Boing Boing » insects

Dragonflies outfitted with brain sensor backpacks

David Pescovitz — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:10:22 +0000

Neuroscientist have attached an electronic "backpack" to dragonflies that jack into the insect's brain and wirelessly transmit the data back to a base station. Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher Anthony Leonardo and his collaborators hope the telemetry will deepen our understanding of how dragonflies target and catch their pray. (via Wired)

Dawn of the Chirpy Bugs: A collection of cicada-related news

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:23:18 +0000

Image: Cicada, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from tinali778's photostream

So here is another line to kill space

This summer, folks on the East Coast of the US will see (and hear) an invasion of billions of cicadas in what is probably the most obvious part of the insects' 17-year life cycle. The cicadas will crawl out of the dirt, make a lot of noise, and seek out other cicadas in order to breed and create a new generation of larvae that will, 17 years from now, emerge to do the same thing all over again.

It's big news for those of us who think things like insects, evolution, and cyclical processes of nature are really, really cool.

Today, I ran across a number of Cicadasplosion-related stories and wanted to share them with you:
• First up, Carl Zimmer has a piece in the New York Times about cicadas and the evolution of seemingly strange life cycles. It includes a neat, interactive graphic showing a century of cicada blooms around the United States.
• The University of Maryland has a helpful cicada cookbook, including tips on the best times and ways to harvest the bugs. You want them young, and succulent, apparently.
• Cicadas will not hurt you, but they might land on you and there's a possibility that they may be sexually attracted to the sound of your weed-wacker.
• In 1894, The New York Times suggested pressing cicadas into a biscuit for dog food.
• If you're not a cicada fan and don't want to eat them yourself, rest assured, some of them will be eaten alive by a horrific-sounding fungus.
• Radiolab's cicada tracker is still up and running, and you can participate.
• A couple of years ago, when a different group of cicadas (on a 13-year-cycle) was hatching in North Carolina, Charles Choi spoke with chronobiologist and blogger Bora Zivkovic about why we don't yet understand cyclical systems like this.

Image: Cicada on leaf, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from frotzed's photostream

Mall of America welcomes 72,000 ladybugs

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:01:02 +0000

"The Bloomington, Minn., mall, which is so huge it could hold seven Yankee Stadiums, also has more than 30,000 live plants, including about 400 trees, which act as natural air purifiers for the indoor mall. But aphids -- the pesky insects that feed on plants -- thrive inside the Mall of America's many landscaped areas." [Discovery]

Chipping ants to understand colonies

David Pescovitz — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:49:02 +0000

University of Lausanne biologists chipped hundreds of ants and digitally tracked them to see how they form social groups and work collectively to get stuff done. Based on the data, they created heat maps and visualized the ants' trajectories. From Nature:

The biologists… have found that the workers fall into three social groups that perform different roles: nursing the queen and young; cleaning the colony; and foraging for food. The different groups move around different parts of the nest, and the insects tend to graduate from one group to another as they age, the researchers write in a paper published today in Science.
“The paper is a game-changer, in the size and detail of the data set that was collected,” says Anna Dornhaus, an entomologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"Tracking whole colonies shows ants make career moves" (Thanks, Nic Weidinger!)

Below is a video, accelerated five times.

Vintage ad for cockroach racing set

David Pescovitz — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:03:35 +0000

Early 20th century ad for a cockroach racing kit (complete with roaches) sold by the International Mutoscope Reel Company, makers of arcade machines and dime museums. "Holds the crowd… Gets the money." (via Weird Universe)

It's time to eat insects

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:45:48 +0000

Not only are insects a more resource-efficient food source than meat (and more nutritious, to boot), you're also already eating them, writes Mary Hall at Mind the Science Gap. Insect parts are considered unavoidable, natural "defects" in foods and the FDA makes allowances for them, including up to 30 insect parts per average chocolate bar, up to 10 whole aphids for 2.5 cups of spinach, and up to 10 fly eggs (or, if you prefer, 5 eggs and one maggot) per serving of tomatoes. It all sounds gross, but when you consider all the benefits of bug eating (and the fact that many, many reviews proclaim them to taste delicious) it might be best to think of this news as a wakeup call. You're eating bugs already. Why not do it intentionally?

Amazing LEGO insects and arthropods

David Pescovitz — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:15:55 +0000

Sean and Steph Mayo created an exquisite series of LEGO bugs for the "Creepy Crawly" category in the 2013 MocAthalon building competition. See them all in this Flickr set. (Thanks, Jake Dunagan!)

Ant wars: Battle of the invasive species

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:16:58 +0000

There's a war on in America, pitting invasive ant against invasive ant in a fight to the finish. It's sort of like Alien vs. Predator, in a way, because whoever wins ... we lose. Argentine ants (the reigning champions) have wiped out native ant species in many of the environments they've invaded over the years, affecting the survival of other animals that used to feed on those ants. Worse, they have a fondness for certain agricultural pests, like aphids. In places with lots of Argentine ants, aphids do very well — and plants do worse.

But now the Argentines are facing a serious challenge in the form of Asian needle ants, another invasive species that — for reasons nobody really understands — have suddenly gone from minor player to major threat in the last decade. The big downside to Asian needle ants: They sting. They sting us. And, right now, it looks like they're winning.

John Roach tells the story at NBC News. But you can get a good idea of what this matchup looks like by checking out the work of insect photographer Alex Wild. That's his picture above, showing an Argentine ant on the left and an Asian needle ant on the right.

Bees sense electric charge from flowers

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 21:11:06 +0000

Scientists are studying another element that attracts bees to flowers, in addition to color and scent: the distinct electric field a flower emits.

The bug killing tool preferred by mosquito researchers

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:54:42 +0000

Meet The Executioner.

Earlier today, I got a tour of the mosquito breeding facility at North Carolina State University. Basically, it's a small room — about the size of my bathroom at home — where scientists breed and grow the mosquitoes they use in scientific research. The downside: Mosquito enclosures are somewhat less than foolproof. Which means the mosquito breeding facility has a significant number of loose mosquitoes. That's where The Executioner comes in. There were multiple Executioners in that one small room. Then entire time I was talking with the scientists, they were simultaneously swinging around these electrified tennis racquets to zap any mosquito that blundered into their personal space.

Personally, I consider this a hell of an endorsement for any bug killing tool.

How to tell whether a mosquito is male or female (without getting bitten)

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:33:10 +0000

The mosquito on the left is a male Aedes aegypti mosquito. The mosquito on the right is his female counterpart.

Viva la difference — and the difference is in the antennae. Mosquito antennae are lined with fine hairs called antennal flagellum, and the density of the flagellum differs from one sex to another. Males have many, many more antennal flagellum, turning their antennae into a pair of bushy bottle brushes. Megan Fritz, a post-doctoral student in the North Carolina State University department of entomology described them to me as the mosquitoes' mustache. Even though mosquitoes are tiny, the males' flagellum are prominently noticeable to the naked eye. Fritz can tell which mosquitoes are boys and which are girls, on sight.

Female Aedes aegypti do the biting. But they don't have nearly as many flagellum and, thus, their hearing is not nearly as finely tuned as that of male mosquitoes. That's because the men and the women are looking for different things.

Female mosquitoes are on the lookout for victims to bite. Like the males, they eat sugar. At the NCSU mosquito breeding facility, Megan Fritz feeds both males and females on sugar water. But, without regular meals of blood, the females lose their ability to reproduce. No blood, no baby mosquitoes. Unsurprisingly, then, female mosquitoes have special sensory abilities that allow them to find and procure blood.

Males, on the hand, are primarily interested in finding females. And that's where those thick flagellum come in. Turns out, the flagellum are integral to the mosquitoes' ability to hear. Specifically, all those flagellum help male mosquitoes hear the very, very, very quiet sounds of female mosquitoes buzzing around. Sound waves make the flagellum move. That movement is carried through the antenna to a special organ that helps the mosquitoes actually make sense of the motion. Called Johnston's organ, it can tell males how fast the wings of nearby mosquitoes are beating and it can help them distinguish male from female, and species from species.

Junkbot bug assemblage sculptures: The Litter bug

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 19:39:53 +0000

Mark Oliver's Litter Bug series is a collection of assemble-sculpture insects made from urban found objects and laser-cut metal and wood. They're extraordinarily beautiful -- right up my street. They don't appear to be for sale, and more's the pity.

Arthropod sub-species of the Insecta class. A creature whose instinctual and physical qualities have adapted so uniquely to the modern urban environment that it has rendered itself, by nature of camouflage, virtually invisible in it’s normal habitat. When seen in isolation ‘Litter Bugs’ appear to be composed of everyday ‘found’ objects.

The Litter bug (via Neatorama)

A classic work of entomology, available online in French and English

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 17:30:37 +0000

In 1879, Jean-Henri Fabre wrote a book about insects called Souvenirs entomologiques. Today it's considered a classic of entomology. An English translation, with some absolutely beautiful illustrations like the cicadas pictured above, was published in 1921.

You can read the full book online for free. Yes, both versions. The original French work is available at Gallica. Meanwhile, you can read the full English version at Google Books. Very neat!

Via Alex Wild

Bug-a-salt: Gadget gun takes aim at flies, with a pinch of salt

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 02:12:05 +0000

I first met Lorenzo Maggiore a couple years ago in yoga class, and run into him at the beach from time to time—he's an accomplished surfer, and pops a mean Adho Mukha Vrksasana. But until recently, I had no idea he was also the inventor of Bug-a-salt (Twitter), a novelty gadget that allows you to shoot houseflies dead (yet delightfully intact!) with a pinch of salt.

Our yoga teacher just told me today that Bug-a-salt has gone crazy viral, and he isn't kidding. Nearly a million YouTube views on the "how it works" video; news reports all over the place, and he's reached 10 times the original fundraising goal on indiegogo.

You can pre-order one of the guns here. The videos are weird but excellent. YouTube channel here. I find this one to be particularly satisfying.

Go, Lorenzo! I think you are about to become very rich.

On knitting 50 life-sized bees

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:28:16 +0000

Hannah Haworth found herself in the enviable position of having to knit 50 life-sized bees, which she did, and celebrated their completion with detailed notes and lovely photos.

Remember when I mentioned that I had to knit 50 life size bees? Well I finally finished them!! woop woop! I may have gotten a little obsessive with the detail, but I kinda always do. It was weird for me doing such a small scale project after the huge pieces Im used to making, but I enjoyed it a lot, I think I learned quite a bit from it.
These bees are made form 100% baby merino wool from Malabrigo. I especially love the way they dye their colours, they are pretty much iridescent
Making the bees was certainly a process. I began by knitting the body from the back to the head, then I picked up stitches to make the wings which I used a simple lace stitch pattern for.

bzzzzz (via Making Light)

Delicious, ready-to-eat giant water bugs, frozen fresh to seal in the flavor

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 19:00:29 +0000

A redditor of Vietnamese descent discovered these giant water bugs in her/his mother's freezer, put there "to scare me."

My Vietnamese mom had these in the freezer to scare me. It worked. (i.imgur.com) (via Neatorama)

The song about the song of the Jurassic cricket

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:25:49 +0000

Last week, we learned that scientists had reconstructed the song of a Jurassic-era cricket. This week, song-a-day impresario Jonathan Mann has written a ballad to that lonely insect and its ancient quest for love.

Video Link (with lyrics!)

Excavating an ant colony

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:52:47 +0000

This is simply breathtaking.

In the video, researchers pump 10 tons of concrete down an ant hole and then slowly, carefully excavate the site to see what an ant colony looks like. The result is an intricate structure, equivalent in labor to humans building the Great Wall of China.

And then you think, "Oh, and we just pumped 10 tons of concrete down it. Oh. We're ... kind of assholes sometimes, aren't we?" Sorry ants. Sants.

Via Richard Martyniak

30 hornets vs. 30,000 bees = "300" with flying insects (video)

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:29:19 +0000

[Video Link]

Spoiler: the hornets win. Above, snip of BBC documentary with narrator commentary. Below, the EPIC MUSIC REMIX VIDEO.

(Via The Daily What)

Poignant short film about the death of a dragonfly

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 16:39:10 +0000

When filmmaker Paul Kroeker found a dragonfly dying on his deck, he turned the animal's final moments into a beautiful and haunting short movie. Who says insects can't be charismatic fauna?

(Via John Pavlus)