A Ribald Tale of Love and Lice

You may have heard that I told a slightly rude story at the ScienceOnline2012 conference.  If you missed it, here you go!

Listen to the (Slightly NSFW) Story  via The Monti

Everything I said is true; there are even photos. (Think carefully before you click this link. You’ve been warned.)

There are still pubic lice out there, even in a world of Brazilian waxing.  Here’s a recent paper from the New England Journal of Medicine. Can you spot the crabs?

Ben Lillie’s story is right after mine, and is very different, and incredibly powerful. I got a little verklempt.  Ben now runs The StoryCollider, which is an amazing project to collect science stories.

I had been mentally drafting something about storytelling and science, but then Emily at This View of Life wrote something so spot on in summary of ScienceOnline I defer to her:

“I think that this tendency to focus on the sexy or the gross, the morbid or the taboo, is not just a symptom of our four days of very little sleep, more than a little alcohol in some cases and a deep sense of intellectual and cultural overstimulation.

No, this is an integral part of who we are as a group. We focus on duck penises because we almost have to.

We are all story tellers, whether scientists, journalists or educators.  We take data and create hypotheses. We take facts and construct narratives. We take a curriculum and transform it into inspiration.

What she said.  Go read the rest.

I’ll try to put together a more meaningful summary of the Science Online conference later this week, but for the moment I’m enjoying the accomplishment of briefly trending on Twitter.  Even if it is for telling a story about Seamonkeys in your Pants.

Roaches with JetPacks

You might have noticed a lot of news lately about robot designs based on insects.  Insects are great models for robots because bugs have an extremely stable and efficient model of locomotion: the tripod gait.  At any time, roaches have 3 feet on the ground–even when they’re running.   This tripod structure makes insects extra-resistant to tripping or tipping over.

Biomimetics is the fancy name for engineering systems that copy principles found in nature. Basing robots that need to scamper over rough terrain on an insect model that’s successfully lasted millions of years makes a lot of sense. But just how, exactly, do insects keep all those legs going in the right direction?  How can they respond so quickly to an approaching rolled-up newspaper?  How do insects manage this advanced scuttling with such a tiny brain?  And how can insects keep running even after their head is removed?

(Yes, insects can live for quite a while without a head. They eventually die from dehydration or starvation because they can’t drink or eat anymore, but remain able to run away and respond to environmental stimuli. It’s really quite disturbing.)

In order to build a biomimetic robot, one has to first understand the mechanics at work in insects.  The engineering explanation for insect locomotion is hidden in equations about viscoelastic spring mass oscillation and tiny insect-mounted cannons.

Yes.

ROACHES WITH JETPACKS.

This is not a photoshopped picture; it’s from a 2002 research paper in which researchers attempted to mathematically work out the principles of roach locomotion. You can see the jet-pack at work in this movie:

So. Um, WHY did they put jetpacks on roaches? Aside from it just being a totally freakin’ COOL thing to do?

Remember I mentioned how stable the tripod gait is?   The researchers suspected that the roach wasn’t using just its brain to keep itself balanced and running.  They created a mathematical model of a roach with legs that were springs.

Just the mechanical properties of springy legs were able to explain how a roach kept on track and at full speed, despite obstacles.  They called these “preflexive” mechanisms, to indicate that the exoskeleton and muscles stabilize roaches without involvement of the nervous system.

They had an explanation on paper, with a lot of big words and calculations of lateral velocity.  The next step was to test their lovely model by poking a roach while it was running.   That…was about as difficult to do as you might imagine, based on your experience chasing roaches around your kitchen.

The researchers needed to have a precisely measured force disturbing the roaches, so that they could plug it into their model and see if it was accurate.  Hence, a tiny exploding cannon mounted on a roach. Or, to give it the gizmo it’s proper name, the rapid impulsive perturbation (RIP) device.  (That name is doubly clever, since they were experimenting with the death’s head cockroach, Blaberus discoidalis.)

They calculated the lateral force generated by the RIP explosion was equal to 85% of the insect’s forward motion.  If you were jogging along, and I ran into you with a force that was 85% of your forward momentum, I don’t think either of us would be standing up.  (Ok, yes, there’s mass involved in this too, but just work with me here.)  The roaches hardly even break stride.   In fact, it took just 13 miliseconds for a roach to begin to respond to the explosion and get back on track.  The roaches completely recovered from that RIP explosion within 31 miliseconds. 

Insects are indeed pretty damn amazing animals, and a great model for robotics.  The authors have continued their work on the hexapod gait, and have proposed several models of ways in which legs might be built–in both roaches and robots–to respond quickly to problems.

Science is awesome.

Citation: Jindrich DL, & Full RJ (2002). Dynamic stabilization of rapid hexapedal locomotion. The Journal of experimental biology, 205 (Pt 18), 2803-23 PMID: 12177146

Revzen S, Koditschek DE, & Full RJ (2009). Towards testable neuromechanical control architectures for running. Advances in experimental medicine and biology, 629, 25-55 PMID: 19227494

Also: Just look at how easily the Star Wars AT-AT or AT-STs were destroyed by the rebels! Tripod-gait woud have saved the empire!

Wild Ideas Podcast

I did another podcast–this time I was a guest on Wild Ideas, a podcast from a Nature Center in Ohio.   You can listen here.

Before the bug stuff, there is a short discussion of radio isotopes and fracking, which I bet you’ve never heard with a background of owls calling!

They start talking about insects at 19:00, and I arrive to talk about bogus insect control devices at  26:25.  We also discussed insect repellents, spandex, and if mosquitoes bite zombies.

Here’s a link to my review of the plant pollinator app I mentioned.

Buggy Mac and Cheese

For those of you that want to try entomophagy–but don’t want to eat bugs–I thought I would give a shout out for this wonderful Mac and Cheese: Crazy Bugs!

It has adorable bug-shaped pasta, and is also delicious.

Despite the name, this is not an organic product.  In fact, Back to Nature is a subsidiary of Kraft Foods.  It’s quite salty, which is one of the reasons I love it.  It doesn’t have any artificial preservatives or dyes in it, though.

This way you can eat bugs….without having to eat actual bugs.
A good first step on your path to true entomophagy, maybe?

It’s a bit pricey, but you can buy it in bulk via Amazon.  In fact, if you order it through this website, part of your purchase will support the Rouge River Bird Observatory!

I don’t get any kickback for plugging this product, alas, although if they want to mail me a case, that would be just fine.

Fleas Navidad!

Roaches and Woodpecker Conservation

Most humans–and I include quite a few entomologists in that category–love to hate roaches.  This is a sad thing, because the vast majority of roaches never set foot (feet?) in a kitchen.  The few species that tap-dance around in your sugar bowl are just a tiny piece of a huge spectrum of amazing roachy biodiversity in the world.

Over 99% of all roach species are innocent soil and forest dwellers, and are important for ecosystem functioning.   Some of them can leap like grasshoppers.  Some of them can run 4 times faster than a cheetah (well, in terms of body lengths traveled per second, anyway.)  The group of insects with the highest frequency of parental care?  Roaches.  One estimate puts roaches at 24% of all arthropod biomass in tree canopies, and 43% of arthropod biomass in alluvial forests.  There are a LOT of roaches in the world, and you’ve never seen or heard of most of them.  H. E. Evans may have said it best:

“The study of roaches may lack the aesthetic values of bird-watching and the glamour of space flight, but nonetheless it would seem to be one of the more worthwhile of human activities.”  [Life on a Little Known Planet]

This week a new paper came out that highlights the importance of roaches to an animal we have kinder feelings about:

Unusual macrocyclic lactone sex pheromone of Parcoblatta lata, a primary food source of the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.  Eliyahu et. al  PNAS Dec. 19 2011

The red-cockaded woodpecker is an adorable little bird that lives in old pine forests. Historically their range covered much of the eastern US, but these days they are down to remnant populations in the southern US, and they’ve been listed as an endangered species since 1970.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers need large stands of old growth long-leaf pine to survive–they are unique because they nest in living trees, not dead trees.  And here is where roaches come into the story–69.4% of the food given to nestlings is wood roaches.

Logging has reduced the number of old pines, resulting in a major loss of habitat for the birds.  Artificial nesting cavities have been drilled in trees in hopes of getting more birds to breed. Deciding where to drill a nesting cavity means assessing just how many roaches are in an area, and if there are enough roaches around to support a brood of hungry baby birds.

The majority of wood roaches are secretive and nocturnal, so finding them and counting them is not an easy thing.  They live underground, under bark, and generally hide in places you can’t see.  It’s not only humans that have trouble finding the roaches–this also makes it tough for the roaches to find each other for mating.

Like many other insects, they’ve solved this problem with chemical signals called pheromones.  Pheromones are “chemicals emitted by living organisms to send messages to individuals of the same species.” By making a species-specific blend of chemicals and releasing it into the air, insects can communicate over great distances.

With sex pheromones, the message is usually from the female, and has the content “I’m here and ready to get it on, big boy!”  Male antennae are exquisitely sensitive to even single molecules of a female sex pheromone. Because of that sensitivity, you can use male antennae as a type of pheromone detector. (Watch an animation of what happens neurologically in an antenna when pheromone hits a receptor, via UC Davis.)

You can hook up a male antenna to electrodes and actually measure just how much the neurons depolarize in response to a specific compound.  This is electroantennography, or EAG.  In really fancy EAGs, you can run an unknown compound through a gas chromatograph (GC) and an EAG simultaneously.  With the help of these expensive machines, you can extract the pheromone gland from a female, get information about the structure of the chemicals from the GC,  and figure out just which chemicals are the ones that attract the males with the EAG.  The graph at the right is what that looks like.

It’s fairly clear when you find the right molecule–the male antenna produces a big spike like the one you see for compound #1.

(Side note:  I actually did a fair amount of EAGs in my earlier research, and I have to say I’ve never felt more like Dr. Frankenstein in my entire life. You basically decapitate an insect and then stick all sorts of electrodes on their brain and antennae, and hook it up to a lot of really, really fancy instrumentation.  I kept having to stifle the “Bwa ha ha ha ha ha” that wanted to bubble up, and found myself rubbing my hands together in glee a lot.)

Anyway.
There are many insects for which humans have figured out how to synthesize artificial pheromones and use them as a type of buggy birth control.  In this case, knowing what the pheromone is for this wood roach gives humans a simple way to assess how many roaches are in an area under consideration for woodpecker habitat restoration.

You put the pheromone out near a sticky trap; male roaches come a running for some roachy lovin’, and then you count up how many of the unlucky suitors end up dead on a glue trap.

And now a surprise ending much more pleasurable than that experienced by the roaches on this trap: a holiday entomological carol written about this very research!

This carol actually includes some details I left out, like the species name of the roach (Parcoblatta latta); the researcher whose lab this work was done in (Coby Schal); and the use of nuclear-magnetic resonance (NMR) to determine the specific chemical structures. Enjoy!

Elissa Malcohn’s Parcoblatta lata Wonderland

(to the tune of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”)

Roaches stink, are you smellin’?
Pheromones, they’re a-tellin’.
So succulent-sweet, what woodpeckers eat.
Parcoblatta lata wonderland.

Dr. Schal took a reading.
Found the compounds for breeding
By using some gas as roaches chased ass.
Parcoblatta lata wonderland.

Nuclear magnetic resonating
Let him know what turned a suitor on.
Then he synthesized a mix for baiting
And watched the males all falling for the con.

Now his sexy solution
Tells about evolution:
Viagra for some, for others it’s dumb.
Parcoblatta lata wonderland.

People say the lata’s a home-wrecker,
But the bugs are happy in the wood,
‘Til they’re chomped by red-cockaded pecker
Who wants a lata latté in the ‘hood.

Synthesized, it’s a winner.
“Go get laid, then be dinner!”
That pheromone blend helps avian friend.
Parcoblatta lata wonderland.
Parcoblatta lata wonderland.

——

Suggested additional reading:

• Cockroaches: Ecology, behavior, and natural history. 2007. William J. Bell, Louis Marcus Roth, Christine A. Nalepa.  Johns Hopkins Press.
• More about the Red-cockaded Woodpecker (USFW)

Full citation:

Eliyahu, D., Nojima, S., Santangelo, R., Carpenter, S., Webster, F., Kiemle, D., Gemeno, C., Leal, W., & Schal, C. (2011). PNAS Plus: Unusual macrocyclic lactone sex pheromone of Parcoblatta lata, a primary food source of the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1111748109

(this post appeared as a guest post at Scicurious)

Santapede!

Yeah, I post this every year. But it still makes me smile, so here it is again!  I stole it from Ugly Overload:

Oh, and don’t miss the new Xmas song, Silverfish (To the tune of Silver Bells):

City cellars
Moldy cellars
We have just ventured down
To the basement to get things for Christmas
Lots of boxes, stacks of boxes
I think this one’s the tree
As we move them we’re likely to see…

Silver fish, Silver fish
Its Christmas time in the cellar
Centipedes, race with ease
Soon it will be Christmas Day

 

Happy (Roachy) Hanukkah!

Since I’m posting holiday songs, we can’t leave out Hanukkah!

Authored by Miriam Goldstein, who says it was inspired by her former Brooklyn apartment:

To the tune of “Oh Hanukkah”:

Oh cockroaches oh cockroaches
Come in from the wall space.
Skittering all over
The kitchen and food plates.
Please explore the counters
So you will meet
Roach motels to stick to
And poison to eat.

My insect repertoire is a bit sparse for this holiday–if you know of any additional Hanukkah insect songs, please let me know!

An Entomological Carol

I was cleaning my office last night, and found a newsletter from my graduate department in 1987!   I had to share. Lyrics by Jim Richmond; hopefully he doesn’t mind me sharing them here.

Sung to the tune of the Christmas Song (Chestnuts roasting on an open fire)

Professors resting wherever they are,
Grad students nipping at their knows
Post-docs with their eyes on jobs aglow
And secretaries dressed up like who knows;

Everybody knows some plants and some insects too,
Goes to make the work just right,
Tiny technicians with their eyes half aglow
will find it hard celebrating tonight.

We know the Chairman is on his way,
He has lots of authority in his say,
And every PI is sure to try
To see if the Dean can make their proposal fly.

And so to you I am offering this simple phrase,
For you, whatever age you are,
Though it’s been said many times many days,
Merry Christmas to you.

How to make sure you are never invited to another potluck. EVER.

Ah, the Holidays. The season when introverted curmudgeons like me….are fairly miserable and awkward, actually.  I’m not good enough at small talk to do well at holiday gatherings:

“What are you doing for Christmas?”
“Um….lamenting the over-commercialization of your imaginary savior dude’s birth? And avoiding my family?”

Over the years, I’ve perfected a way to free myself from the stress of having to whip up a special dish for the obligatory office potluck.  I’ve carefully developed a reputation for insect cookery. I casually make sure everyone in the office knows this.

Since I’m in a new job this holiday season, I made sure to loudly ask my coworkers where the bait shops are in our town.  I need a bait shop for the key ingredient in my traditional holiday John the Baptist Bread, you see.

This bread’s name comes from a passage in Mark 1.6: “And John was dressed with the hairs of a camel and with a belt of skins around his loins, and he ate locusts and wild honey.”  I skip the camel hair part–I have quite sensitive skin–and substitute in roasted crickets, since locusts are hard to come by in Connecticut in mass quantities.

You grind roasted crickets into flour (a coffee grinder is excellent for this, but you will find the odd antenna in your coffee later on) and mix it with lots of honey to make a very nice little cake.  It’s actually quite delicious.

This year I already have gotten word that I don’t have to do any roasting or baking, though. I achieved my goal of being dis-invited to the potluck early–I’ve been instructed to bring only a bag of chips and dip. In sealed containers.  WIN!

I don’t just eat insects to fuck with people (although that is an entertaining side effect). Entomophagy, or insect eating, is actually quite common in the world.  Insects are the ultimate sustainable agriculture, requiring far fewer resources than other forms of livestock, and they produce fewer greenhouse gas-causing emissions per pound of protein. And they are delicious!

I like to cook with insects to make people think about why they would be excited if I brought shrimp cocktails to the potluck, but horrified if I brought them a grasshopper curry.  Both are arthropods, and frankly grasshoppers have a more appealing lifestyle. For some reason, Americans don’t think of insects as food, although an estimated 40% of the world’s population eats insects on a semi-regular basis.

This graphic shows in a nice visual way how most of the food that goes into a cow…does not become part of a cow. It ends up in a little steamy pile behind the cow, since they aren’t terribly efficient at converting grass or corn into cow meat or milk.  Insects, on the other hand, are just as protein rich as a cow or a pig, can be bred under your bed (I haven’t seen your bed, but I’m betting you don’t have pigs under there), and have a high profit margin.

Note that the meat processing is where a lot of the profit comes from–which is why what farmers get paid and the price you actually pay at the store are sometimes extremely different.    The nice thing about insects is that there isn’t a whole lot of post-mortem processing to do, other than perhaps removing the wings.  You don’t need a professional or sharp pointy tools to carve a grasshopper rump roast.

Insects are a great way for subsistence farmers to make some cash–and raise nutritious food without a lot of land, water, or resources.  100 grams of caterpillars can provide all of an adult’s recommended daily protein, along with iron and several important vitamins.  That’s a lot cheaper and more sustainable than a steak!

So, while I have been excused from bug cookery for the upcoming potluck, I do still have a secret evil plan to expose my co-workers to entomophagy and convince them it’s cool.  I found some big-ass ants on sale.

Seriously, that’s their name: Big-Ass ants.  In Columbia, where they are harvested, they are “hormigas culonas.”  Big-Ass Ants are leafcutter ants  (Atta laevigata), and have long been eaten in Central America.   I had some queen leaf-cutter ants, Atta texana, earlier this year courtesy of Dave Gracer when I came up to interview for this job.

(What? You don’t arrange clandestine cookery of edible insects when you have a faculty interview? Huh.)  The ones Dave cooked for me were awesome–they had kind of a nutty Chex Mix taste. I could totally see snacking on those like popcorn.

So, when I saw these toasted ants on sale, I made an impulse purchase.

Alas, I did not read the fine print carefully, and so was a tad disappointed when my rather smallish tin of ants arrived.  I have photographed them here next to an Altoids tin.  They don’t quite have the wonderful taste of the texana ants–they are a bit dry and dusty–but still have a lovely nutty taste.  And they do indeed have a lot of junk in their trunk–it’s just about all butt, with a tiny head and legs attached.

It turns out that the Altoid tin is exactly the right size to carry all the ants in–so that I can put it in my pocket and offer up ants as an appetizer at the staff potluck.  I am trying to figure out what dip might best go with them–I think hummus would actually be pretty good, with the ants substituted for pine nuts.

Fat Bottom Ants, you make my rockin’ world go round.