Tuesday Tunes – Hey Bartender, There’s a Bug in My Beer

 Entomology, Fun Stuff, Pop Culture, ScienceShare, Tongue in Cheek, Tuesday Tunes  No Responses »
Dec 132011
 

Ryan FleacrestSeeing as it’s Science & Social Media week, and Klout (a metric service which aims to calculate the influence you have through social media websites) thinks I’m influential about beer, I thought I’d share with you a little about Untappd, a social network for beer enthusiasts!

Almost all the entomologists I know enjoy a nice cool beer after a day in the field or following the publication of a manuscript, and with quality microbreweries increasing their distribution distance, it’s a good time to be  a beer drinker!

Untapped LogoUntappd is really quite a simple network; you share what type of beer you’re drinking, perhaps include where you’re enjoying it or a photo, and you can provide a rating out of 5 stars and a comment, all of which can be seen by your digital drinking buddies! It’s a pretty good way to discover new beers, and of course there’s a badge system included as an incentive to try new things. This is the perfect network for all those who enjoy a little #drunksci from time to time!

I’m finding that I can find an entomologically-themed song for any topic I want to discuss, and luckily enough today is no exception! So sit back, crack a brew, and enjoy this week’s song; Hey Bartender, There’s a Bug in My Beer by Eddie Pennington & Warner Williams!

If you end up joining Untappd, be sure to save a seat for me!

This song is available on iTunes – Hey Bartender, There’s a Big Bug In My Beer – Down Home! Saturday Night

Tuesday Tunes – Bumble Bees – Aqua

 Cool Science, Entomology, Fun Stuff, Natural History, Tuesday Tunes  5 Responses »
Dec 062011
 

Ryan FleacrestLet me start by saying that when I went looking for a song for this week’s Tuesday Tunes, I didn’t expect to find such a gem as this. All I wanted was something simple that would allow me to segue into some very cool insect news, but what I got instead was one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard, but which actually has some relevant biology included in the lyrics. That being said, consider yourself warned: there’s cool science ahead, but also some really, really, bad music!

The University of California Davis insect collection announced yesterday (with future taxonomic publication to come I assume) that they collected specimens of Bombus cockerelli Franklin 1913 for the first time since 1956. Collected again from it’s extremely restricted known range (a 300 square mile plot of land in New Mexico), this species is understandably rare in insect collections. There has apparently been considerable debate amongst Bombus experts over whether B. cockerelli represented a unique species or whether it was a variant of the much more common Bombus vagans, and with museum specimens 50+ years old, there has been no ability to compare DNA between species. Lead researcher Doug Yanega implies that molecular evidence obtained from these new specimens supports B. cockerelli as its own species, and it will be interesting to see in future publications how this species fits into the larger Bombus picture! Doug has some succinct comments on why it shouldn’t come as a surprise to rediscover an insect species thought to be “lost”, so I’d highly recommend giving the press release a read!

Bombus cockerelli from EOL.org

Bombus cockerelli courtesy of EOL.org (CC-BY-NC-SA)

 

Moving on to this week’s “killer” song, if you grew up in the late 90’s (or had offspring doing so), you’re probably familiar with the musical torture stylings torture that was Aqua, the Danish pop band responsible for the hit song Barbie Girl. This week I bring you another musical instrument of torture, Bumble Bees:

Well, did you catch the surprisingly accurate lyrics as pertaining to pollination biology? From the “Wham bam, thank you mam” insinuating the correct sex for flower visiting bees, to the fact that bumblebees regularly leave “donations” of pollen while “invading” deep flowers, the song is actually pretty good for biology. Even though it sounds horrible, Aqua get props for taking the time to pen some pollination biology into their “music”!

 

If you haven’t had enough, this song is available on iTunes – Bumble Bees – Aquarius

Tuesday Tunes – I Am the Fly – Wire

 Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tuesday Tunes  3 Responses »
Nov 292011
 

Ryan FleacrestIt’s been awhile since Tuesday Tunes featured a song about those beautiful bi-winged bugs the flies, so I think we’ll rectify that!

This isn’t the first time that Wire has been featured here on Biodiversity in Focus, with their song Outdoor Miner previously making the list. That song featured a relatively accurate depiction of a leaf miner fly, probably in the family Agromyzidae. Today’s song features flies a little closer to home, repeatedly talking about a fly in the ointment and flies causing more disease than fleas.Well, that and a divergent wasp dealing with plate-glass (side note: Flickr is fun).

So what might the flies be? Well I’m going to go with the common house fly (Musca domestica) for the fly in the ointment, just based on ubiquity and the odds of one ending up in someone’s moisturizer/tonic/soup. How about the flies causing more disease than fleas? Well, fleas are vectors for a number of diseases, with the big one being the Bubonic Plague. With an estimated 75 million people killed during the Black Death pandemic and another 12-15 million more killed in epi- and pandemics up until the mid 20th century, I think we can confidently put a back-of-the-napkin (BOTN) estimate of 100 million deaths attributable to fleas in recorded history. Tsetse flies (Glossinidae, 23 species total, 2 of which are of medical importance to humans) are vectors for the trypanosome that causes African Sleeping Sickness, which was listed as killing 48,000 people in 2008. A BOTN gives me an estimate of 100 million deaths in the last 2000 (50k x 2000 years, assuming smaller populations but higher mortality rates), so Tsetse flies are a possibility. Our next suspect might be the common house fly from earlier. Known to spread diseases such as typhoid (BOTN = 20 million deaths out of 450 million in past 2000 yrs), cholera (BOTN = 30 million deaths out of ~600 million in past 2000 yrs), and dysentery (BOTN = 50 million deaths out of 1.5 billion in past 200 yrs) among others, the house fly may be a dark horse in this race.

Of course, the best bet are the mosquitoes. With the genus Anopheles (the vector for Malaria) responsible for easily 100 million deaths in the past 200 years, not to mention the deaths attributable to Yellow Fever & Dengue Fever (Aedes aegypti) and “minor” diseases like West Nile Virus and Japanese Encephalitis (Culex). I think it’s pretty safe to say that mosquitoes are the most deadly insect known to man!

Anyways, that was a pretty morbid tangent from the song, so let’s just listen to some music shall we?

 

 

(All estimates based on conservative values found in Wikipedia. Some estimates may be horribly off, so best to do a more thorough literature check if you need more reliable numbers!)

This song is available on iTunes – I Am the Fly – Chairs Missing (Remastered)

Tuesday Tunes – Empire Ants – Gorillaz

 Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tuesday Tunes  1 Response »
Nov 212011
 

Ryan FleacrestFrom last week’s ESA meeting, you’d think that ants were all powerful and super diverse or something by the number of people talking about them and the level of excitement surrounding those talks! You might say people were going ape over the empire of ants…

 

Ya, that was a pretty horrible reference. But the thing about ant enthusiasm and the large number of talks about a single family wasn’t hyperbole!

 

This song is available on iTunes – Empire Ants (feat. Little Dragon) – Plastic Beach

Tuesday Tunes – All My Friends Are Insects – Weezer

 Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tongue in Cheek  No Responses »
Nov 152011
 

Ryan FleacrestSince I’m here at ESA 2011 and becoming reacquainted with old friends and meeting all sorts of new people interested in insects, I thought it was only fitting to share this short song from Weezer! We’ll forgive the slight transgression about earthworms being insects for now, but Rivers Cuomo best watch his taxonomy in the future!

Don’t be afraid to go out and make an insect/entomologist friend of your own this week!

 

This song is available on iTunes – All My Friends Are Insects (Bonus Track) – Hurley (Deluxe Version)

Tuesday Tunes – Butterflies – Stereos

 Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tuesday Tunes  No Responses »
Nov 082011
 

Ryan FleacrestWell, it’s been awhile since the last sugar pop edition of Tuesday Tunes, so I guess now’s as good a time as any.

Proudly Canadian, the Stereos share that feeling of gastric unease in Butterflies.

 

 

Speaking of gastrointestinal Lepidoptera, I’ll be traveling to Reno, NV this weekend to take part in the Entomological Society of America Annual Meeting. It’s going to be a busy week for me, and I’ll be sharing my schedule with times for my talks, what I’ll be talking about and some of the other events I’ll be looking forward to tomorrow! So watch next week when I hope to be active sharing the experience with all of you, here on the blog and on Twitter (where you can follow me @BioInFocus).

Buy a T-Shirt, Prevent Malaria

 For a Good Cause, Fun Stuff, Pop Culture  1 Response »
Nov 042011
 

I’m not the most fashionable guy, but I love me a good graphic T-shirt, especially if it’s got an insect in the design. I’ve accumulated a fairly decent collection of shirts featuring all manner of insects and other nature nerdery, and proudly wear them each day to work/meetings/conferences/family functions/etc. A simple style, sure, but they usually get a smile out of people, and they’re super comfortable!

Which is why I absolutely LOVE a new campaign by the good people at Threadless.com (my favourite T-shirt vendor),  UNICEF, and New York artists Justin & Christine Gignac to raise money for humanitarian aid in the Horn of Africa.

It’s simple; make a donation to UNICEF to cover the exact cost of an aid item, and receive a cool t-shirt with the item you donated on the front. For example, donate $18.57 to cover the cost of an insecticide-treated mosquito net used to prevent Malaria transmission, and you’ll receive this entomologically AWESOME t-shirt!

Can you say win? 100% of the donation goes directly to UNICEF and is converted into the item you donated, and there is a wide variety of items you can donate, ranging in price from $18.57 for the mosquito net to $300,000 for a cargo flight full of relief. To sweeten the pot for a limited time, Threadless will ship you your shirts for free (even internationally) if you spend more than $50! So for $54 you could provide 3 families with a safe place to sleep free of mosquitoes carrying Malaria, Dengue Fever or other deadly diseases, you get a really cool T-shirt for yourself and 2 others to give away to those hard-to-buy-for entomologists on your Christmas shopping list (trust me, they’d love this)!

Check out the video below further explaining the project, and then click over to Threadless.com to donate today!

 

Good Shirts for the Horn of Africa from Threadless.com on Vimeo.

Good Shirts do good. The design on each shirt symbolizes the type of aid UNICEF is delivering in the Horn of Africa. 100% of your donation will go to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF to support life saving relief efforts for children. Good Shirts is a collaboration between UNICEF, BBH New York, and Threadless. Illustrations by Christine and Justin Gignac.

http://www.Threadless.com/UNICEF

Ent-O-Lantern 2011

 Fun Stuff, Life as a Grad Student  3 Responses »
Nov 012011
 

Remember when I told you ticks were pretty well my worst nightmare? Well with this year’s Ent-O-Lantern, you might start feeling the same…

Tick jack-o-lantern pumpkin Halloween

Tick pumpkin Jack-O-Lantern

Modeled after the Deer Tick (Ixodes scapularis), this tick isn’t likely to transmit Lyme Disease, but you might lose a kidney as it burrows into your back.

Deer Tick Ixodes scapularis

Deer Tick Jack-O-Lantern Pumpkin

With squash capitulum (head), butternut squash hypostome (mouthparts), carrot segmented legs, and feeding amongst pipe insulation hairs, this year’s pumpkin will hopefully stick deep inside your psyche and instill a year’s worth of nightmares until we can bring you an all new creation! Happy Halloween!

Thanks to all the U of G Insect Systematics lab members for help carving and suggestions on how to make it come together!

Tuesday Tunes – Bullet with Butterfly Wings – Smashing Pumpkins

 Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tuesday Tunes  2 Responses »
Nov 012011
 

Ryan FleacrestWell, it’s the day after Halloween (commonly referred to as November 1st) and what better song to accompany the tossing of Jack-o-Lanterns to the curb than something by the Smashing Pumpkins? Another 90’s hit that I remember quite fondly from my formative years, Bullet with Butterfly Wings doesn’t really have much to do with insects beyond the title, but with reference to vampires and plenty of rats, it’s a pretty decent Halloween song (complete with creepy zombie-like miners).

 

And speaking of Smashing Pumpkins, stay tuned later today for the big reveal of our lab’s annual Ent-o-Lantern!

 

This song is available on iTunes – Bullet With Butterfly Wings – Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Tuesday Tunes – Dragonfly – My Brightest Diamond

 Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tongue in Cheek, Tuesday Tunes  1 Response »
Oct 252011
 

Ryan FleacrestWhen I first found today’s song, I immediately thought of this dragonfly photo I took while on vacation a few weeks ago:

Dragonfly Dreams

 

That is, until I finished watching the music video and realized the video director and the artist might not realize the difference between a butterfly and a dragonfly…

 

If you’re keeping track at home, that’s a Taxonomy Fail Index of 57.8, and quite frankly, one of the least imaginable given the general popularity of both orders! Perhaps that was an artistic choice of some manner…

 

This song is available on iTunes – Dragonfly – Bring Me the Workhorse

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