats, check out The Featured Creature.

With some extra time between dinner and our planned night hike, I explored some more. As mentioned earlier, I found a huge wolf spider. While the picture doesn't have much to show for scale, look at your hand, and imagine a spider as big as your palm. That's the approximate size. Fortunately, I found a friendly enough lizard after the spider, which wasn't nearly as creepy.

Shelob.

Much less creepy than Shelob.

And then came the night hike. Sitting on the porch of my cabin around dusk, I noticed a remarkable change in the makeup of the forest wildlife. It was a quick, but seamless transition into the chorus of katydids taking over for the night and producing much of the noise in the forest. It sneaks up on you inconspicuously. Then you realize that there has been an almost imperceptible change. Pretty neat. Once the night sets in, the fireflies start turning on their bioluminescence. You can turn off your flashlight and just watch the trees light up with males attempting to attract females. It's a dazzling mating ritual.

These guys are tricky.

During the night hike, we finally found some snakes. I was excited, but kept my distance. I respect snakes, but would rather leave them to be investigated by the herpetologists. All the snakes we found were in the trees, hunting for their meals, and were relatively small. No fer-de-lances or anacondas. I'll spare you the blurry pictures: I'm sure Google and Flickr have better ones than I do. Still, they were pretty neat. Great camouflage on them, they're tough to spot even from a few feet away. The fauna at night was quite different, and more diverse than what I had found during my day explorations. More frogs were out, especially the tree frogs, and I found a camel cricket, stick insect, scarab beetle, many moths, and some Hemipterans. We even saw an armadillo come lumbering across the path. Looking back at the pictures, I can't help but notice some similarities between some bugs I found at La Selva and some I've found back in Ohio.

I couldn't leave this picture out. This guy was found near our cabin.

Unfortunately, my second and last day at La Selva arrived all too quickly. A 6:30 AM wake up time was a bit daunting, but necessarily. Following the advice of some other men who were staying at the station, some friends and I took some pieces of banana over to the bridge after breakfast, and dropped them into the river. A few seconds later, the waters were churning (and continued to churn after we kept throwing in more pieces): there were frugivorous piranha in the river.

The assignment for the day was to go into the forest and find a relationship between two organisms. While quite simple, I was enamored with the thought of having four hours to explore the rain forest. So off my partner and I went!

Check out those mandibles.

As you can tell, the exploration started off very well. That's a longhorn beetle, and its antennae were indeed quite long. The beetle itself was at least three inches long.

We eventually reached a meadow of sorts, and found a termite nest at least three feet in height and about two in width, six feet up a tree. It had trails crossing all over the tree, and was doing a number on it: the tree was slowly being hollowed out. Even more interesting is that the termites themselves have a mutualism with protozoa in their guts: the protozoa digest the cellulose from the wood for the termites. On top of that, the protozoa have mutualistic bacteria inside them that help to produce enzymes to help break down the cellulose. Ecology: just when you think you have a clear-cut relationship, more and more get piled on.

While not as terrifying as a wasp nest, still not something to mess with.

Then we saw the bullet ant nest. And by saw, I mean to say we walked through a line of bullet ants without realizing it at first. Not necessarily the best thing to do, but the bullet ants didn't seem to mind. I laid my pencil on the ground for scale while I was taking pictures of the ants, and one go-getter decided to attack the pencil. It bit the top, wrapped its legs around it, and attempted to sting it quite vigorously. If that had been my finger instead of the pencil, I would have been in some intense pain. As in, enough pain that I wouldn't be able to do much with that finger for a few days. Or possibly hand and arm, for that matter. Yeah, don't get bitten by bullet ants.

I wonder which hurts more: the bite from a bullet ant, or the bite from a wheel bug.

After passing by another line of bullet ants (one ant had an unfortunate caterpillar in its jaws), we came upon a small gazebo and sat down for a while, gathering our thoughts, watching the activity around us, and listening to the sounds emanating from the forest. We saw a coati (related to the raccoon) digging around and then sunning itself (it looked very zen), heard the calls of howler monkeys, the grunts of peccaries, and the droning of cicadas.

A coati: the elongated raccoon of the forest.

Leaving the gazebo and heading back to the station, we saw the aforementioned raptor bird, some gigantic trees, and more interesting insects. We saw an agouti, and while I was busy taking a picture of a leaf-footed bug, I heard a scream. Apparently a bullet ant had hitched a ride on my partner, and she noticed it crawling over her knuckles while she was waiting on me to get my picture of the bug. Thankfully, she shook it off quickly. Dodged that bullet.

Yes, that is a very tall tree.

If there were raptors at La Selva, they would be hiding in there.

After that excitement, we continued on our way. The last thing of note we found were some mantis oothecae (egg sacs), both at least two inches in length. Now, a Chinese mantis, which is about three inches long, lays an ootheca about the size of a ping pong ball. I would have loved to see the mantis that laid these ones, it would have been quite large.

After buying some identification guides for beetles, it was time to head back. La Selva is a great place to find all kinds of wildlife and interactions, and it was a great opportunity to be able to visit. You could easily spend months (or more) there and never get bored.

Sadly, I can't post all the pictures I would like to from my trip, but here's a small summary of what else I saw while I was at La Selva:

-Ctenosaurs/Iguanas? hanging out in the tree limbs above the river
-Very sharp (tested myself) thorns erupting in bands from a tree stem. Did not stop the epiphytes from growing on the smooth space in between the bands of thorns, however.
-Katydids, beetles, moths, frogs, wolf spiders, turkey bird...
-Tree growing halfway up a dead one: it needed that sunlight!
-A flower high in the canopy dropping long threads of who knows what. Think white spaghetti noodles.
-Nine harvestmen (Opiliones, AKA Daddy-long-legs) on one leaf.

Old Man's Cave - Hocking Hills, Ohio

2011-02-08T00:12:00.000-05:00

Old Man's Cave is an interesting place. It's part of Hocking Hills, an Ohio state park, and is located near Logan, Ohio. The state parks in Ohio are wonderful places to enjoy nature, find bugs, and just revel in various types of biology, and Old Man's Cave is no exception. The cave is named after a settler who lived in the cave after the Civil War, Richard Rowe. He was killed by an accidental shot from his own gun, and it's rumored that local Native Americans buried him near the Cave. Who knows if that's true or not, but it's an interesting story.

Moss covers every rock around the park, and there are good amounts of lichens and bryophytes as well.

While I was there, I found a lot of mushrooms. If you're a mycologist, you'll enjoy the place.

Unfortunately, my mycology skills are pretty non-existent right now. I'll have to come back to the ecology and identification of these at a later date. But still, very neat, and a good variety for only a cursory glance. I only had an hour or two there, but I'm positive there's a lot more to explore and discover.

Conocephalum conicum - Scented liverwort/Snake liverwort

The liverworts, as usual, were quite pretty as well. They were very prevalent in the moist areas near the bottom and sides of the caves, and by the waterfalls.

I found one very interesting insect while examining the lichen on a tree. Strangely enough, the lichen started to move. It actually turned out to be the larva of a lacewing, an insect within the order Neuroptera. Lacewing larvae will routinely cover themselves with debris: lichen, dirt, dead insects, etc. to help them blend in with their surroundings, or hide their bodies. It's pretty good camouflage, you wouldn't know they were there if they stayed still.

Sadly, with only an hour and a half to explore, I missed a lot. The only solution to that, of course, is to return with more time to explore.

The Nexus of Science & Popular Culture: Part 1 - The Symphony of Science

2011-02-02T12:28:00.002-05:00

Something that has become very clear to me is that science and popular culture don't mix as often as they should. There is a large portion of the general public that doesn't understand science, thinks it's boring, and has no interest in pursuing any other information about science.

Yet, maybe that's not a fair nor a correct characterization. According to the National Science Foundation's most recent survey on public attitude's about science and technology, more than 80% of Americans reported that they were very or moderately interested in new scientific discoveries. Public interest in science and technology topics is higher in the US than in many other countries, including European countries, China, and South Korea. 59% of Americans visited an informal science venue (such as a museum or zoo) in 2007. So, maybe the problem isn't a lack of interest. Perhaps the problem is a lack of effective communication by scientists and the lack in the number of opportunities given to explore science.

As one example, when Planet Earth was shown on the Discovery Channel in the United States in 2007, it became cable's most-watched event of all time, reaching over 100 million viewers. Not too shabby, if we're still working under the assumption that people think science is boring. Well, maybe people just really like listening to Sigourney Weaver's voice. Another example can be found on CBS's primetime block. The Big Bang Theory is a show that premiered in 2007 that centers around 4 scientists, and incorporates a surprising amount of (correct) science, while at the same time including an equal amount of humor. By the time it reached its third season in 2009, it was CBS's highest-rated show for its time slot among adults 18-49.

Obviously, when science is presented effectively and accessibly, it's not ignored.

With the advent of the internet, and the recent additions to the internet with Internet 2.0 and social media, there are now vast opportunities for spreading science to a wider audience in a way that's accessible. Online networking can make a video go "viral" in a matter of hours, and it's easier now than it ever has been to share content online.

I'd like to highlight one project in particular that does a marvelous job of spreading science to a wide audience. It's a project by a man named John Boswell, and it's called the Symphony of Science. The concept might sound a little weird, but just go with it: auto-tuned scientists singing. John takes clips from shows and interviews with scientists, auto-tunes their voices, and sets it to music. It's pretty wonderful and the songs are catchy. He uses the voices of scientists such as Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, and more. It's a neat project and one of the best examples I've found of merging science and art (not to mention a bit of philosophy as well) in an accessible way. You don't have to understand all the concepts the videos cover, but you can still easily be inspired by them.

The first video, "A Glorious Dawn," has garnered over 5 million hits, and is embedded below.

My favorite video, "The Poetry of Reality" is also embedded below.

If you want to learn more about the project, check out John's website, which I linked to earlier. Or, you can check out his Youtube channel. He also has a Twitter, if you are Twitter-inclined.

This is the first post of a series I'm planning to do about how Science and Popular Culture mix and complement each other, so if you enjoyed this one, well, super. You're going to get more similar to this.

Inventing the Wheel(bug)

2011-01-24T16:13:00.000-05:00

Back in September, a good friend brought me two bugs he had found in Little Hocking, Ohio. He didn't know what they were, but figured that I would know something about them.

Eh, he was correct.

In fact, what he had found was a wheel bug, part of the assassin bug family, of the species Arilus cristatus. Two of them in fact, which was quite fortunate (one was a female, as I found out later when it laid an egg cluster). Wheel bugs are quite large: the wheel bug is one of the biggest true bugs in North America (1 inch to 1.25 inches in length), and, certainly in Ohio, is probably the biggest you're likely to find. If there are bigger true bugs (Hemiptera) in Ohio, I would love to find them. Female wheel bugs are bigger than males, as is the trend in the insect world. Wheel bugs range from Rhode Island to Nebraska, further west into California, and south into Florida and Texas. They've also been reported to be in Mexico and Guatemala, so if you find yourself down there, look around for them.

It actually has pretty good balance: it's keeping itself upright with only two of its legs. Thinking back to this moment, it could have been making an aggressive stance. If so, I dodged that bullet.

The most distinct feature of the wheel bug is also its namesake: the "cogwheel" on its back. Or chicken's comb, if you prefer. The wheelbug is the only insect in the United States with such a structure, and no one's quite sure what its use is. It's been speculated that it's useful for species recognition or to alert predators that it tastes bad, but from what I could gather from the published literature, no one has really bothered to study the wheelbug enough to figure out what function the cogwheel has. It's actually kind of embarrassing, not least of all because that's where the insect gets its common name from, and certainly something so unique and conspicuous deserves special attention. I don't buy either explanation, as they're both extremely lacking. If anything, it seems like it would serve to intimidate potential predators more than anything else. In my experience, it has had that effect on humans who have seen them. At any rate, it's a very interesting quirk that the bug has. The cog can have anywhere between 8 and 12 teeth on it, and the nymphs lack the crest. That must be an interesting molt.

The wheel bug has some interesting colors. The membrane on the wings reflects a bronze color, and its body is covered in fine yellow hairs (pubescence). Just in case you haven't noticed by now, this bug has a strange shape. All in all, the bug has its cogwheel, long legs, long antennae and its conspicuously wide abdomen, which juts out from under the wings. For some reason, the wheel bug has been described as "grotesque" before.

This is terrifying.

Obviously, this bug is a predator. It feeds on things like stink bugs, caterpillars and beetles. During its smaller nymphal stages, it will feed on smaller insects like aphids. The wheel bug eats some pest insects like defoliating caterpillars, and so is considered beneficial, but isn't the best at its job since it also eats some beneficial insects like honey bees. Its hunting strategy is akin to that of a mantis: that is, it's an ambush predator. It's usually slow-moving and waits in one spot for its prey. When it finds prey, it's kind of terrifying. The wheelbug's saliva contains some toxic compounds that paralyze and kill its prey within 15 to 30 seconds, and it then proceeds to suck out the (delicious?) fluids. I found a wonderful description of a wheel bug feeding on a beetle in a paper by Eisner & Aneshansley, which deserves a direct quotation. The full paper is cited at the end of this post, and also in the picture above this paragraph:

"It had impaled the beetle on its proboscis and was in the process of imbibing its contents. We collected eight such bugs at the site, and fed each an H. cyanea, with consistent results. The bug approached the beetle and straddled it, to which the beetle responded by clamping down. The bug then proceeded to probe the beetle until it found a membranous site for beak insertion. Within seconds after being pierced, the beetle went limp, and as it did, the bug simply lifted it up and pulled it off its hold (Fig. 3E).With its legs gone flaccid, the beetle seemed to detach readily. The beetles were thoroughly sucked out (mass of carcass=5.5 +-0.3 mg; n=8)."

A paper by McCauley and Lawson corroborates the carnage:

"Victims were found either impaled on the proboscis of a wheelbug or lying on or under the plant on which the predator was located. Individuals killed by wheelbugs display a characteristic discoloration at the point of puncture but are otherwise intact and can be sexed easily"

This is not a bug to mess around with. The pain from its bite (more accurately described as a piercing) is ten times worse than a bee, wasp, or hornet sting, and numbness can last for days afterward. The full healing time takes about two weeks, but can take months or longer if you're acutely sensitive to it. (That's when you lose that particular genetic lottery.) Make sure you take care of the wound and it doesn't get infected. For treatment, ammonia water and magnesium sulfate (epsom salt) soaks are recommended, though the sources for any information about wheelbug bites are from 1919 (Barber), 1924 (Hall), and 1958 (Smith et al.). So, the recommendations are a bit dated now. No one wants to get bitten by a wheelbug for science anymore. On the bright side, while vicious in the wild (though that sounds like an exaggeration to me), they're less so after being in cages and become used to being handled quickly, which is sort of neat. Less neat is that cannibalism of the male by the female has been reported after mating when in cages, so maybe the viciousness is just sort of suppressed for a while.

If you ever get the urge to go looking for some wheelbugs, they're diurnal, and found at lights at night (attracted to their prey rather than the light itself). They're also attracted to turpentine oil, oddly enough. Unfortunately, I have no idea why or any other information about that particular fun fact, since the publication is from 1928 (Metzger) and a bit difficult to find. Hagerty and McPherson published their findings of wheel bugs in southern Illinois from their study during 1997-1998, and they found nymphs starting in May, with adults being found starting in June. Plan your hunts accordingly.

Figure 2, Hagerty & McPherson, 2000. (Click to enlarge)

If you capture one, it might extrude some orange-red scent sacs from its anus. So yeah, be prepared for that.

I've yet to hear the wheelbug produce any noises, but it's able to produce a chirping sound, and makes a loud droning sound when it flies. I would love to see one fly, it seems like it would look more than a little ridiculous. The reason for its chirping sounds isn't known.

This seems like a good place to interject: there is a lot about wheelbugs that we don't know. It's a pretty egregious oversight, considering how unique it is, and how large it is as well. At least with smaller bugs like leafhoppers there's the excuse that they're quite small, making them harder to study, but wheelbugs are pretty conspicuous. There's so much more to research, and we would probably get some pretty interesting answers (and even more questions) if more research was being done. Hagerty and McPherson hit on this well, stating that "Although a common species, most published information on its biology consists of scattered notes." I have a feeling we're missing out on a lot by ignoring the wheelbug.

Even the eggs of the wheel bug are interesting and unique. If you like to wax poetic with your descriptions, you might describe the eggs to "resemble miniature brown bottles with fancy white stoppers" (Mead). If you want to actually understand what they look like, a picture is below. They're arranged in a hexagonal cluster of around 40-180 eggs (I counted 139 in my picture), and are glued together with a gummy cement for protection from the elements and from predators. There's one generation per year (wheelbugs are univoltene), and the eggs overwinter and hatch in the Spring. After hatching, it takes about 3 months for the nymphs to mature to adults.

Fancy indeed

Hagerty & McPherson's study on wheelbugs is a particularly good paper about wheelbugs, so I'd like to take a look at some of their results. The full paper is cited at the end of this post, and a link to it is provided if you'd like to read it yourself.

The study listed some of the wheel bug's prey, which included:

Fall webworm, Hyphantria cunea, a pest species
Imported cabbageworm (also known as Small White), Pieris rapae, an imported pest species
Orange Dog (Giant swallowtail), Papilio cresphontes, a pest in citrus orchards
Tent caterpillar, Malacosoma
Bollworm, Helicoverpa zea, a pest of many crops
Mexican bean beetle, Epilachna varivestis, an agricultural pest

Those are some of the reasons why it's considered a beneficial insect, though its usefulness is tempered by its numbers (not always quite large enough to be an effective control) and the fact that it also feeds on some beneficial insects.

The study also explored the life history of Arilus cristatus, and measured the average incubation time for the eggs to be 60 days in lab. It was also found that a cold period is not necessary for the eggs to develop normally. While collecting eggs from the field, a total of 12 egg clusters were collected, and 10 of them were heavily parasitized (which speaks to why the wheel bug and other insects lay so many eggs at a time). The other two egg clusters had 315 eggs between them (123 and 192, respectively), and 252 of those hatched.

Not all of the hatchlings survived, and the study recorded how many of the nymphs successfully made it through each of their stadia (stages in their life history, i.e. their molts) to reach adulthood. The data were listed in a table, but I went ahead and graphed it to make it a little easier to understand.

(Click to enlarge)

The x-axis is the cumulative mean age (the amount of days it took for the average wheelbug to complete each stage) of the wheel bug nymphs, and the y-axis is the number of nymphs that completed each stage. As you can see, a little more than half (about 53%) of the nymphs reached adulthood. This graph doesn't include the number of nymphs that started the first stadium (210 healthy ones were selected from the original batch), nor does it include the number that hatched from their eggs (252, from which the 210 were selected), nor the original number of eggs (315). If you start from the number of eggs laid (315) and end at the number of nymphs that reached adulthood (93), you have a survival rate of 30%. So, after hatching, avoiding various ways to die during their youth, and successfully molting five times, about a third of the wheel bugs make it to adulthood.

It's an unforgiving world we live in.

Pictured: Success!

References:

Mead FW. 1974. The Wheel Bug, Arilus cristatus (Linnaeus) (Hemiptera: Reduviidae). Entomology Circular No. 143. Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Division of Plant Industry, Gainesville, FL.

Eisner, T. & Aneshansley, D. J. 2000 Defence by foot adhesion in a beetle (Hemisphaerota cyanea). Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 97, 6568–6573. (doi:10.1073/pnas.97.12.6568) http://www.pnas.org/content/97/12/6568.full

Stehr WC, and Farrell W. 1936. Two hemipterous enemies of the Mexican bean beetle in Ohio. Ohio Journal of Science 36: 332-333. https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/2832/1/V36N06_332.pdf

Hagerty AM & McPherson JE. 2000. Life history and laboratory rearing of Arilus cristatus (Heteroptera: Reduviidae) in southern Illinois. Florida Entomologist. 83(1): 58-63. http://www.fcla.edu/FlaEnt/fe83p58.pdf

Mating Reduces Predation on Male Milkweed Beetles. David E. McCauley and Ellen C. Lawson
The American Naturalist Vol. 127, No. 1 (Jan., 1986), pp. 112-117

Further Reading:

Beneficial insects in the garden: #09 Wheel Bug (Arilus cristatus)

Wheel bug, Arilus cristatus from University of Florida

Líquenes de Costa Rica

2011-01-24T14:38:00.000-05:00

I had the great fortune of going to the Poás Volcano this weekend and seeing all the interesting biota there. The first thing I noticed after stepping off the bus on starting the walk up to the crater was the intense smell of sulfur. It was almost suffocating and apparently some people got a bit sick from it. Of course, what else can you expect from a volcano?

The main crater, which is 950 feet deep.

The volcano is located within Poás Volcano National Park, so naturally there was a gift shop. It had a wonderful selection of books that were 50% off, and I found one about lichens! This was a pretty big deal to me, since it's difficult enough to find books about lichens in the United States, so I promptly bought it. It's Líquenes de Costa Rica, by Loengrin Umaña and Harrie Sipman, and is published by INBio, the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad, a huge Biodiversity institute in Costa Rica. The book has some general information about lichens, and identification information for 55 species of Costa Rican lichens.

It's always nice to find some extra information about lichens since they are generally overlooked. It's amazing to think that a lichen is a symbiosis between a fungus and an algae; it looks radically different from either of those. They're grouped in the Kingdom fungi, and are referred to as lichenized fungi, showing the limits of our taxonomic systems.

Lichens are useful as biomonitoring agents. They're slow-growing and are apt to acquire minerals and things from the air. They hold onto these materials for a long time, and so can be used to monitor air pollution levels in an area. This particular characteristic is something important for at least two studies going on in Marietta, Ohio, measuring manganese levels and air quality. In the above picture, the lichen doesn't look terribly healthy, and this is probably due to the sulfur levels in the area.

Kayford Mountain lichen, notice the discoloration near the top.

Another example of air quality and lichen biomonitoring can be found in the area near Kayford Mountain, West Virginia, where a mountaintop removal mining site's air pollution can be seen in the lichens.

Lichens are pretty useful, and a lot more interesting than they get credit for. Hopefully I'll find some more information about them while I'm down here. I might even learn something I can take back to Ohio and use.

Hitting the Ground Running in Costa Rica

2011-01-19T01:06:00.000-05:00

I've been in Costa Rica for about two weeks now, and it's been an eye-opening experience to be in an entirely new biome. The only exposure I've had to tropical plants before now has been in greenhouses, but my visits could hardly come close to exploring the actual tropics. So far I've been to a beach on the Pacific side of Costa Rica, and one on the Caribbean side. I've explored tide pools and the brush around a chocolate plantation, as well as my new front yard. I've seen so many new plants, animals, fungi, and so much more, which has led me to one conclusion.

I made the right choice in coming here.

Now unfortunately, the internet I'm currently on isn't the fastest in the world, so I'll probably start using less pictures. Actually, that's probably a lie. I've found so many interesting things here, I'll invariably end up posting a lot of pictures. What I truly mean is that it will take me longer to write up the blogs while I'm uploading the pictures. Nonetheless, I'm definitely going to have a lot to write about.

Some of the things I've found so far:

Grasshopper as big as my hand
So many orchids
Colorful flowers out the wazoo
Sea slugs, nudibranchs, a brittle star, crabs, and other denizens of tidal pools
A sloth & a toucan
Beetles, leafhoppers, millipedes, moths & butterflies
Possibly a poison dart frog
A bat as big as a small cat

I haven't even been to a national park yet. I can only imagine what's in store there. I've also found banana plants everywhere, which is so exciting to me. I will definitely have a post about bananas soon, the most important fruit in the world.

If this doesn't get you eager to learn about bananas, well, open your mind a bit. These things are fascinating. Don't worry, I'll convince you.

So, to summarize, I'm certain that Costa Rica is going to teach me a lot. Probably in the same league as my trip to New Mexico this past summer, which I will also probably elaborate on at some point. Moral of the story: it was one of the best trips of my life and helped me to understand biological concepts in a whole new light.

Expect new blog posts now, since I'm mostly settled in and adjusting to my schedule here. It will be impossible for me to run out of topics, and in March there is apparently a Mycology conference here that I might be able to attend. In February I believe there is an orchid festival, which I'm also excited for. I'll try to pump out at least one post a week, it sounds like a reasonable goal, but will surely not be enough for all that I find here.

Needless to say, I will be exploring those forests.

Predeparture & Teeth

2011-01-01T22:42:00.000-05:00

I'm heading to Costa Rica tomorrow for four months, so we're going to see how many posts I'm able to write in between everything else I'm going to be doing. Hopefully it's going to be a lot, because I'm pretty keen on finding a lot of new insects and other things while I'm down there. So, expect to see a shift in the content of my posts!

Before leaving, however, I would like to share a link.

Source: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/8/2/1280745851474/A-dragonfish-from-Austral-016.jpg

Enlarge that picture. Now, you'll notice a very peculiar thing: it has teeth on its tongue. TEETH! ON ITS TONGUE! That is too amazing. It's a dragonfish from Australia, though I couldn't find much other information about it. It lives in deep water, and you do not want to get bitten by it. Obviously. It was discovered by the Census of Marine Life, which is one of the most exciting projects I've ever heard of. For more information, check out The Guardian.

An Introduction to Treehoppers

2010-12-29T00:33:00.001-05:00

Treehoppers are marvelous little creatures from the family Membracidae. They're in the same suborder as the cicadas (Auchenorrhyncha), and were formerly classified in the order Homoptera. Treehoppers can be pretty tiny, only millimeters in length. The one in the picture below has a dime for scale. They're quite interesting creatures, and can vary a lot in their shape, often sporting horns and structures that allow for nice mimicry.

Entylia carinata, a common species in Ohio

This particular species, Entylia carinata, formerly had the species name of bactriana, after the Bactrian camel, which has two humps. The similarities are striking.

The moniker carinata means shell-shaped.

Fun fact: the guy on the left is the man who named the species as carinata, Johann Reinhold Forster. Painting by John Francis Rigaud, 1780. Image credit to Wikipedia.

Notice how its body is shaped to mimic a leaf, right down to the notch near its head.

For some more information about treehoppers, check out the following links:
General Treehopper Information
Pictures & Life Cycle Information
Short Tidbit of Information
Marvelous Array of Pictures, Courtesy of Bugguide.net