The story has been making the rounds lately, but these videos about its creation were so captivating I had to post them!  A team of people labored for years to capture spiders, and then persuade them to produce enough silk to weave a garment.  It’s a rather mind-boggling process:

“The spiders are harnessed … held down in a delicate way,” Godley says, “so you need people to do this who are very tactile so the spiders are not harmed. So there’s a chain of about 80 people who go out every morning at four o’clock, collect spiders, we get them in by 10 o’clock. They’re in boxes, they’re numbered, and then as they get silked, about 20 minutes later, they get released back into nature.”   (NPR interview)

The Madagascar Golden Orb Weaver Spider is the spider-goose that laid the golden…er, thread.  It’s estimated that  1,063,000 spiders contributed silk.  The color of the silk is amazing–I had no idea!  The embroidery is also beautiful, with a spider motif.

This second video has more info about the history of trying to make textiles out of spider silk, footage of the apparatus they used to collect the spider silk, and some natural history information about the orb weavers.

Enjoy!

I also scored a copy of the book Spider Silk:Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating, so I’ll be posting a review soon.

“On January 27, 2012, science writer and marine biologist Kevin Zelnio started the Twitter hashtag #IamScience, encouraging scientists to share their individual stories about their traditional or unconventional paths that brought them to where they were today. The response was overwhelming, with hundreds of tweets pouring in over just a few days. 

I’ve collected and excerpted just a handful of them, and set them to Reckless Kelly’s “Wicked Twisted Road”, a song that Kevin mentioned in his original post as holding particular significance for his own path toward science.

You can see a storify of most of the tweets for #IamScience; or you can watch this video. Get Kleenex.

“Magical things can happen when you enthusiastically open your mouth on the internet. One of these magical things is learning how personal experience shapes people’s lives. Looking into others causes you to look into yourself. And then something really magical happens – we learn we are not alone.”  –Kevin Zelnio

Want to make the project bigger? Kevin has offered to put things together in an e-book:

I would like to curate a free e-book of submissions from people about their experiences – good and bad, whatever you are willing to share. Put your name on it or keep it anonymous, doesn’t matter, but people need to hear how your experiences in the past shaped who you are today and what you do.

If you are interested in participating in this project, I’d love to hear from you. Please email me at kzelnio at gmail dot com. Submissions are whatever is necessary for you to tell your story, up to 5000 words. Include drawing, sketchpads, poetry, whatever you need to tell your story.

You ROCK, Kevin.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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)

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

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!