Although we had a good time carving our various insects Thursday night, we still had to come up with a new pumpkin design for our department’s contest Friday afternoon. With a pumpkin supplied by the graduate student council and 2 hours to carve our winning design, the pressure was on to uphold our title as pumpkin champions! After a strategy session over coffee, we decided to bee proactive and get busy.
Just in time for all the exoskeletons and Devils Walkingsticks to head out onto the streets for some trick or treating, there are a few other insects ready for Hallowe’en!
Corn-Stalk Eyed Fly
2009 saw a larger crowd in our lab than previous years, so we ramped up our pumpkin to allow everyone to participate. Before we get to it though, here are a few of the side projects people made with extraneous vegetables:
Having found success with our jumping spider, we ventured further into the realm of morphological correctness, and constructed an ode to our advisor, Dr. Steve Marshall:
Photo courtesy of Matt Bergeron
This lovely creature is a morphologically correct Sphaerocerid fly, right down to wing venation and the square rear basitarsus (hard to see in this picture, but it’s there, trust me). I was working in Ottawa at the time so I can’t claim any credit for this, but I believe it was another 8+ hours of work between 3-4 grad students. The sculptors incorporated a range of materials, including a wire frame for leg and head support, toothpicks for bristles and tarsal claws, and popsicle stick wing veins. As per the jumping spider, we use fiberoptic microscope lights to illuminate our creations (the silver tubes sticking out from below the head). Unfortunately there are no images of the fly lit up, but I hear it was pretty spectacular!
Leading up to Halloween, I thought I’d share some of the pumpkin creations that our lab creates for our annual departmental pumpkin carving contest. We’re lucky to belong to a department full of competitive and talented pumpkin carvers, so we’ve needed to up our game every year, resulting in some pretty cool pumpkin designs. We generally make an evening of it, with all the available grad students, undergrad volunteers, post-docs, lab managers, etc joining in and making some ent-o-lanterns!
2007 was my first Halloween as a grad student, and the pumpkin carving really started to take off:
Composed of 3 pumpkins (one each for the cephalothorax and abdomen, and one carved into legs), we used the bottoms of popcans to recreate the globular shining eyes, and small peelings of pumpkin skin embedded into the parts for bristles. The “bristles” actually dried out over night, curling and appearing more life-like. Time for completion? 8+hours with 5 grad students.
One of my daily internet stops is TeeFury, a t-shirt site which offers independent designers the chance to showcase their work for one day only, and offers shirts for $9US! Usually there’s some pretty catchy shirts, but today’s is one of their better designs!
Image courtesy of TeeFury.com
I’ve already ordered mine, so get yours while you can! The shirt will be off the market forever at 11:59:59PM Wednesday night, so act fast. Click here to order yours today.
I have no affiliation with TeeFury.com, just a big fan of t-shirts!