I’m still super busy, so how about you visit LabLit and read about the amazing migration of the Painted Lady Butterfly.  The article is written by a researcher that is putting the butterflies into a flight simulator (!) to determine how they orient.  In other words, how do they know in which direction to fly?

The Painted Lady migrates from Africa all the way to Britain and northern Europe.  I suspect Nesbit’s work is related to further elaboration on this recent paper, that described two layers of migration: One at the ground level, relatively independent of wind movement, and another at very high altitudes, where prevailing winds would move the butterflies without much effort very great distances.

Nesbit works in the Chapman lab, which has done a great deal of work on butterfly migration.

• Interview with Chapman by BBC about Painted Lady migration
• A presentation (PDF) about insect migration from Chapman
• The painted lady is a globally distributed species, and you can find them in the US.  You can help report Painted Lady migration in the US via a Citizen Science project!

Full citation of paper:

Stefanescu C, Alarcón M, Avila A. (2007). Migration of the painted lady butterfly, Vanessa cardui, to north-eastern Spain is aided by African wind currents. J. Animal Ecology, 76 (5), 888-898

Can I just say, I really, really miss George Carlin?  Anyway:  a roundup of random items and a vote!

Item 1: Finally, after 2 years, we have an offer on the house!! We also did have to re-dig our water well…and repair the septic tank…but it does seem like it will happen.  The downside to this is that the offer is contingent on our moving by July 30th.  EEEEK!

Item 2: I will be super busy the next two weeks with a major new program for first-year students, as well as getting our fall classes sorted out. So, posting will be very spotty.  I feel bad about phoning it in on the Bug Blog so often lately, but life is pretty crazy.  You can tell I’m stressed because I’ve cut most of my hair off.

Item 3: Because I will be working 24/7 for the next couple of weeks, I’m trying to start packing now. Here’s the vote: Keep the 1979 high school year book? or chuck it?

In case you missed it–Rebecca and Sid got married at TAM.  So bummed I couldn’t be there, but so happy I could see it on JREFmedia stream!!

In case you missed it on my Twitter stream..a tribute to Michael Jackson. In Alaska. With Skeeters.

Field Biologists ROCK.  And I told you I was dressed accurately!!

You can’t live in Michigan long without running into a building, or project, or something that is named after W.K. Kellogg, founder of the Kellogg cereal company and major philanthropist. It’s his brother, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who is really the interesting one, though.

Dr. Kellogg was profiled (sort of) in the book and movie The Road to Wellville. In the movie, Anthony Hopkins delivers an inspired performance of Kellogg as a…well, pretty much total nutter.

Hopkins didn’t exaggerate all that much. Dr. Kellogg was ahead of his time in terms of some of his ideas about nutrition and health. He just always managed to take them to 11 in terms of strangeness, and threw in some General Jack Ripper’s theories on pollution of our precious bodily fluids for good measure.

Dr. Kellogg’s ideas are nicely profiled in the essay “Porn Flakes.” What we know now as ubiquitous foods–graham crackers and cold flaked cereal–actually are related to fears of masturbation and religious dietary edicts.

This all begins with Sister Ellen White, founder of the Seventh Day Adventists. In the late 1860’s, Battle Creek was home to the headquarters of the Adventists, and a vision (?) inspired White to found The Western Health Reform Institute, which became known as the Battle Creek Sanitarium.  The sanitarium treated the ‘Illness’ of being a upper-class American in the late 1800’s: too much food and a sedentary lifestyle.

Dr. Kellogg became the manager for the Sanitarium, and advocated the principles of his church as the Road to Wellness: no meat, lots of water, and exercise.  (In fact, Kellogg could legitimately claim to have invented the aerobics class: exercise to music.  Legwarmers were not developed until later, though.)

Here is where things go odd.  It wasn’t just drinking water he pushed; Kellogg also was a major enema advocate.  One of his inventions was an enema machine that could deliver 15 gallons of water in a single sitting (so to speak).  Water enemas were followed by yogurt–half eaten, the other half delivered below.

Kellogg is profiled in the book Quack! in part because of his invention of a shaking machine.  This vibratory chair was designed to prevent constipation by, literally,  shaking the shit out of the patient.   He also invented an Electkothekapeutical Chair (that is not a typo) to stimulate your innards.  (If you really NEED to know more, you can read his 1915 book Colon Hygiene online via Google Books.)

Why did you need a squeaky clean colon?

Kellogg’s 1881 sex education book Plain Facts for Old and Young explains. Food was related to sexual desire, and and too much sex (i.e, any sex) created poor health:

” Sexual precocity, idleness, pernicious literature, abnormal sexual passions, exciting and irritating food, gluttony, sedentary employment, libidinous pictures, and many abnormal conditions of life, are potent causes in exciting the vile practice…

After long abuse of the sexual organs, and in many cases after a short course of sin, the whole system becomes deteriorated; digestion is impaired, the muscles are weakened, the circulation is unbalanced, the nerves are irritable, the brain—especially the back and lower portion of it—is congested, the skin is torpid, the bowels are inactive, the general health is deranged in almost every particular.” (emphasis mine)

In other words, sex was bad, and sex made you sick. Meat was bad, and meat made you think of sex. Sex was bad….well, you begin to see the cycle.  Granola eating and enemas were a way to purify yourself, in addition to, of course, not having any sex.

Dr. Kellogg reputedly never had sex his entire life–I’ll leave his obsession with things anal and oral for you to analyze on your own.

Some of Kellogg’s ideas for ‘curing’ the problem of sex were pretty extreme.  That would include (from the same book I quoted above) circumcision of masturbating boys without any anesthesia:

” The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment….“

And..well… for women:

“In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.”

Since all of you are probably clutching your groin right now, I’ll leave the story of Dr. Kellogg’s Eugenics boosterism for another time.  I just find Dr. Kellogg fascinating and disturbing.

Amazing. Under this headline:

“Science still cannot explain why women sleep around”

“A study published today in Science details a series of careful experiments Swedish researchers conducted on mating seed beetles (pictured). They want to find out what the benefits were to females who mated with multiple males….”

Now, as a normal person, you are probably thinking: “WTF does a paper in Science about beetles have to do with promiscuity in women?”  The answer would be NOT A GODDAMN THING.
This is one of the most blatant, shameless examples of “sexing up science” I’ve seen in a long time.

Here is the actual paper they are referring to:

Bilde, T., Foged, A., Schilling, N., & Arnqvist, G. (2009). Postmating Sexual Selection Favors Males That Sire Offspring with Low Fitness Science, 324 (5935), 1705-1706 DOI: 10.1126/science.1171675

It is a paper about seed beetles, people. Seed. Beetles.

In the press release covering this paper, there is no mention that this research means anything for mammals, much less humans. So… where did this get connected up to explaining why women “sleep around?”

In the messed up little head of the writer, that is where. Because human women liking sex is clearly deviant, and in need of explanation.

And that is how you get crazy sentences like this one:

“Why would these insects have sex with so many different men, only to choose the crappiest sperm?“

As I said initially, Amazing.  Aside from the Green Porno of Isabella Rossellini, I am not aware of any human-insect hookups. (And, frankly, do not want to be aware of any, so please don’t email me.)

There are a whole host of other errors in this i09 article, and I’ll just pick this one:  It does not use the term fitness correctly.

In evolution, the one who dies with the most babies wins. Even if the animal is small, unhealthy, and wimpy.  The males with the most offspring are, by definition, the most fit.

OY.

BTW, I was asked recently to recommend some things to read critiquing evolutionary psychology, and this seems like a good spot to stick some links.

Related posts on Bad Evolutionary Psychology:

• Pop/Pap Psychology
• Susan Brownmiller dissects Thornhill’s book about rape (very well done!)
• An entertaining rant (although dated) from Natalie Angier
• Sexual Selections: what we can and can’t learn about sex from animals (Zuk’s very fun book)
• An interesting discussion of Evo Psych at Huffpo;  They try to categorize the different flavors of EP

WIN.

I’m back in town and trying to catch up on all the sleep I missed by being at SkepchickCon.  After some calculations this afternoon, I determined that the last time I attended a science fiction convention was in 1982.*

Seriously.

I was at (and helped to plan) AggieCon XIII. AggieCon is “the oldest and largest student-run science fiction convention in the United States.”  We showed Rocky Horror for the first time on what was (and still is) an extremely conservative campus with a large military presence. Ted, our faculty adviser, was very nervous that the higher-ups would be upset with the sexual content of the movie.  I think that was a pretty realistic fear

So, I did go into CONvergence with an idea of what a sci-fi con was.
One of the fun things about Cons is all the weirdos come out to play.  But the nature of the play has changed. A lot.

Pretty much everyone at CONvergence seemed to be wearing a corset, dudes included. Huge tracts of land were on display everywhere, as well as fetish costumes that would keep you in your bunk for weeks. Hot damn, things have changed!!

Every flavor of freak flag was flying happily and proudly. Everyone was so beautiful. And they all had AMAZING SHOES.

We also had a great series of panels on the skeptic/science track at the convention, with lots of attendees and great questions. I got to spend some time chatting with Greg Laden and Pamela Gay, which gave my brain some exercise.

I have some interesting stories to write up for you when I’m less sleep deprived.

*the first commenter to mention they weren’t even born in 1982 will be dope-slapped within an inch of their life. You’ve been warned.

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:

• Good news: we found our water well!
• Bad news: it’s not to code, and we have to dig and install a new well. Ouch.
• Good news: I’ll be in Minnesota this weekend at SkepchickCon!
• Bad news:  Um, no real downside to that, actually, unless you can’t be there too.