There’s a pretty remarkable fly photograph making the rounds of social media today, and while it originally had me going “Oooooh!”, the more I think about it, the more I feel like we’re staring at clouds.
It started when Ziya Tong tweeted a photo of a Goniurellia tridens (a fruit fly in the family Tephritidae) displaying its wings:
Goniurellia tridens is a 3-in-1 insect [photo: Peter Roosenschoon] pic.twitter.com/i8ThAOkrvN
— Ziya Tong (@ziyatong) November 4, 2013
Remember the last time I wrote about the Jewel Beetle Field Guide and said international orders “should begin shipping by June“? Ya, about that…
Co-Author Adam Jewiss-Gaines has been secretly hoarding books, Scrooge McDuck-style. (Not actually)
It turns out that we were much more successful spreading the word about the field guide than the Canadian Food Inspection Agency had expected, and ended up having significantly more orders come from outside of Canada than the CFIA had budgeted for!
Out of money, and with more than 1,000 people patiently awaiting their copies, we were in a tight place this summer. Thankfully, Michael Bohne of the US Forest Service in New Hampshire came to the rescue and arranged to distribute all of the US orders. Mike and his crew received the massive shipment of books last week, so I think it’s safe to say (famous last words) that the field guide should be hitting mailboxes across the US in the next few weeks! I want to say a huge Thank You to Mike and the US Forest Service for helping us get the field guide where it needs to be, and also thanks to everyone who put up with all of the unexpected delays the past several months.
Now, with all this good news, there’s also a bit of bad news. Because of the budget crunch, we’re not going to be able to fulfill orders outside of North America. I feel absolutely terrible about offering the book to anyone, anywhere and then being forced to backtrack, but the CFIA just doesn’t have the money to cover it, and unfortunately neither do I. My sincerest apologies for those beetle-maniacs who were looking forward to getting a copy.
However, here’s a consolation prize for anyone who’s missing out on the hardcopy: you can now download a complete PDF of the book, in either English or French! It may not be quite as nice as a copy on your shelf, but it comes with other perks, like being easily searchable and with high resolution photographs throughout! Since the files are so large, I recommend right clicking on the link and selecting “Save Link As”, which will download the PDF to your computer rather than try and open it in your browser.
If you live in North America, there are still some hard copies available, which can be ordered by calling 1-800-442-2342 and placing your order with Service Canada. US orders might take a little longer to ship as they will be waiting for a critical mass to ship copies out rather than one at a time. UPDATE: Sorry, hard copies are all sold out at this time.
Finally, Glendon Mellow, the science artist & illustrator who provided several of the illustrations in the field guide, has prints (and other items) of the field guide artwork available for purchase in his online store. If you’re a fan of the book, or jewel beetles in general, why not support Glendon, and get a little jewel beetle art for your home or lab!
The British Wildlife Photography Awards were announced this week, and one of the Highly Commended award winners in the Wildlife in HD Video is pretty great.
Apparently it can’t be embedded, so go watch “A Passion for Bees” by Tim Balmer and come back. I’ll wait.
Things I didn’t expect to do today: talk about flies live on BBC Radio 2!
I made my radio debut this afternoon when I helped out with Simon Mayo’s Homework Sucks! segment of Drivetime. Homework Sucks! is a regular feature where listeners send in questions (whether from their kids homework or otherwise), and the BBC finds experts to give a hand with the answers.
Today’s question: Can insects smell, and if so, how far away can they smell things? You can listen to my answer thanks to the recorded and archived edition of the day’s episode on the BBC website (skip to 1:39:30 for my segment).
So how’d my first brush with the mainstream media happen? I got a call from Richard Levine, the Public Affairs Officer for the Entomological Society of America, asking if I’d be interested in the opportunity to speak on the BBC about how flies smell. There was a catch though: the segment was going to be live, and was going to start in less than 10 minutes! So, I ran across the lab, grabbed R.F. Chapman’s The Insects: Structure and Function off the shelf, quickly refreshed my memory on volatile chemoreception in insects, then jumped on Google Scholar to see if I could find an estimate of how far away some insects can sense scents (which isn’t easy when your fingers are quivering from the adrenaline rush & nerves). Before I even had Chapman opened, a BBC producer had called me to explain what was going to happen and to get my details figured out, and then 5 minutes later another producer called and I was on hold waiting for my opportunity to go on the air! A few minutes after that I had given my spiel, and was sitting at my desk wondering what had just happened, while trying to dissect what I had said and whether I could recall making any goofs!
While I was sure I stumbled and mumbled my way through it at the time, I actually think I sounded pretty coherent after listening to the recording, and it would seem people enjoyed it as well (thanks for the feedback to those who’ve given it!). I’m giving a lot of the credit for me not sounding like a bumbling n00b to Breaking Bio, which has provided me the opportunity to practice talking about science in an informal setting, and in a digital format. It just goes to show that goofing around on the internet with your friends can have surprising benefits for your work!
This morning, shark mega-enthusiast & PhD student David Shiffman (@WhySharksMatter) tweeted
I just uploaded a pic of me with a #Shark to Google Image reverse search and it IDENTIFIED THE SPECIES OF SHARK pic.twitter.com/fTpmHP7IVG
— David Shiffman (@WhySharksMatter) August 23, 2013
Here’s the screen cap image a little larger if you can’t make it out (click to embiggen further):
Is reverse Google Image search able to identify sharks to species? Yes, David included the search term “lemon shark” (David just let me know that Google included the text search terms itself… my mind is blown), but the fact that Google returned “Best guess for this image: lemon shark” might imply that they’re playing around with visual identification services, not just photo comparison. Considering how well reverse image search does at aggregating similar images, how many shark images are online & indexed by Google, and that many of those images are probably tagged with a species name nearby or in the metadata, I think the concept is entirely plausible.
Seeing how insect ID is kind of important to me, I tried it with a few of my insect photos, and got nothing. I even tried improving the odds by using search terms like David HAL 9000 Google did, and this is all I got:
I was beginning to get discouraged, but Marianne Alleyne (@Cotesia1) made a good point: perhaps it was the fact that David was sitting on the shark that mattered!
So, I reverse Google Image searched this photo
Apparently Google thinks this fly wrangler looks like a bride. Perhaps their search algorithm could use a little more work after all.
Clearly Google loves sharks and hates flies (and passenger pigeons). Not cool Google, not cool.
I guess we’ll just have to stick to other web-based tools for identifying flies for a little while longer. Darn.
Good news! Field Guide to the Jewel Beetles of Northeastern North America is finally shipping! If you pre-ordered a copy of the book and you live in Canada, you should be receiving the book any day now (if you haven’t already). If you don’t live in Canada, don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about you. To make sure that all Canadian orders are filled (including those in forestry research departments and industry), international shipments are being held back a couple of weeks, but should begin shipping by early June.
Bring up flies in casual conversation and undoubtedly you’ll receive a look of disgust from your company, often followed shortly thereafter by the words “hate”, “disgusting” or “gross”. Thanks to the culturally unsavoury and occasionally deadly deeds of but a few, flies the world over are generally regarded as creatures to crush, worth more dead than alive.
Considering the media’s tendency to only get excited over new species that are fuzzy, feathered or fossilized, you could be forgiven for not realizing that more than a thousand new species of fly are described every year by taxonomists from around the world. Even other taxonomists rarely acknowledge how cool and extraordinary flies are, as they’re the only major insect order not to be selected as one of the Top 10 New Species of the Year by Arizona State University’s International Institute for Species Exploration (yet; I encourage you to nominate you’re favourite new species via the link I’ve included at the end of the post).
So welcome to what I hope will become a weekly feature, where I’ll highlight a newly described species of fly, sometimes sharing the nuances of biological nomenclature, sometimes the tireless work of taxonomists, but always the incredible diversity of Diptera. Because as Vincent Dethier concludes in his entomological exploration To Know a Fly:
To know the fly is to share a bit in the sublimity of Knowledge. That is the challenge and joy of science.
Dear io9,
I appreciate all the work you do to bring science news to a large and enthusiastic audience, and I’m a frequent reader myself, but as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately in a recent post one of your authors blew it in a big way.
In “Too many fly bites can lead to death by bug-spit poisoning”, Esther Inglis-Arkell repeatedly states that black flies inject their larvae into the bodies of the birds or people their feeding off of, and that humans are carriers of their young.
No. Just, no.
Black fly larvae are 100% aquatic, living in streams, rivers & flowing water all over the world. In some places — like northern Canada, so infamous for its black fly populations there have been songs sung about them — rivers and streams can be black with fly larvae attached to rocks and other material under the water (check out this post by Crystal Ernst to see just how many larvae can be found in the cold waters of the Great White North).
Yes, like most blood-feeding invertebrates, black flies employ anti-coagulant-laced saliva to keep the good times flowing, but there certainly aren’t fly babies in that spit. Some species of black fly in Africa and South America can transmit a nematode parasite through their saliva (Onchocerca volvulus, responsible for River Blindness, a non-fatal disease), and, as evidenced by the paper that inspired Inglis-Arkell’s post, too much fly saliva can be a bad thing, but to fear-monger that there could be fly larvae swimming in your blood isn’t cool.
Now, I recognize that Inglis-Arkell acknowledged her mistake in response to a commentor who also pointed out the error, but that acknowledgement is buried in the comments, and, unless a reader goes looking for it, will likely remain unread. Why not correct the post (preferably in a way that doesn’t hide a mistake was made) or at least add a footnote that clearly states the author’s mistake? That’s the great thing about web publishing: you can immediately clear up mistakes when they’re uncovered instead of waiting days to print a retraction or correction like in the olden days (i.e. less than 10 years ago). Your web stats show that more than 36,000 people have read articles by Ms. Inglis-Arkell today alone, meaning there are a huge number of people potentially leaving your site with a horribly inaccurate impression of black fly biology.
And that’s the real shame, because despite their bad reputation, black flies are fascinating creatures and are actually kind of cute, especially when they’re biting someone else.
Simulium (Psilopelmia) bicoloratum from Ecuador (Simuliidae) feasting on my blood.
UPDATE 2013-03-10 20:30: That was fast! Less than 15 minutes after I tweeted a link to this post, io9 responded saying they were correcting their original article, and included links to those who pointed out the problem! Well done io9, well done!
When I woke up Wednesday morning, I never could have guessed that I’d stumble across the most bizarre and terrifying fly-related idea I’d ever heard later that day. But then again, the internet is a weird and wacky place, so perhaps I should have known better.
While innocently looking for scanning electron micrographs of bot fly larvae (Diptera: Oestridae), I chanced upon Insecti-cure, a website promoting, among other things, a “treatment” for fat removal involving intentional bot fly infestations. Really.
Bot fly larvae are THE safest way for fat to be removed.
the maggots are planted next to the stomach, and will eat around the organs, the treatment, is of course painless, after you have had your injection of morphine and you will only be there for 8hrs, you will be subject to 300 larvae which have antiseptic saliva, to literaly eat the fat away, before this operation you wil need to contact us 3 weeks before in order for us to get our orders ready and don’t worry after the morphine you wont be able to remember anything, even if you are squeemish!
Tonight on CBC (8pm local time across Canada) The Nature of Things with David Suzuki is showing ZAPPED: The Buzz About Mosquitoes, a documentary all about mosquitoes in Canada, the rising potential for mosquito-vectored disease thanks to climate change, and the ways in which Canadian scientists are working hard to stay ahead of them.
Featuring great macrovideography (which you can learn more about with the behind the scences feature on the ZAPPED website), ZAPPED has great potential to spread information and awareness about mosquitoes in Canada.
I’ll be live-tweeting the program tonight @ 8pm EST using the hashtag #CBCZapped, and I hope that if you live in Canada you’ll join me in learning more about the flies people love to hate!