A Short Mid-Season Post

In my last post, I was patiently waiting for field season to start. And then, all of a sudden, it did -- a few warm days and blueberry bloom was off and running.

Today was an easier day -- it would have been our seventh day of data collection (we need fourteen this year), but the morning was too cool and overcast to be a "good bee day", so the crew and I came back to the lab for a much-needed day of bee pinning and downtime.

I've also had a chance to go through some of my photos, and I even took a few more today of the various critters that visit the honeysuckle bush at the field station. One of the nicest things about staying here is looking out the window while I'm cooking or washing dishes and watching bumblebees visiting flowers. They get absolutely covered in pollen. It's fantastic.

I'm not going to write a whole lot tonight (more data collection tomorrow, so I need to get to sleep soon!) but here are a few photos of what I've been seeing out in the field. The white bell-shaped flowers are blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum, highbush blueberry). Enjoy!

Bumblebee (Bombus) species mid-flight.

This is my best Habropoda laboriosa photo to date, you can actually see her face in this one, yay! Also take a look at all the pollen on her legs! I wish her hundreds of fat children.

Fun fact: "Habs" are actually as soft as they look!

One of the best parts of my field work (and also one of the most frustrating) is feeding bees by hand. Here you can see my triumphant feeding of a Colletes spp. female, who has just visited one of the open flowers near the top of the cluster. At the bottom you can just see my hand holding the water tube; this flower was eventually taken back to the lab and is now a data point in training!

Once Upon a Field Season

HELLO WORLD!

I'm BACK.

This is a blueberry field on April 22. Notice that it is 1) not in bloom and 2) raining.


A different field, on May 4. You may notice that it is still quite grey and, in fact, the day this picture was taken it was also raining. (This will be the ongoing theme of field season.)



The ongoing dismal weather grounded the local turkey vulture population. They liked to hang out in one particular dead tree near this field. You can see them in the above photo, but here is a close-up.


The next day was another rainy one. Since bees don't like the rain very much, I didn't see very many. I did see some other beautiful little things:

A green spider amid the pink blooms, how very Lily Pulitzer.

I think this tiny arachnids is some sort of crab spider. That flower is about 8 mm long.

Back at the field station, I saw this little guy puffing himself up against the cold weather. A few buzzed me at my field sites as well, but I didn't get any photos. Too bad the light was so dull, you can't really see the ruby-red.

Eventually the weather dried out a bit and we had clear skies for a few days. Of course, the Pinelands are a fire-happy ecosystem, so when I looked up and saw this:

I placed a call to the police to find out whether I needed to evacuate my field site. Fortunately it was a controlled burn and was put out quickly. It smelled very nice, actually, since they were burning a patch of pine forest.

Oh! Right! I also saw some bees!

Since it was a very early season, most of the Bombus I saw were queens. You can tell Bombus queens from workers by the fact that the queens are as big as your thumb and sound like helicopters, while the workers are relatively quite small (especially early in the season). This is probably Bombus impatiens. Fun fact: bumblebees are actually as soft as they look.

A number of other native bees appeared at my field sites, although generally not in any great numbers. This is one of my favorite native bees. It's in the genus Colletes and the orange hairs make them look like they're wearing tiny fox-fur jackets. Eventually they get around to sticking their heads into a few flowers, but they don't work constantly like the bumblebees do.

I'll post again soon, but it's been so long that I have to split things up over several entries. In the meantime, click on the photos to see them larger -- they look really good full-screen, thank goodness I learned how to use the macro on the camera before the season started. Enjoy!

Better Know an Insect: Fungus Farmers

Happy Thanksgiving!

A few weeks ago, I read some interesting papers about mutualisms in ecological networks.

Here is a thought-provoking opening sentence from one of them:

About 40 – 60 million years before the advent of human agriculture, three insect lineages, termites, ants, and beetles, independently evolved the ability to grow fungi for food (Mueller & Gerardo, 2002).

As you digest your delicious Thanksgiving meal, think of all the things we farm, and the complex relationship we have with agriculture, with farmers, and with the organisms we farm. Then contemplate that insects did it all way before us with their tiny little nervous systems.

Leafcutter ants are one of the lineages that have developed the ability to farm. You might have seen leafcutters in a museum -- they're popular exhibits because they will build their entire colonies readily inside an enclosure and only require a steady supply of leaves. They are the champion farmers of the insects; in some areas, they are considered major agricultural pests because they will strip all vegetation near their colonies to feed their fungus colonies.

The life cycle of leafcutter ants is something like this: when a new queen hatches, she takes a small amount of her home colony fungus along with her on a specialized structure on her thorax when she makes her nuptial flight. After mating, she founds a new colony with the fungus she carried with her. The fungus grows on decomposing vegetation -- leaves -- which the queen initially supplies. After her first offspring have developed, they take over the role of leaf-gathering so that the queen can focus entirely on laying eggs.

Humans go to great lengths to maintain their crops. We spray insecticides, fungicides, and other chemicals to keep our crops disease-free. Ants have developed a system to do this as well -- on each worker is a small patch containing beneficial bacterial colonies. These bacteria secrete antibiotics that help protect the fungal crop from disease. The ants can also adjust the kind of vegetation brought into the colony, and will not bring leaves that have previously been rejected by or toxic to the fungal crop.

Two amazing, related facts about leafcutter ants: 1) they are native to the Americas (especially Central and South America) and are not found on other continents; therefore, when you see a line of leafcutter ants in The Lion King (sorry, I'm having a hard time finding a screenshot) that is an error.

2) While most leafcutters make their homes in the tropics, one species actually lives as far north as southern New Jersey.

There's loads more to say about leafcutter ants, but I mainly wanted to talk about farming in this post, since it sort of relates to Thanksgiving. Perhaps I'll write about them again soon. Eusocial insects are my favorite insects to talk about since they do so many amazing things. Look for more on ants in the future!

Sources:
Mueller, Ulrich G. and Nicole Gerardo. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 November 26; 99(24): 15247–15249.

Better Know an Insect: Just a Little Weevil

I love whole grains, so I keep a variety of them in miscellaneous jars and other storage vessels in a cabinet in my kitchen. I like barley in my soup, curried quinoa, fresh popcorn (no microwave needed!), steel cut oats, and other tasty grains.

Unfortunately, I'm not the only one.

While restocking our popcorn jar, I picked up a bag of barley that I had opened some weeks ago and had rolled and clipped shut. I noticed that some of the barley was... moving. Crawling, really.

This was how we found out that we had an infestation of weevils. More specifically, they were probably wheat weevils, also known as granary weevils, which are a common pest of grain. They look like this:


Unlike the giant water bugs a few months back, however, what you're seeing on your screen is far larger than lifesize. If you check out the post on Wikipedia, you'll see the length given as 3-4 mm from snout-tip to end. These are tiny little critters; they burrow into seeds, very tiny indeed!

They might be tiny, but they don't lack ambition. We found the majority in the barley, but they'd also made it into the wild rice and the oat bran. (Actually, we caught a mating pair in the act nestled in the oat bran. I'm just glad we found them before it was full of their offspring.) It's not entirely clear -- they may have simply navigated the folds of the bag -- but they may have actually chewed through the plastic to get to the barley. (It was one of those flimsy two-pound bags.)

Anyway, we transferred everything to weevil-proof glass jars and threw the infested materials in the trash.

I don't know how accurate the Wikipedia article is, although the description is true enough. (It's completely lacking in citations.) The page about the weevils as a group is fairly interesting, if brief. It's too bad that the article is so short. There are 60,000 species of weevils in the world, so such a short entry really doesn't do them justice.

Weevils are in Curculionoidea, a superfamily of Coleoptera, or beetles; there are approximately 350,000 described species of beetles total, although there may be as many as 5 million in the world. (This might sound familiar -- frustration with mammal-centrism is part of the reason I do these "Better Know an Insect" posts.) As the visualization goes, if you lined up every known species of animal at random, every fifth one would be a beetle. By comparison, there are fewer than 6000 species of mammal in the world. There are not quite 60,000 species of vertebrates. Yet the gallery for weevils has just a handful of pictures, including the very pretty palmetto weevil.

Even the Encyclopedia of Life has no information about the little granary weevil. The best you can do is the snout beetles page, which has a few nice pictures and a phylogeny but not much besides.

I'm tired and it's nearly Friday, so I'm going to end there for now... but there will be more about other kinds of beetles in the future! There are so many, I could just blog about beetles and have several years' worth of material!

Correction

Just a quick FYI -- thanks to Mike, I can now inform you that the dragonfly I previously labeled L. vibrans (great blue skimmer) is actually L. incesta (slaty skimmer). Apparently, vibrans has a whitish face, which indicates that this is incesta. I do not know how it came to that species name, however. That's all for now!

Anax junius and Friends

As promised, some pictures!

It turns out that Anax junius likes to hang out more towards the middle of the pond. Lacking waders, I practiced catching anything I could. (Things like coordination don't always come easily to me.) I also don't have a great camera for macro stuff. One of these days I'll get a better one, but in the meantime I still got some decent pics!

OK, less talking, more dragons!

Pachydiplax longipennis

First up is Pachydiplax longipennis, also known as the blue dasher. That is the standard way of holding dragonflies after you catch them, by the way. This guy was a lot more blue than the picture looks, but it's sort of hard to see.

Celithemis eponina

If this is what I think it is (but I don't have a great field guide) then it is the aptly-named brown-spotted yellow-wing, Celithemis eponina. Unfortunately, standard dragonfly holding procedure obscures a lot of the beautiful wing patterning, so check out Wikipedia for more. The wings on these guys are lovely! If I've ID'd it correctly, it's also known as the Halloween pennant. Even if I don't have the species quite right, I feel pretty good saying that it's at least in Celithemis.

Libellula vibrans?
Libellula incesta

I don't have a good handle on this one. I suspect it might be Libellula vibrans, the great blue skimmer, but I'm really not sure. There's a picture of one on this page about the genus Libellula, but ... I don't know. I'll have to send this post to Mike and ask him.

(Editor's note: See next post for correction.)

Plathemis lydia

I'm pretty sure this one is a white-tail, Plathemis lydia. Why? The tail is white. (Actually, there may be several species of white-tails, but there is only one in my field guide. Hopefully the correct one. )

And, finally, the pièce de résistance, the trophy at the end of several hot hours standing in the sun by a mucky pond with a net, the big kahuna we were hunting all day:

Mike holding our first and only Anax junius of the second day out.

Waiting for the glue on the transmitter to dry.

Waiting for clearance from air traffic control.

After being manhandled for several minutes, they need to shiver their flight muscles to get warm enough to take off. Payload firmly attached, he was airborne a few seconds after this pictures.

We tracked him for about an hour with a pretty strong signal, first up in the woods and the back to the pond area where Mike had originally caught him. And then, suddenly, the signal vanished. We waited awhile, but he did not return. Perhaps he decided that this pond was too dangerous.

PS: You might be interested to know, for scale, that my left thumb nail, which features prominently in all but the pictures of Anax, is almost exactly one-half inch wide. You might also be interested to know that "longipennis" means "long-winged", despite what I know you were thinking. Apparently penna means "feather" in Latin and is related to the word "pennant". Penna is also the root of the word "pinion", meaning both the outer part of a bird's wing and the removal thereof to permanently prevent flight. Aren't you glad you asked? Entomology and etymology, all in one convenient location.

Better Know an Insect: Anax junius, part I

I post a lot about what's going on in the world of science, but I haven't posted much about what I'm doing.

Today, that changes.

Ladies and gents, this is Anax junius, the green darner dragonfly:

Male green darner.

Female green darner.

Take a good look, because you'll be hearing a lot about these guys in the future.

Today was a testing day for Mike and myself. (Mike is my advisor.) We received some very small transmitters a few weeks ago, but because of various things (his trip to South Africa, my shuffling between NJ and LI, logistics, etc.) the plan finally came together only this week.

(Please bear with me. I forgot my camera, I will try to describe things as well as I can, and I will hopefully have some more pictures tomorrow.)

After borrowing a van from Princeton, which may or may not prove handy depending on how well we can use our radio antenna, we headed to a pond and spotted a few Anax. Mike being in possession of the one pair of waders, he went on in while I stayed on shore in case any made an escape attempt in my direction. We were very lucky, and Mike bagged a male (like the picture above) within a few minutes. Back on shore, we sat down in the shade (don't want the little guy to overheat) and proceeded to apply a radio transmitter with a combination of eyelash adhesive and crazy glue. Once it was on, he sat on Mike's finger, shivered his flight muscles for a few minutes to warm back up, and took off.

We were able to follow him for a bit into some trees (apparently, green darners that have been man-handled will retreat to trees away from the pond) and then lost the signal. Driving around, we were able to find his blip again, only to lose it a few minutes later. We are concerned that the soldering was not as firm as we'd like and the transmitter may only be transmitting intermittently (that's a mouthful!).

Our plan for tomorrow is to 1) try to find our guy again in the same area. If we are successful... well, actually I don't know. I think we'll just try to keep an eye on him as long as we can. 2) If we can't find him, we'll first do a practice run with just a transmitter to test the range of a properly-functioning beacon. After that... probably try to bag another one and follow it around for a while.

What's the point of all this? Well, our project is on migration in Anax. So, we're trying to figure out whether it's even feasible to tag one, relocate it, and follow it for several days over land. It has been done before, but we're both new-ish to the technique. And it's not easy.

I'll post more in the next few days about the exciting world of insect endocrinology and how hormones may influence migratory behavior -- an under-explored area which might become part or all of my project if it proves too difficult to consistently follow tagged individuals. Also, pictures next time.

PS: In case you were thinking that we were attaching big, heavy transmitters to dainty damselflies, rest assured, we are not. Green darners are anything but dainty. Go out to a pond, take a look at all the dragonflies you see, and look for the biggest thing flying around. That's probably an Anax species. A picture for size comparison:

Male A. junius and female A. longipes.

I didn't take this picture and those aren't my hands, but this will give you some idea of just how big these guys are. Totally harmless, of course, but definitely massive!

Better Know an Insect: Femme Fatale Fireflies

Last night Dustin and I took an evening stroll through the park. It was a lovely, warm evening, with robins singing from the treetops and a slight breeze rustling the grass. And, of course, there were fireflies, lighting up the summer night with their romantic display, a visual analog to a bird's song.

Males, seeking females, blink their message in code, while females sit and wait on the ground for the right guy to come along. When she sees him, she blinks back until he finds her, and that's where baby fireflies come from. Aww.


Unless she's a hungry female of the genus Photuris, that is.

After Photuris females have mated, they don't need to mate again. But why waste a perfectly good signaling device? Instead, the Photuris females signal back to males of another species, Photinus, luring them in and catching them for dinner. Delicious!


But he's not just a tasty meal to help her lay eggs. It turns out that Photinus males produce a chemical that protects them from attacks by spiders and other arthropod predators. By eating Photinus males, the Photuris female acquires this armor and is herself protected from attack.

So, the next time you're out for an evening stroll in July, consider the drama playing out before you. There are dangerous femme fatales everywhere you look.

Read more about it on this page from Cornell.

Better Know an Arthropod: Bizzaro Lobsters!

Most people are familiar with the lobsters that grace many New England tables this time of year. The American/Atlantic/Maine lobster, Homarus americanus, is a well-known icon of the northeast part of the country and countless J. Crew summer prints.

Therefore, we're not going to discuss them further here today. Perhaps once I read The Secret Life of Lobsters I'll have something interesting to say about them beyond that they're apparently good with drawn butter.

This post is about the bizarro-lobsters of the deep seas. Sharon introduced me to a new one today, so let's view that one first!


The slipper lobster is not a "true lobster" -- it is instead more closely related to some of the other bizarro lobsters, the spiny and furry lobsters. They are achelate, meaning they have no claws. This makes them easy prey for humans, and indeed, if you Google "slipper lobster" you will find their tail meat for sale. (Of course, there is no claw meat to speak of.) Some of them are actually referred to as bugs, which is rather entertaining. No word yet on their position as a sustainable seafood. Not much seems to be known about them, if Wikipedia is at all accurate. Maybe it's better that way.

Next up: spiny lobsters. Popular for eating, also known as "rock lobster", and very colorful. Also, the only arthropod (as far as I know) that was immortalized in song by Fred Schneider (who is also very colorful). Interestingly, spiny lobsters have a unique form of sound production involving rubbing their antennae against a file-like protrusion. I'm not really sure what's going on there, but they're the only ones that do it, so that's neat.

I would tell you something about the furry lobsters, but there doesn't seem to be much to tell. (Except that if you start thinking too hard about the concept of a furry lobster, it can sort of hurt your brain.) Besides, you don't want to hear about true furry lobsters, you want to hear about this:

Kiwa hirsuta

Kiwa hirsuta, also entertainingly known as the yeti lobster, is not a true lobster or in the Achelate group with the other "bizarro" lobsters. Kiwa is in its own brand-new family, Kiwaidae, all by its lonesome. See, this beautiful, samba-dancing lobster, which you might be tempted to call a furry lobster but is not, was only discovered in 2005, chillin' at the bottom of the Pacific ocean. It lives on hydrothermal vents (so, maybe not chillin', per se), is pretty much blind, and may use all those "hairs" to detox after hanging around the vents, which spew mineral toxins.

My favorite part of this lobster is not that it's yellow, not that it's furry, and not that it's a deep-sea critter. (Although I love deep-sea critters, they're so bizarre!) My favorite part is that it was only found three years ago. I spent most of my life on a planet where no humans knew this thing existed! I suppose Kiwa knew it existed, if decapods can have self-awareness. But we did not know. There are still new things out there to find, if we look hard enough! (As I mentioned in my previous post, the world is just awesome.)

So there you have it. OK, true, none of these critters are true lobsters, but they all have lobster in their names and are therefore acceptable for a not-entirely-scientific blog post. (I didn't name the blog "Correctly Taxonomied Creatures," did I?) I hope you enjoyed your bizarro lobsters. Now please pass me some drawn butter, I want to dip my asparagus in it.

Better Know an Insect: Plant-Ants and Ant-Plants

"In the present paper, plants with ants living in them will be called 'ant-plants'; the ants will be called 'plant-ants.' "

~Dan Janzen (1966)

Whatever you decide to call them, myrmecophytes (ant-plants) are an interesting area of research. I recently wrote a term paper on the subject because they came up in the chapter on mutualisms and I couldn't stop thinking about them.

This is a bullhorn acacia tree; similar trees live in the tropics around the world:


This is a South American acacia-ant, Pseudomyrmex ferruginea (sorry, it's sort of blurry):


These species need each other to survive. The acacia produces enormous thorns, which a recently mated queen can hollow out to build the first chamber of her colony. She lays eggs and cares for them by using food provided by the plant in the form of extrafloral nectaries (glands on the tree that produce nectar) and Beltian bodies (small blobs of protein that grow at the end of leaflets). As the colony grows, they hollow out more thorns to use as brood chambers and for other purposes.

Sounds great for the ants, but what does the tree get for giving so much? Easy -- the tree gets a standing army, equipped with painful stingers and biting mandibles. The colony of ants protects the tree from all herbivores, both small (they will either kill or carry away any insects that try to eat the leaves) and large (those stings are effective on large mammalian herbivores as well!).

An African acacia, with large mammalian herbivores.

The ants also act as a landscaping crew. The workers use their powerful jaws to mangle any vines that attempt to climb the tree and destroy any saplings growing within a certain radius. Acacias are susceptible to being shaded out by other trees, so this landscaping is of great importance to the tree's survival.

Mutualistic ants are critical for the tree's wellbeing. In fact, if the ants are experimentally removed from an acacia, the tree is rapidly destroyed by herbivores. (Janzen found this in his landmark study in 1966, the source of the introductory quote.) It is believed that ants have taken over the role of secondary plant chemicals, which normally function as the plants' defense against herbivores. Rather than increasing the toxicity of their leaves, this group of acacias has lost their secondary chemicals and have gained instead a standing army.

This relationship has, not surprisingly, been parasitized by closely related species of ants. You can learn more about this, and the role that large herbivores play, in this video.

There's a lot more to tell about this relationship, but this post is getting long. I wrote a term paper on it, so let me know if you want more ant-plants and plant-ants!

Links: More photos of acacias; "Weird Plants"; a webpage comparing the symbiosis between ants and plants to a nuclear reactor (welcome to the Internet!).

Better Know An Insect: Mad Hatterpillar

Some insects have evolved really wild ways of defending themselves. Some butterflies have eyespots that they flash to startle birds; bombardier beetles can spray boiling acid at any would-be attackers. (I should probably devote a whole post just to them.)

But the caterpillar of the gum leaf skeletonizer, a species of destructive moth, has an unusual defensive mechanism that has earned it the nickname "mad hatterpillar" -- every time it molts, it retains the exoskeleton of its head capsule on top of its head. By the time it reaches the last instar, it looks like something out of Wonderland indeed:

The extra head capsules probably don't offer much physical protection, but if a bird bit off a capsule or two it might give the caterpillar just enough time to escape. Wild, pretty, and pretty wild!

Better Know an Insect: Giant Water Bug

Like, OMG, I have been totally vertebrate-ing out here. Hares, tortoises... humans!

Let's get back to bugs, eh?

Today's subject happens to be the topic for my insect behavior class tomorrow: the giant water bugs.

Depending on your monitor, this might be life-sized!

Things you should know about the giant water bug:

• There are several genera that are referred to as "giant water bugs."
  
• Really not kidding about that "giant" part, some can be almost five inches long! (Oh, and they fly!)
• They have one of the most painful bites out of all the insects. (Rated on a different scale from hymenopteran stings, however.)
  
• They're true bugs (order Hemiptera) and as such have cool sucking mouthparts. They're predators and inject digestive enzymes into their prey to liquefy them, and then suck out the contents like soup.
  
• They really earn the #1 DAD mug every year.

Wait, what? #1 Dad? What's going on here?

Giant water bugs in the genus Abedus are one of the few insects that demonstrate paternal parental care. (Say that five times fast!) After repeated matings (to assure paternity), the female lays her eggs on the back of the male who fertilized them.


He takes care of them for a fortnight or so, even though they may weigh up to four times more than he does. He makes sure they get enough oxygen by "brood pumping", which is to say that he rocks forward and backward to move them through the water. Eventually, towards the end of their development, they encumber his breathing apparatus to the point that he needs to park himself on a plant and stay close to the surface until they hatch.

Furthermore, mama water bugs and unencumbered males will eat any first instar (just after hatching) nymphs that they can get their grasping appendages on, but dads brooding eggs will not eat nymphs. It's not all bad-parent good-parent though; if times are tough, the male will remove the eggs from his back and eat them before moving on to find a better habitat. Mm, embryo-licious!

I hope you've enjoyed these installments of "Better Know an Insect (or Other Arthropod)." I think I'll keep doing them, because they're really fun! I'll probably cut down to once a week or so from now on, but I will keep the series going. Thanks for reading!

PS: You'd probably love to know what my sources are, wouldn't you? Click this link to a Google search for the genus and the author, and prepare to immerse yourself (ha!) in water bug literature. The papers I read today are:

• Smith, R. L., 1976. Male brooding behavior of the water bug Abedus herberti. Annals of the Entomological Society of America 69:740-747.
  
• Smith, R. L., 1979. Paternity assurance and altered roles in the mating behavior of a giant water bug, Abedus herberti. Animal Behaviour 27:716-725.
• Smith, R. L., 1979. Repeated copulation and sperm precedence: paternity assurance for a male brooding water bug. Science 205:1027-1031.
  

Borrow your local academic's library subscription if you want to read them... or just ask me for the PDFs. They're really interesting and fun to read!

Better Know an Arthropod: Giant Isopod

Have you ever turned over a rock and watched the little creatures that go scurrying away? Under your average rock in New Jersey you'll probably find a centipede or two, a millipede, a variety of insects like ants and beetles, and a few rolly-pollies. Pillbugs. Woodlice. Whatever you want to call them, they're sort of cute, greyish little things that roll up in a ball if you poke at them.

Imagine, if you will, what that would look like if it were light purple, 14 cm long, weighed over a kilo and a half, and lived in the ocean.

Turns out, you don't have to imagine too hard. It would look like this.


What does a beastie of such proportions eat, you might wonder? Fish? Octopi? CHILDREN?

Nah... they're noshers.


Apparently, in Taiwan they're served in restaurants and taste like crab. EXTREME CHEESE flavored crab, in this case.

They're pretty much harmless to humans, being slow-moving deep-sea scavengers and all, but you should avoid looking them directly in their highly reflective, compound eyes.

Not photoshopped!

They can see into your soul, and they will know if you are hiding Doritos from them. Oh yes, they will know.

PS: If you want a t-shirt featuring a giant isopod, get one here! (Third one down.)

Better Know an Insect: On Second Thought...

You really don't want to better know these.

Actually, stay as far away from them as you can.

Cracked.com: The Five Most Horrifying Bugs in the World

I have to kind of agree with them on all counts, too. Notice how all but one are hymenopterans.

Better Know an Insect: Beatrice

Meet Beatrice. Beatrice was truly an exquisite little creature. She is surely gone to the great garden in the sky now, but she lived in a tank (ok, actually a file box) in our apartment for three days last October.


For my insect anatomy & physiology class, we had to collect some insects for dissection. I had already caught more than I needed (I still have some of the insects I didn't use in a jar on my desk, to remind me not to take life needlessly) when I found Beatrice hiding in a tangle of vines.

She was so astonishingly beautiful (even if her kind is an invasive species) that I knew I couldn't let my classmates find her. I borrowed a jar to keep her in and brought her home with me instead.

I tried to make her comfortable in a file box full of plant matter. (She coordinated with it beautifully.) I fed her whatever insects I could. Strangely, although we almost never get insects besides fruit flies in our apartment, while Beatrice was with me I found two large shield bugs on the screen door to our balcony. I fed both of them to her. She seemed to like them.

Watching her eat was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. (Including the time I saw a snake eat a mouse while hiking in New Mexico!) Mantids are ambush predators, so she would hold very very still and orient towards her prey, whether it was a stink bug, an injured satyr butterfly, or any of the other prey I supplied. Watching her triangular head turn to face her prey could have been science fiction. Once she was within striking distance, her forelegs would shoot out, delivering a crushing blow with the sharp spines on the inside of the grasping section. Then she would eat.

I could write poetry about the delightfulness of insect mouthparts. Humans are so limited. We have a single jaw that goes up and down. With a little thought we can go side to side, a bit. And that's it. Insect mouthparts are derived from appendages, which is why they come in pairs. Several pairs, actually. In addition to the mandibles, which are often the most visible, they have several other pairs that taste the food, help process it, and push it into the opening of the mouth. They are complex, tiny, and fascinating to watch.

Mantids are what we technically call "chewing" predators, which is to say, they eat the whole damn thing, exoskeleton and all. ("Sucking" predators turn the insides of their prey to soup and suck it out through straw-like mouthparts, discarding the exoskeleton when they finish; the true bugs do this.) Beatrice took dainty little bites (owing to her mouth being relatively small for her body) but she was certainly quick. Watching her eat a caterpillar reminded me of how I would approach a baguette, if no one was looking: hold it in both hands, take a big bite out of the middle, and eat through the middle first. Chew up one side until it was gone, then the other. Lick fingers.

Beatrice was as fastidious as a cat. After eating, she would meticulously groom every spine on her grasping legs. She even cleaned her eyes at one point (possibly after the butterfly, which no doubt covered her in little wing scales).

Eventually I felt that I couldn't keep Beatrice indoors any longer -- not when October was continuing in such glorious fashion. I returned to the garden when we first met and set her down on a patch of flowers, knowing that visiting bees and butterflies would supply her with plenty of food. I wanted her to live out her last week or two in her natural habitat, so that next spring there will be more baby mantids out there to find.

Better Know an Insect: Hissing Cockroach

As promised, more critters!

This beauty is a Madagascar hissing cockroach. This one is a male. I borrowed him and a female (henceforth "Hissy" and "Missy") from my friend Eugene earlier this semester for a class project.

You can tell this little guy is a male by the large horns (bumps) on his pronotum. (The pronotum is the part that looks like a shield over his head.) Females are much smoother.

As you might expect for something that is roughly snack-sized for a lot of creatures, hissers are not fond of being lifted. When you pick them up, they flatten against the ground as best they can and expel air through a series of tubes in their abdomens. This creates a loud hissing sound -- and even when you expect it to happen, it can still startle you! Missy wasn't particularly prone to hissing -- I couldn't get a peep out of her -- but Hissy up there was not fond of being lifted and hissed at me repeatedly before I got him up.

Once you pick them up, though, they're very happy to sit for pictures. (I suspect that they liked how warm my hands are; they're tropical and my apartment doesn't frequently reach 85 degrees!) Their legs are strong and they can hold on to almost anything. Eugene says that they can climb glass, and I definitely saw them climbing the walls of their plastic tanks.

They also constantly test the air. In the photo you can see that Hissy's antennae are blurry; that's because he was moving them constantly despite the rest of him being completely still. It's important for potential snacks to know what's going on!

I hope you like my hisser photo. Tomorrow I'll post some pictures of Beatrice.