Mantis Fratricide?

It appears someone found the giant mantis mentioned earlier this week. The description sounds like classic cold war stuff:

“Dilke had been miniaturized, first man in a daring experiment to solve Earth’s hideous overcrowding. He was just quarter of an inch high and there was no going back.

Now Dilke, a microagent for British Intelligence, was on a mission to South America tracking down the source of a horrifying poison gas.

And in the tropical jungle Dilke was hunted…by Mamoth-fanged wolf-spiders and the ferocious praying mantis.”

Also, why is this dude wearing ugg boots?

Bad Roamin’ Ants (Lady Gaga)

Given that we found out yesterday that the inventor of the Ant Farm passed away Wednesday, it seemed like a good time to post this very fun Lady Gaga cover of Telephone: Native Ants.  An impassioned plea to not import potentially invasive species, but to enjoy your native species.

And thank you to TreeLobsters for the terrible pun in my title!

Thursday Taxonomic FAIL

I was excited about this “big bug” feature that someone sent me…until I got to the 4th bug.  That is NOT a Giant Walking stick. It’s a Mantis.  If the mantis is also 21 inches long, though, that IS worth making a big deal about!

 

No, Bounce Fabric Softener will NOT protect you from bugs

I usually like Lifehacker, but in this case, FAIL.  Here’s a story they ran 2 weeks ago:

Bounce Fabric Softener Keeps Mosquitoes and Gnats Away

Some people have sworn by the power of Bounce dryer sheets—and specifically Bounce, too—to keep mosquitoes away from them, and gnats out of their garden. Now scientists have proven the power of fluffy white sheets as an insect repellent.

Lifehacker wasn’t the only media group that picked up on this story; and pretty much all of them made the same mistake.

When you look at the actual research paper, what you see is that some of what was reported was correct.  There actually WAS a paper that examined the repellency of Bounce dryer sheets to insects.

Raymond A. Cloyd, et al. (2010). Bounce® Fabric Softener Dryer Sheets Repel Fungus Gnat, Bradysia sp. nr. coprophila (Diptera: Sciaridae), Adults.
HortScience, 45, 1830-1833

However.
There is a very large difference between a fungus gnat and a mosquito.  That’s rather like reporting that the care and feeding of cats and humans are interchangeable. Since, you know, we’re all mammals, right?

Let’s start with what a fungus gnat is, and when you’d be likely to encounter them.
Basically, fungus gnats don’t bite. They just annoy.  They’re likely to be the tiny things flitting around the soil of your potted plants.  They can be a commercial pest in greenhouses, but generally they are just a nuisance. They breed in moist soil and nibble on roots.

I think everyone knows what mosquitoes are–a biting fly that can carry major human diseases. They breed in water and adult females require a blood meal from a host to reproduce.

Not. The. Same.

This is an important difference, and it is a difference that has human health implications. If you go out in an area where there are disease-carrying mosquitoes with just a pocket full of dryer sheets as your protection, you are taking a risk with your health.

Media make mistakes covering science news all the time–but in this case, it’s a taxonomic mistake that could literally cost someone their life.  (Ok, I’m overstating it a bit. But, in THEORY, I’m right.)

Now that I’ve impressed upon you what’s at stake, let’s look at the actual experiment, shall we?

The authors tested the repellency of the dryer sheets in a very controlled situation, and were successful at reducing the number of fungus gnats in test chambers containing a dryer sheet.  At the end of their paper there is this caveat:

However, there are still important issues that need to be resolved, including the residual effects (based on age of dryer sheets) and effective distance of repellency, response in a no-choice situation (if dryer sheets are placed into each petri dish), impact on fungus gnat larval populations, and ultimately plant damage.

Now, every scientific paper ends this way. Here’s what we did, and here’s how it’s uncovered a whole host of new questions for us to answer! Continued employment, yay!

What I, as a gardener, would draw from this experiment is that it certainly couldn’t hurt to put a Bounce fabric sheet near my potted plants, if I happened to have a fabric sheet laying around.

But I would not, in a bajilion years, jump to the conclusion that it would protect me from all biting insects.

Sigh.

—

Long link to the paper, since the Researchblogging code keeps messing up blog code

Raymond A. Cloyd, et al. (2010). Bounce® Fabric Softener Dryer Sheets Repel Fungus Gnat, Bradysia sp. nr. coprophila (Diptera: Sciaridae), Adults. HortScience, 45, 1830-1833

Roach Museum Tour

I love this!  It’s being billed as a “participatory art project.”  Basically, you can sign up to have a cockroach tour of the London Science Museum in 2011.

Superflex is an art group from Denmark; they contracted with the costumers Firmaet to create these wonderful roach suits.  I have no idea what that carapace is made out of, but I really, really want one!  I think it was probably fabricated by 10Tons, which means acquiring one is probably out of my price range.  Firmaet’s Blog has many adorable photos of the roaches–I have swiped one here since I can’t link to individual posts.

Some of the other groups linked to as participants in the project are drama-related, and there is a credit for a script writer, so I suspect that there is much more to this than just walking around in fun costumes.

If ever there was a time for a press junket, THIS IS IT!   Oh Science Museum, I await your call!

An Inordinate Fondness #12

I’m trying (trying!) to do more blogging, and what better way than to host a blog carnival? 

So welcome to the 12th edition of An Inordinate Fondness, the monthly blog carnival devoted to beetles.  In fact, it seems appropriate that we celebrate the most diverse taxa on earth today, as this particular carnival occurs on Martin Luther King’s birthday.

Ok, maybe that’s a stretch.

But!

We can value Mr. King’s words as we marvel at the beauty of these wonderful little animals.  Today is not meant to be a day to take off from work, but to be a day of service to the community.  Why not head outside, and take some kids with you?

“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”  ~MLK

And what is more uplifting than ART?   Giant scarab sculpture, for example.  Artist Dean Colls has more photos of his metal construction Alexander the Great on his portfolio website.  He even took the time to consult with some entomologists and assign a genus–Anoplognathus.

I really like his statement about the inspiration for the sculpture:

“My sculpture Alexander the Great stands as an avatar for the unnoticed world at our feet and as a champion for that sense of wonder and exploration that is so easily lost. It reminds us that however great the empires of man may be, they are dwarfed by one that is far older and greater.”  ~Dean Colls

Kate Sherrod contributes a Sonnet about forest pest insects at Suppertime Sonnets, and Elissa Malcohn presents a Poem about food insects posted at Chronicles from Hurricane Country.  Either of those poems would convert into excellent songs, I think. (Just a hint to my musical friends)

From art and poetry we segue into FOOD:
Trish Wells has a lovely film of  a Ladybird eating her colleagues at The Birds, the Bees and Feeding the World,  and you can consume Bug Soup! posted at Insect Art.  (Ok, those actually aren’t beetles for eating, but they are relaxing. Like soup.)

Michael Bok discovers cucumber beetles are A pretty little pest at Arthropoda.  (All right, not food related. But there is a mention of a cucumber!  Work with me, people.)

“Painstaking excellence” could describe what we all strive to achieve with TAXONOMY.  Dave Hubble submitted his Diary of a beetle recording scheme, a description of something I know we’ve all struggled with–keying out a specimen.

MISSOURI contributes a couple of posts:  a Round-headed Apple Tree Borer (Saperda candida) posted at Nature in the Ozarks, and  a series of photos of Soybean Leafminers posted at MObugs.

On the theme of valuing individual variation:

“It may be argued that to know one kind of beetle is to know them all. But a species is not like a molecule in a cloud of molecules—it is a unique population.” ~EO Wilson

As a completely snowed in Michigander, I shake my fist at Alex’s PHOTOS of Florida Winter Butterflies at The Nemesis Bird.  An unknown scarab larva was discovered someplace clearly warmer than where I am in Grub, posted at The Bug Whisperer.   Things Biological is posting a series of summer photos to cheer us up in the middle of winter; including   An abundance of fireflies.  TGIQ is snowed in like me, but still managed to find a Winter beetle at Fall To Climb.

And I’ll close with Dragonfly Woman’s series of Aquatic Beetles, because they are some of my favorite beetles to watch too.

The next Inordinate Fondness will be held at The Dispersal of Darwin! It will be a Darwin edition and any beetle posts looking at history of science connected to beetles or naturalists who worked on beetles are encouraged.

I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from MLK:

“Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.  It is a sword that heals.”

What will you do today–and in 2011–to make the world a better place?
January is a good time for resolutions.

Christian Identity: The scary religion you don’t know about

Sadly, Michigan is home to an awful lot of racist bastards with guns.  The Hutaree group arrested in May 2010 for stockpiling guns and explosives is a pretty good example.  Once again,  Americans were shooting and plotting terrorism–and they were doing it in the name of Christianity.

To those of us who have been targeted by Christian Identity folks, this isn’t all that surprising.  Christian Identity is a particularly virulent (and violent) form of creationism and apocalyptic thinking.  It disguises racism, antisemitism, and brutality under happy, Christian sounding churches and groups. Can you spot the hate group in this line up?

• America’s Promise Ministries
• By Yahweh’s Design
• Church of Jesus Christ Christian
• Church of True Israel
• Ecclesiastical Council for the Restoration of Covenant Israel (ECRCI)
• Fellowship of God’s Covenant People
• Gospel Ministries
• House of Yahweh
• Kingdom Identity Ministries
• Present Truth Ministries
• Scriptures for America Ministries
• Tabernacle of the Phineas Priesthood
• United Identity Church of Christ
• United Church of YHWH
• Yahweh’s Truth

Lousebusters!

A fabulous new development in louse control! I’ve written before about the problem of head lice becoming resistant to commonly used pesticides, making treatment much more difficult.  A new device received approval from the FDA to be this year–and it’s a lot of hot air.
No, really:

Goates, B., Atkin, J., Wilding, K., Birch, K., Cottam, M., Bush, S., & Clayton, D. (2006). An Effective Nonchemical Treatment for Head Lice: A Lot of Hot Air. PEDIATRICS, 118 (5), 1962-1970 DOI: 10.1542/peds.2005-1847

This device is a great story of how basic ecological research can lead to improvements in human health.  It all starts with birds.

Those of us who keep chickens or work with wild birds know that they have an amazing assortment of ectoparasites–parasites that live on the outside of the body (“ecto” = external). Most of these are called “feather lice.”

Feather lice are a fascinating group of animals; the researchers in this lab have studied, among other things, how lice have evolved to match the color of their host birds.  I think it’s safe to say that Dr. Dale Clayton, the lead researcher in this story, is Mr. Bird Lice.   Over the last 2 decades, he’s published a steady stream of fascinating papers (and books!) about lice and their co-evolutionary relationships with their hosts.

It was because of Clayton’s research that the University of Utah lured him away from his job at Oxford in the late 1990s.  Unfortunately, Clayton discovered exchanging  jolly old (damp) England for Utah’s arid climate made keeping his lousy subjects alive extremely difficult.  In fact, his lice colonies dried out and died.
Having dead research subjects will put a serious dent in one’s research productivity.

His travails in lice-rearing, however, were what set a lightbulb off when his children came home with head lice. If his research lice dessicated and died, could he make head lice dry out and die too?  Alas, it proved to be a much harder puzzle than he thought:

“Over the next several years a variety of methods were tested in Clayton’s lab, ranging from the use of chemical desiccants, to heat caps fitted with electrodes, to rice bag caps heated in a microwave, to various hair dryers and blowers up to the size of a leaf blower “

His lab website says that “student volunteers” were used as his guinea pigs. Once again, a novel use for graduate students is discovered!

After almost 20 years of tinkering, the Lousebuster is now FDA approved and on the market. It also happens does a really, really good job of killing the insects using only hot air!

I know what you are thinking–unfortunately, it is not enough to have a blow-dryer, as you can see here in the results comparing the percent of lice being killed with different methods.  (I also am rather relieved that wall-mounted hand driers were not effective.  I can only imagine the lines at the airport bathroom if families traveling decided to do a little de–lousing between connections.)

The other nice item is that the company selling the Lousebuster requires that anyone purchasing them be certified in their use.  That means that no one should have a scalded scalp, and it should actually perform at the 95-99% louse mortality levels reported in various publications.

A newer version released December 2010 is quieter and “works on curly hair”.

So hoist one to toast Dr. Clayton and his lab in their demonstration of how basic research  pays off for all of us!!

Happy 2011!

To start the new year right, how about a fabulously beautiful cicada?  

This photo is from Michael Jefferies.  Thank you, and thank you to all the other Flicker folks for sharing their beautiful work.