I’m on the road right now, so why not enjoy this beautiful photo of one of my favorite groups of insects!
The Chrysididae are a group of parasitic wasps that are harmless to humans, and wonderfully beautiful with their punctate, shiny exoskeletons. They are also sometimes called Emerald Wasps, for obvious reasons.
There is an entire website devoted to this group of wasps, and they have some AMAZING photos. This lovely photo used courtesy of smccan; thanks!
Yep, it’s apparently “Interview Bug Girl on the Interwebs” month. I’m this week’s featured blog at the Nature Blog Network. Squee!
In other news:
I recently got a letter from the Michigan Nature Association that announced they have nesting ospreys at the Helmer Brook Plant Preserve. Osprey Watch reports there are 17 active nests in lower Michigan this year.
The DNR has been releasing ospreys in the lower peninsula since 1998:
Ospreys are listed as a threatened species in the state. Along with bald eagles and peregrine falcons, they were hard hit by the liberal use of pesticides shortly after World War II. Unlike peregrines, Michigan never lost its entire osprey population; the species managed to persist in small numbers in the state. Since the ban of DDT and other similar persistent pesticides, they have rebounded in the Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula.
Ospreys got a double whammy; in addition to the effects of organochlorines, they are also migratory, and lost habitat along their entire trip–North America, Central America, and South America.
I’ve mentioned before the important role of an MSU biologist in the collection of evidence of DDT Bioaccumulation. (You can actually read an original article by Wallace in Audubon Magazine from 1963 here.) Michigan is still home to the Pine River Superfund site–a toxic waste dump of DDT manufacturing leftovers, as well as other industrial waste.
So, I’m pretty geeked that there are some signs of recovery, however small. You can help by reporting sightings in lower Michigan with this form.
[Thank you to C. A. Mullhaupt, who took this lovely photo of a nest in Michigan in 2008.]
Oh, and since every time I mention DDT a whole host of right-wing people show up to flog their political agenda: save us all some time, and read these posts first, ‘kay?
Homebuggarden commented earlier this week:
“Has anyone come across a good source of information on providing nest support for alternative pollinators such as bumblebees, digger bees, and the like?”
Indeed, I have! Xerces has an excellent PDF download, Nests for Native Bees. There are also additional detailed instructions in their publication Farming for Bees (starting on page 25).
There is Michigan specific advice in a PDF here (and any day now I’ll get around to reviewing the awesome paper those authors published in Ecology Frontiers….) There is also a plant list for Michigan in this PDF publication.
You can find a list of all the excellent Xerces Society publications online here, downloadable free as PDFs!
In case you missed it, here’s a link to the NPR interview with Steve Buchmann, the international coordinator of the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign. 
You might remember Buchmann as one of the authors of the excellent book Forgotten Pollinators.
From the NPR blog:
“Mother Nature has lots of other pollinators — typically five to ten types — that visit a single plant.
Still, bumblebees and bats could use tending, too, he says. To improve their lives, try to plant local wildflowers and heirloom fruits and veggies. Native plants suited to the local climate and soil are likelier to flourish and feed bees. Steer clear of the ornately ruffled sophisticates that have spent generations in a hothouse.
Breeding a plant for our taste often inadvertently breeds out the goodies–the sweet nectar–that pollinators seek.”
I believe you may remember an earlier rant here about “pollenless” varieties of plants I was finding in my seed catalogs 
The Pollinator Partnership has an interactive zipcode map to suggest plants that will please your local native pollinators. You’ll get a full collor multi-page PDF document to download explaining what kinds of plants different pollinators like, and some plant suggestions. The Xerces Society also has some nice lists of plants for pollinators you can download, too!
Check out these Pollination Reources for teachers at the NBII! (National Biological Information Infrastructure) They currently have 78 lessons related to pollination and pollinators listed.
They also have some fun resources on pollination and food, like this one: Chocolate’s Sweet Little Secret (PDF)
“The cacao flower, while only about the diameter of a nickel, is complex in design and behavior, necessitating a special kind of animal to pollinate it. Recent studies in cacao plantations indicate that midges, tiny flies that inhabit the damp, shady rain forest, are the only animals that can work their way through the complex cacao flower and pollinate it. A member of the same insect family as the “no-see-um” flies that plague us with their bites, this millimeter-long fly is from the family Ceratopogonidae and the genus Forcipomyia–a very tiny animal with a very long name. These cacao-pollinating midges are endemic not to plantations, but to the tropical rain forest itself.”
Sadly, the way in which we grow cacao actually contributes to low pollination rates, since the midges aren’t very happy away from the rain forest.
Happy surfing!
It’s National Pollinator Week, and here’s a neat site for you–a complete list, continuously updated, of crops of importance to humans that insects pollinate. Pollinating animals contribute to at least one out of every three bites we eat.
Some of the fruits and vegetables on this list are obviously recognizable. There are also crops that produce a product that we use, like Neem or cotton. And, of premier importance to scientists everywhere: COFFEE and CHOCOLATE!
Why not plan a menu that features only foods and recipes created with the help of pollinating animals? NAPPC has some suggestions that will highlight all that pollinators do for us:
Baked Pita Chips with Artichoke Dip
Beef Brochette with Green Pepper & Tomatoes
Vanilla Ice cream with fruit/ chocolate sauce
And a little after dinner drink…..Tequila Sunrise
Ok, well, I guess you could have a cup of coffee, as an alternative.
Celebrate National Pollinator Week, June 22-28, 2009!
There is a nifty collection of online resources–including document templates, fact sheets, and more–online here!
There are even stickers you can print on your printer. Cool!
My post on blogging anonymously was surprisingly popular, so I thought I would mention this news tidbit: A British policeman was recently outed as the author of the blog Night Jack, a 2009 Orwell Prize award winner for writing excellence in political science.
The Night Jack blog was also hosted here at WordPress, and has now been completely deleted. The cop author was also recently reprimanded, although he will probably not loose his job:
“The 45-year-old detective constable with the Lancashire constabulary has been spoken to and received a written warning but will not be disciplined further “unless anything else was to come out”, a spokeswoman for Lancashire police said.
“We have conducted a full internal investigation and the officer accepts that parts of his public commentary have fallen short of the standards of professional behaviour we expect of our police officers,” she said.”
Sadly, even the posts chosen by the Orwell Prize Award Committee now link to deleted pages. You can still read several of his posts at the Guardian. (For who knows how long?)
The irony of all this that I haven’t seen mentioned yet is….
‘George Orwell’ was a pseudonym.
Eric Blair did not write under his real name. In fact, Orwell also worked as a policeman, which lead to the essays in Shooting an Elephant. Orwell/Blair was a teacher at a public school, part of the home guard, and worked for the BBC. In fact, memos exist discussing whether it mattered that Blair was Orwell.
I think it’s safe to say that if he could have, Orwell would have blogged, he would have used a name different than his own, and that he would definitely have upset some people and risked his job. In a commentary on the Night Jack case, it was suggested that:
“the best strategy, for those bloggers hoping to remain anonymous, is to be dull, trivial and inarticulate. Had Night not stirred his readers, to the point that he won the Orwell Prize, the Times would not have bothered with him.”
This is, unfortunately, accurate advice. You can write badly online and no one will care; if it’s truly awful and silly some people may occasionally link to you (”OMG look at this!”) but for the most part, no one will care who you are.
Is is better to be an outstanding writer, and risk being unmasked? At what price does art come, now that we are all on stage and digitally documented, 24/7? Go read Shooting an Elephant. What would have happened if Orwell had put this on a blog, for all to see?
One thing that has made my new job even harder is dealing with the financial fallout in Michigan as it affects state and university budgets. A review of several books that deal with University funding appeared in the New York Review of Books last week, and it pretty well describes some of the pressures I’m seeing.
It’s a longish essay, and well worth reading if you want to understand the Hobson’s Choice we face in higher education right now. Some highlights:
“at public institutions, where tuition historically has been kept relatively low by means of a subsidy derived from tax revenue, the financial model is also at risk. These institutions—long before the current crisis—were seeing … “massive disinvestment” by the states.
…On the expense side, one finds the usual strategies: salary and hiring freezes, reduction of staff by layoffs or attrition, cancellation or postponement of construction projects….On the revenue side, some institutions…are increasing the number of undergraduate students they admit, in order to collect additional tuition to help close the budget gap….
such a strategy stretches the capacity of existing dormitories, classrooms, and advisers at just the time when more and more students, facing a contracting job market and longer odds against getting into and paying for graduate school, are turning to the career and counseling services for help
In short, the financial crisis not only is threatening the livelihood of faculty and staff but is also degrading the experience of students.
Yup. That’s about right.
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