Mark your calendars: National Moth Week!

National Moth Week is a new project celebrating moths and biodiversity in the US.

July 23-29, 2012

Why moths? Moths can be found everywhere from inner cities to heavily forested remote areas.  You might dismiss moths as boring brown fluttery things, but Moth Week is a great time to look more closely.

They can be amazing mimics; they can be as tiny as the head of a pin. They can be huge with surprising underwing patterns, like the moth on the Moth Week Logo.

The purpose of Moth Week is two-fold; to encourage people to go outside and look at the life around them, and also to encourage people to document and submit what they see as part of a larger citizen science project.

You don’t need to know what you are looking at to participate–if you post your images on the Discover Life site (following the protocol), they will identify them for you!

You can find instructions for having a Moth Party at your house on the Discover Life website, too.  I plan to have a Moth Night Celebration at my house in Connecticut; let me know if you are interested!  I live in a perfect area for mothing–streams, a big pond, forest, and agricultural land all near me.  We’ll get lots of interesting insects, including moths.

Join me in being one Bad Moth-er…
(Shut your mouth!)

Some great resources:

• How to light trap moths (PDF)
• How to bait for moths (PDF)
• BugGuide has photos of most common moths in the US!

Happy St. Urho’s Day!

Mid March! A time when the US turns its attention to an important event–a type of March Madness, if you will. People stock up on food, buy special t-shirts, and drink alcoholic libations in mass quantities.  It’s….

St. Urho’s Day.

St. Urho (pronounced “oorho”) is a completely made-up saint. Essentially, Finnish Minnesotans were sick of green beer and Irish hoopla in March, and decided they needed their own holiday on March 16th:

“The legend says St. Urho chased the grasshoppers out of ancient Finland, thus saving the grape crop and the jobs of Finnish vineyard workers. He did this by uttering the phrase: “Heinäsirkka, heinäsirkka, mene täältä hiiteen” (roughly translated: “Grasshopper, grasshopper, go to Hell!”). His feast is celebrated by wearing the colors Royal Purple and Nile Green. St. Urho is nearly always represented with grapes and grasshoppers as part of the picture…..

Today, the St. Urho tradition is carried on in many Finnish communities, sometimes as an excuse to add an extra day of rowdy celebration to the St. Patrick’s Day festivities. In many Finnish-American communities, however, St. Urho’s Day is the celebration, and St. Pat’s feast day is merely an afterthought, a day to sleep off the hangover.”

Urho’s victory over grasshoppers is celebrated by this statue in Menahga, MN. A very amazing chainsaw sculpture!

Support  this champion of biological control by drinking some purple wine or purple beer (Ew!) March 16th, in honor of St. Urho’s entomological feat.

Related post:

• Beekeeping Patron Saints

Productivity, prepare to meet your doom

Because I just spent HOURS playing with this online superhero generator,
and I predict you will too. It took a little work to get her to the appropriate level of….zaftigness.

Mr. Bug Girl says it does actually look like me, but I think that’s just because of a similarity in the rack region.

Also, note the Red High Heels!

What superhero alter ego can you come up with?

Edited to add: Link fixed! Now you can happily waste time….

Amusing Music Thursday

Wow. I soooooo wish I had the chutzpah to do this. I present: Leslie Hall, from Ames, Iowa.

There is, alas, no video for the song “Midwest Diva,” which you can hear on her MySpace page. Because it would probably be awesome.

Also, someone tell PZ that she’s got his octopi on her shoulders.

Food of the Gods

In the pantheon of Very Bad Giant Insect Horror Films, Food of the Gods has always been a standout.
A director Bert I. Gordon (BIG) classic, this adaptation of an H.G Wells story is amazing for it’s incredibly bad special effects. In fact, it won a Golden Turkey Award for it’s special effects.
And it’s now been released on DVD for your viewing….um. Pleasure?

You might remember Gordon as the director of Beginning of the End and Earth vs. the Spider. Those 50′s films were classics of the cold war, and suggested radioactivity (and possibly communism) would destroy us all.

Food of the Gods was made in the 70s, and so has an environmental (sort of) bent. Ida Lupino (!) finds a chemical goo bubbling up from the ground, and feeds it to her chickens to make them grow bigger. Now, at a time when the EPA Superfund was looking for toxic sites to clean up, one would think perhaps a bit more caution about gooey stuff bubbling from the ground would be warranted. Apparently not.

Other animals get into the chemicals, and a gigantism-fest begins. Also in the mix is a camping football team, an evangelist, and a “lady bacteriologist.”

Entomological Highlights (from memory):

• Ida Lupino is attacked by a giant plastic tomato hornworm in her kitchen while canning
• Giant mosquitoes are fended off with a rifle
• An attack of giant wasps stings and kills a football player

Other amusing parts are the chicken attacks (it’s clearly a guy in a chicken costume) and giant rats running amok…in what appears to be a Barbie camper.

I’m not sure why someone thought this needed to be released on DVD, but hey–if you want to have a bad movie fest for St. Urho’s day, it’s just in time!

hexapod haiku contest!

NCSU’s Insect Museum Blog is having a Hexapod Haiku Contest! Your haiku should be submitted by 11:59pm, 20 March 2008 (the first day of spring!).

This one I particularly liked, as we are inundated with Asian Lady Beetles right now:

Dapper red and black
What brings you into my house?
Go! Aphids await

Enter, why don’t ‘cha?

6-word stories

Something fun for the weekend:  I was poking around online to find examples of interesting poster design (long story) and stumbled on this: Wired Very Short Stories.
Some of them are excellent–and invertebrate themed, too!

“Starlet sex scandal. Giant squid involved.”
- Margaret Atwood

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

Kirby had never eaten toes before.
- Kevin Smith

Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.
- David Brin

Anyone want to offer up some more entries?

Minuscule: Ants at work

A heist, a bocce ball, and ….well, I won’t give the rest away. Enjoy!