Vote! (on my identity)

I keep getting more and more interesting things coming my way as Bug Girl…but the problem is, I like being Bug Girl, and not (fill in real name here).  Keeps life simpler, and boss happy.

What do you think? Should I give up and come out?

Word of the day: Egregious

egregious:

1. Exceptional, conspicuous, outstanding, most usually in a negative fashion.
2. Outrageously bad.

Example: this headline from Science Daily: Fruit Fly Sperm Makes Females Do Housework After Sex

Seriously. How freakin’ embedded in your culture do you have to be to project your heteronormist, traditional gender role shit onto FLIES, people?

Do fruit flies have a monogamous sex life? No.
Do fruitflies live in houses? No.
Do fruitflies live in nuclear families? No.
Do fruitflies iron, bake, or do any sort of traditional Western gender-role stuff? No.
Is it necessary to have all science news stories relate to humans? No.
Is it necessary to have all science news stories relate to sex? No. Maybe. Yes. What was the question?

PhD comics has an EXCELLENT description of the science news cycle. If you haven’t seen this, go print it out and stick it on your door/cube/whatever.

Anyway.

The paper they were actually describing is this one:

Isaac, R., Li, C., Leedale, A., & Shirras, A. (2009). Drosophila male sex peptide inhibits siesta sleep and promotes locomotor activity in the post-mated female Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 277 (1678), 65-70 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1236

Oddly, no mention of dustpans and ironing there….

The paper is actually pretty fascinating–it provides a connection between a peptide in a male fruit fly’s sperm and a change in behavior in female flies after mating.  Mated females skip their afternoon naps (fruit flies take a siesta, as mentioned in the title of the paper) and spend that time looking for food, or places to lay eggs.

This is, regrettably, described as “domestic type activities” by one of the paper’s authors in the news story, although the actual research paper stays on point and doesn’t branch off into this sort of silly anthropomorpic speculation.

I was not aware that finding food was housework. Thank goodness I have science reporters to help enforce gender norms!

For bonus points, guess the Order of Insect covered in this news release before you click through:

Why Nice Guys Get the Girls

EDITED 11.30.09 TO ADD: Ha! the title of the article has now been changed to “Female fruit flies do chores after sex”. Screen shot of the original article now linked.

Shiny Taxonomic Key is SHINY!

There is now an online key to the 86 species of Chrysididae in North America!

It is, of course, quite useful, but the best parts are all the detailed photos of these lovely Hymenopterans.

Thanks go to Nigel Jones for his lovely photo which you must view at full size, and to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center for creating this valuable resource!

This is my recipe, in which I am well pleased

Brined a turkey for the first time this year–turned out quite yummy! I was much more excited with my green beans, though.

I accidentally bought some extra rosemary sprigs, and needed a way to use them up. I give you: Rosemary Green Beans.*

• green beans, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
• one stick of butter
• lots of chopped fresh rosemary leaves
• 1/2 lemon, fresh

Nuke the stick of butter to melt it.  Dump in chopped rosemary.  Cook beans in salted water until they are tender, but still crispy.  Drain the beans, and toss them with the butter/rosemary mix.  Before serving, squeeze the lemon over the whole thing.

YUM.

——-

*Those of you who read my blog know that I consider measurements a vague advisory suggestion. I do Live Improv Cooking.

Update on the Donors Choose Challenge!

The Donors Choose Challenge is now over, and the project to get more nature bloggers involved was a success!!

The total amount given for the Nature Blogs Group was $5,170.  That put our group at #11–not quite in the top 10, but still pretty darn good!  That also is quite a bit more than I managed by myself last year ($270).  YAY! And THANK YOU!

Overall, the total amount given this year was $637,336. That’s amazing! I was very excited to see that one of the top groups was Making a difference for Michigan Children.  Teachers are being laid off left and right here, so making sure our remaining teachers are supported and have the tools they need is very important.

9 of the 12 projects I chose were fully funded–that’s a lot of new buggy and gardening stuff in the hands of kids. Still need an end of year tax deduction? You can still give!!

• Bug Girl’s Giving Page (some projects only have 10 days or more left–please hurry!)
• Deep Sea News Oceans in the Classroom Initiative
• Potspoon’s Challenge
• Wren’s Bird Challenge Page

MUCH LOVE TO ALL OF YOU THAT DONATED!!!

2010 Native Bee Calendar!

Just in time for the holidays–Xerces has a new native bee calendar!

“The Xerces Society and the Great Sunflower Project are happy to offer the 2010 Native Bee Calendar, which was created by Celeste Ets-Hokin. With magnificent close-up photos by Rollin Coville, this calendar takes you on a tour of twelve commonly encountered types of native bees. Each month features a full-page pin-up of a different bee genus, accompanied by a brief summary of its preferred plants, nesting needs, notes on how to identify it, and of course, a complete day-by-day calendar for each month.

All orders must be received online by Monday, November 30, 2009. Calendars will be shipped to arrive by the holidays.

Price: $14.00 (including shipping).

Xerces Society

Sales of this calendar will directly benefit the conservation work of both organizations.”

What are you waiting for?

Shameless pandering

It’s time for OpenLab! Since I will almost certainly be on the job market soon, an inclusion in OL would be a handy thing for my vita. I’m just sayin’……

Here’s some posts I’m considering nominating:

• Insect Genitalia: an Entomological Obsession
• Are there Roaches in Your Coffee and Chocolate?
• Cochineal: It’s a Bug AND a Feature
• Breaking Fail News: Scientific American

Can you help a Bug out and nominate, if you like these?  Thanks!

 

Roast Beaver

I happened to find this very entertaining Extension Publication in a box: Good Eating from Woods and Fields.  It’s a 1960 reprint of an earlier pamphlet, and what a cultural artifact it is!

I couldn’t decide which of the photos to put here, and so went with my Beavis and Butthead instinct: Roast Beaver.

The pamphlet opens with instructions on how to please ‘the housewife” and also contains historic info on game hunting. Except… they sort of forgot to mention all the people that lived here and hunted for centuries before the Europeans with guns showed up. Whoops!

There are also recipes for rabbit, squirrel, woodchuck, and muskrat.

Book Review: At Large and Small

Ann Fadiman. At Large and Small: Familiar Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2007.

Bug Rating:

I freely admit to being an Anne Fadiman fan-girl. Ex Libris is easily one of my favorite books. The Spirit Catches You is an amazing book about culture, epilepsy, immigration, and they way we don’t communicate.  So, I was pretty sure I would like this book.

When I got it, I discovered the end papers for the book are from a wonderful collection of vintage insect plates (ca. 1859), which you can now find on Google Books.  OMG!
And the very first essay, “Collecting Nature,” is about the joys of collecting insects. Sigh.

We’ve discussed before here at the Bug Blog the issue of insect collections, and the decision to not collect. This is covered in detail in Fadiman’s essay:

“When we were very young, my brother and I could not yet divorce our ardor for butterflies from our desire to flatten them in Riker mounts and hang them on the wall.  We threw away our killling jar not because we wished to stop causing pain–crushing an ant or a cockroach, which presumably had a nervous system similar to a tiger swallowtail, stirred few qualms–but because, unlike Alfred Russel Wallace, we grew uneasy with the pleasure it gave us.”

She does confess it was not an easy decision to make:

“I remember a period of painful overlap, when the light of decency was dawning but the lure of sin was still irresistible.  Like alcohol, nicotine, or heroin, lepidoptery is hard to renounce.”

There are also two very nice essays on Ice Cream and Coffee, both of which reflect personal obsessions of mine.

“I recently calculated (assuming an average consumption of one pint of ice cream per week, at 1000 calories per pint, and the American Medical Association’s reckoning of 3500 calories per pound of stored body fat) that had I eaten no ice cream since the age of eighteen, I would currently weigh -416 pounds.”

The final essay in the book, “Under Water,” is a stunning essay about being a witness to a drowning at the age of 18, and being unable to help.  Haunting.

Fadiman will teach you things you didn’t know, and entertain you while it happens.  Forget my hurried review–go check the book out and see for yourself.

Teachers, Astronauts, and butterflies

A cool opportunity for teachers!!

WANTED: Up to 20 schools (in the U.S., east of the Rocky Mountains) to follow the development of monarchs on the International Space Station.

Background
The next Space Shuttle launch is scheduled for November 16th. Atlantis will carry three 4th instar monarch caterpillars to the International Space Station (ISS) in a small rearing chamber. This chamber will be placed in an incubator aboard the ISS where the developing monarchs will be monitored. Still and video cameras will continually capture images, which will be made available online.

We have prepared a text that outlines normal development of monarchs from the fourth instar until emergence as adults. This detailed text is written for adults and contains an extensive glossary. It is intended to provide the information teachers need to answer student questions and as a guide to the five major challenges monarchs face in the nearly weightless environment of the International Space Station.

Participation
If you would like your school or classroom to participate, please contact us at monarch[at]ku.edu before 5PM this Friday (November 6th).

Monarch Watch will send a special monarch larva kit to participating schools. The monarch kit costs $17.95 and the overnight shipping will be an additional $26 for a total of $43.95. BioServe Space Technologies will send participating classrooms a kit that includes a rearing chamber (similar to the one going into space) with instructions.

The kit consists of six 3rd instar larvae on artificial diet and additional cups of diet. Three larvae will be loaded into the rearing chamber.  One of the cups with diet will be used to fill the feeding trays in the chamber you will receive from BioServe. The other cups of diet can be used to feed the remaining larvae until they are ready to add to the finishing cups. Additional instructions will be provided regarding these points.

If you participate in this program your students will be able to follow the shuttle mission to the space station and the development of the monarchs in space for at least two weeks.

The background materials, additional instructions, and relevant links will be available at www.monarchwatch.org

If you have any questions, please let us know!

Jim Lovett
Monarch Watch
http://monarchwatch.org