You may have noticed the Weekly Flypaper has been missing the past two weekends. I have a good reason for missing one, and a not so good reason for missing the other…
First, the good reason. I took part in the Rouge Park BioBlitz in Toronto, and along with 230+ other naturalists, taxonomists and volunteers, we scoured Rouge Park (soon to be Canada’s first urban National Park) for all signs of life, trying to identify as much as possible in 24 hours. Although the numbers are still coming in, the official species count is already nearing 1,300 species, all sighted or caught in 24 hours (and more than 800 of those were identified within the first 24 hours too)! That is an absolutely amazing number, and sets the bar very high for future BioBlitzes! The Guelph crew had a great time, and I think we contributed almost 100 insect species identifications, including 60+ flies. Lots more came home with us, and we’ll be getting names on them in the near future to be added to the list. The arthropod coordinator, Antonia Guidotti of the Royal Ontario Museum has posted an awesome synopsis of the BioBlitz over at the ROM Blog.
The other reason? I was lazy last weekend and didn’t get around to doing it. Oops.
So with 3 weeks worth of links, and major holidays upcoming in Canada & the USA, I suggest you grab a cold drink, find a comfy spot, and clear your schedule, because the Bugosphere has been busy!
General Entomology
After being challenged by head honcho Rob Dunn, the Your Wild Life team launched a new project exploring the arthropods of our homes, and have been crawling through volunteer’s houses on a hunt & record mission.
The interactions among the organisms in an ecosystem are incredible, and Ed Yong has been sharing some recent finds. First we learned that arachnophobia changes the chemistry of grasshoppers, which in turn affects plant growth as the ‘hoppers die and decay. Then, we learn that it’s not just Venus Flytraps that eat insects, as many plants have teamed up with a fungus that kills and digests insects and feeds their partnering plant. So. Cool.
Adrian Thysse is helping bring entomologist’s voices to the Bugosphere, this time with a nice mini autobiography of Heather Bird, a University of Alberta entomology grad student.
Ted MacRae is running another Super Crop Challenge and it’s full of all sorts of squishy! And because I took so long to get this roundup written, he’s announced the answer…
It’s officially summer, meaning that the entomologist’s field season is in full swing. It also means it’s time for me to get incredibly jealous of people like The Geek that get to go to cool places like the Dempster Highway… *sigh*
Field work is definitely my favourite aspect of my “job”, and Terry Wheeler pretty much nails my reasons for loving it so.
The Weird Bug Lady has a great mantra to live by: “Poke Nature”.
Speaking of poking nature, Prince Charles was caught playing with a pooter in public this week! Unfortunately it’s not as scandalous as it sounds, as Terry Wheeler explains what exactly a pooter is and why it’s an invaluable tool for entomologists.
Continuing with the dirty minded entomologists, the Weird Bug Lady wants your bug porn photos, and Tom Houslay got really into some glowing fly sperm. Can’t say I blame either of them come to think of it.
This University of Minnesota infographic representing the world’s biodiversity, both known and that expected to be discovered, is pretty sobering.
Diptera
Exciting news for dipterology as Brian Brown and Art Borkent were awarded a big grant to inventory all the flies in a region of Costa Rica! Plenty of interesting finds await I’m sure!
It was a big week for the Borkent family, as son Chris successfully defended his PhD at McGill.
The Wellcome Image Awards were announced this week, and the only insect image honoured was a micrograph of a moth fly face. Booyah!
Apparently it’s maggot week at the Natural History Museum in London, with the gang all working to learn their maggots.
It seems that Ted MacRae has traded in his beetles to study syrphids after finding this lovely Chalcosyrphus (?) flower fly!
Coleoptera
If Ted has moved on to higher beings from his metallic wood-boring beetles, at least we can rest assured that they’re in the good hands of the Bug Geek.
This is cool, a burying beetle that specializes on buried snake eggs!
Some very nice photos in this post at BugBlog, but I misread the title and had a pretty embarrassing spit take…
Hymenoptera Formicidae
It’s the Alex Wild show this round now that he’s returned from Brazil and brought a bunch of interesting photos with him!
Alex also shared a newly described species of ant that sucks the hemolymph from its developing sisters.
While Alex warns to be careful when identifying ants from his photos, I think it’s pretty damn amazing that he’s photographed nearly half the world’s ant genera already!
Turns out Alex is also a bit of a bully, flipping beautiful little turtle ants on their back and sharing their struggles online.
Lepidoptera
Christopher Cloutier (guest contributor at ESCBlog) explains how doing something so simple as planting a few trees can let an uncommon butterfly become a new resident.
Tom Hossie, a grad student at Carleton University, recently had his research on caterpillar eyespots featured on BBC Nature.
Identifying caterpillars can be difficult, but as the Bug Geek found out, knowing your host plants can make a world of difference!
Brigette has also got a fascinating series on entomological words, and two recent words were especially interesting: Frass & Sericulture.
National Moth Week is coming up soon, and what better way to prepare than to get your own NMW t-shirt?
Some scientists would do absolutely anything for their research subjects, but Brigette’s lab mate may be taking things a tad far…
Other Insect Orders
While we’re talking about swapping spit, itsybitsybeetle shows off some nice spittle bugs.
For something that can deliver quite a bite, this little wheel bug that the Bug Geek was asked to identify is pretty cute.
Arachnida
If I had realized Adrian Thysse was offering a $1,000,000 prize for his latest super-crop challenge I would have learnt my spiders!
Perhaps his fellow Albertan, Macromite, will be offering the same level of reward for his Electron-raster Challenges Part I, Part II, and Part III. Time to learn me some mites; they can’t be that hard to identify, right?
I’m curious whether Spider-Man inherited the ability to castrate himself in his partner to keep the party going while he goes off to save the world. I’m sure Ed Yong will be watching for it when The Amazing Spider-Man hits theatres this week.
The Dragonfly Lady and The Bug Geek were both channeling Thomas Shahan with some amazing jumping spider portraits.
Congratulations are in order for Ted MacRae on the new additions to his family! They certainly take after their father… 😉
Taxonomy/Phylogenetics
Carl Zimmer had an interesting story about the new Open Tree of Life project published in the New York Times. I’m not sure that the Open Tree of Life project will contribute to our understanding of biodiversity, but it’s nice to see taxonomy/phylogenetics getting some recognition in the main stream media.
Visualizing phylogenetic trees is a hot-topic at the moment, and Rod Page came up with an interesting way of exploring the primate branch.
If you needed an example of the power of a phylogeny for understanding evolution (or why Occam’s Razor can sometimes nick you) then you should check out this paper on gecko phylogeny, and read Ed Yong’s take on it.
There was an interesting, if not heated, conversation across the Taxacom listserv about why species names change after being moved to a new genus.
Most of the above discussion revolves around ease of use by humans vs machines, and Rod Page explains why human error and other nomenclatural quirks can derail species name indexing.
If you like biological nomenclature, you should check out this neat application by Ryan Schenk that lets you visualize species name changes and synonyms over time.
Another interesting taxonomic tool was released this week, the Canadensys explorer, which allows you to view data from collaborating natural history collections.
Natural England is running a name-that-species competition (don’t worry, it’s just common names) for a variety of invertebrates, including this charming long-legged fly (Dolichipodidae).
Museum Work
Natural history collections are filled with all manner of hidden gems, like this extremely rarely collected moth lacewing found in the Manchester Museum Entomology collection.
Taking proper care of your specimens allows for you and all those that follow you to get the most data from your work as the Bug Geek so eloquently reminds us.
Keeping track of specimens in a collection may have just gotten a little easier thanks to new technology that can literally fit on the head of a pin.
The next time you’re chilling in the deep sea West of Vancouver and see an odd looking urchin crawl past, you can reach for your iPad and use the NEPTUNE Canada Marine Life Field Guide to identify it.
Academia
This post on how to get the most out of scientific conferences by Pete Etchells is brilliant and includes advice on the potentially awkward name-tag-glance maneuver.
The routes that biologists take before finding the species or system that they devote their life to studying can take some time, but as this New York Times article by James Gorman shows, it’s all about the journey.
Kate Clancy shared two very inspiring posts about her struggles with scientific writing that helped me realize I’m not the only one who goes blank and breaks out in cold sweats when it’s time to write.
Science Communication
I use Wikipedia all the time to get quick information about subjects and point me to references where I can dive further in, so I found Guillaume Dury’s article on ESCBlog about writing insect content for Wikipedia to be extremely enlightening!
“Because ideologues can be trusted to use science in the way a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination” – Science and why we should care by David Winter
I devote time to science communication and outreach because I hope that one day I can affect people’s lives the way Ed Yong has.
Science outreach doesn’t just have to happen online though, so Jason Goldman took science to the sidewalk for the transit of venus.
Chris Buddle shares why he thinks the ESCBlog is a good move by the Entomological Society of Canada.
The Research Triangle area of North Carolina has become one of the major science communication hubs, and it just welcomed another into it’s ranks as Dragonfly Woman recently took a new job at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. It’s awesome to see one of the Bugosphere’s own find the job of their dreams, and I can’t wait to see all the new insects DW shares from her new Prairie Ridge Ecostation home!
Bug Girl is holding an insect appreciation video contest to combat the rampant “ick” reaction associated with insects, so submit your videos of your best insect SQUEE!
Bug Girl’s not the only one looking for your science videos! Carin Bondar at PsiVid is looking for quick videos from your field work for inclusion in a broader documentary about science.
Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth would love to see more natural history resources made by and available to children and young adults on YouTube, Discovery or even through his parent publisher, the New York Times.
I found this article by Maximilian Majewski about using storytelling in blogs to be very helpful, and I’ll be trying to work some of the concepts into future posts.
Commonly referred to as the Blogfather, Bora Zivkovic has a couple of excellent articles about the role of blogs in media and society.
Adrian Thysse is doing a great job of getting amateur entomologists and students to venture into science blogging, and he would love to hear from you too!
The Canadian Field Naturalists have been on Twitter (@CanFieldNat) for a month now, and share some of the things they’ve learned about tweeting for natural history.
Photography
We all knew Alex Wild was a co-founder/instructor of BugShot, THE destination for learning insect photography, but he’s now offering private lessons! And with a stunning portfolio like the one he brought back from Brazil, I’m sure he’ll share all kinds of information regarding what lenses make for pleasing backgrounds and how to beautifully light any subject.
Sometimes you choose your photography subjects, and sometimes your subjects choose you. Incredible story by National Geographic photographer Jim Brandenburg about his unexpected quest to photograph the wolves of the high Arctic.
Canadian travel photographer David duChemin is featuring some of his everyday possessions that help inspire his photography.
If you’re just starting with insect macro photography, Up Close, A Guide to Macro & Close Up Photography a new e-book by Andrew Gibson published by the Craft & Vision team might be useful for tuning into those tiny landscapes.
Other Fun Stuff
Note to all graphic artists and logo designers: if you’ve been commissioned to create a logo for a toilet paper company, perhaps brush up on your natural history skills before choosing a “leaves of three” design…
Have an old book or thesis laying around? Why not convert it into a surreal cave landscape like Canadian artist Guy Laramee does!
If you’ve ever wondered how different genes are named, you’ll want to read how former PhD student Manyuan Long dedicated a recently understood gene to his cultural heritage.
Irony alert: there is no synonym for the word synonym, but have no fear, as Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, is on it.
If you follow Major League Baseball at all, you’ve probably heard of R.A. Dickey and his free-floating knuckleball. Evelyn Lamb explains why even the world’s best players find it nearly impossible to hit this pitch.
BREAKING NEWS FROM ED YONG: Comic book heroes make for horribly unethical journalists.
I love the new Star Trek reboot, and my labmates and I tried to come up with new faces for my personal favourite series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. I liked our picks at the time, but these choices by Jill Pantozzi are inspired, and I WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE/SHOW HAPPEN. And yes, I am a Star Trek nerd; shocking!
Video of the Week
This week’s video is Seeing Beyond the Human Eye, a fascinating look at the photography and videography techniques artists and scientists are using to help explore and explain our universe and society.
Further Reading
Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science
Bora Zivkovic’s Scienceblogging Weekly
Thanks for plugging the SQUEE contest!
No problem, I love the idea and can’t wait to see more entries!
So many links! Glad you’re back!
My god, this is going to take me several days to go through. Thanks!
Thank you for the plugging and for the wonderful compilation Morgan.