All posts tagged: insects

How many insects are in the air?

How many insects are in the air?

Published by skeptic

average: (in science) A term for the arithmetic mean, which is the sum of a group of numbers that is then divided by the size of the group. biology: The study of living things. The scientists who study them are known as biologists. climate change: Long-term, significant change in the climate of Earth. It can happen naturally or in response to human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests. data: Facts and/or statistics collected together for analysis but not necessarily organized in a way that gives them meaning. For digital information (the type stored by computers), those data typically are numbers stored in a binary code, portrayed as strings of zeros and ones. density: The measure of how condensed some object is, found by dividing its mass by its volume. dimension: Descriptive features of something that can be measured, such as length, width or time. factor: Something that plays a role in a particular condition or event; a contributor. federal: Of or related to a country’s national government (not to any state …

Spiders In The House Released Outside Probably Won’t Survive

Spiders In The House Released Outside Probably Won’t Survive

Published by Jenni Sidey

Some of us choose to perform the kind act of moving spiders found inside the house to the outside in order to save them. Using a cup or piece of paper, we tenderly transfer the eight-legged critter from our bedroom out to the backyard.  You may think, “Why kill them? They’re not doing anything wrong.” While this is highly empathetic, the relocation may not be as beneficial as we believe. The reality of the situation is that these arachnids are actually indoor spiders, meaning that their survival rate outside is very low.  The spiders found within your home are ‘indoor spiders,’ and have a low probability of surviving outdoors. While you may think you’re doing the arachnid a service, the outdoors are harmful for indoor spiders. According to an arachnologist, if you relocate an indoor spider to the outside, it is likely that it will die. The key distinction is that these spiders are specifically indoor spiders and not just spiders found in the home; a large portion of the spider population within a home …

Mount Holyoke’s Corpse Flower Blooms Again, Drawing Crowds to Its ‘Rotting Flesh’ Stench

Mount Holyoke’s Corpse Flower Blooms Again, Drawing Crowds to Its ‘Rotting Flesh’ Stench

Published by Sam Flores

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. (AP) — One person entered the lush, green Victorian-era greenhouse and smelled rotting eggs. Another said the odor evoked the memory of dissecting a dead bird. A third compared it to a stinky diaper baking in the sun. “I was expecting it to smell bad, but it smelled genuinely like rotting flesh,” said Nyx DelPrado, a first-year student at Mount Holyoke College who visited its Talcott Greenhouse this week to see the blooming of a corpse flower. “Its name is accurate,” DelPrado added with a laugh, nose wrinkled, adding that it reminded them of the scent of a dissection. The corpse flower, or Amorphophallus titanum, is a rare tropical plant known for its foul odor. It’s native to the rainforests of Sumatra and blooms infrequently and for only a brief window, releasing a pungent scent meant to mimic decaying flesh and attract pollinators such as flies and beetles. Nicknamed “Pangy,” the plant first bloomed at Mount Holyoke College in 2023, and its latest appearance has once again drawn crowds eager to witness …

Bumblebees surprise scientists by showing a sense of rhythm

Bumblebees surprise scientists by showing a sense of rhythm

Published by skeptic

A buff-tailed bumblebee on an artificial flower Bee lab at Southern Medical University Bumblebees have learned to recognise Morse code-like sequences of flashing lights and vibrations, demonstrating a sense of rhythm that has never been seen in such a small-brained animal. The ability to recognise flexible, abstract rhythms – when, for example, the same pattern or melody is played at a different tempo in different ways – has only been demonstrated in a few birds and mammals, including parrots, songbirds and primates like chimpanzees. Andrew Barron at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues ran a series of experiments to try to determine whether buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris), which have far less complex brains, could also recognise a range of different rhythms. In the first experiment, bumblebees learned to choose between two artificial flowers consisting of flashing LED lights. One flower produced long flashes and the other short pulses, like dashes and dots in Morse code. One flower contained a reward – sucrose – and the other unpalatable quinine. Once the bees had learned …

Why don’t giant prehistoric insects still exist?

Why don’t giant prehistoric insects still exist?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Three hundred million years ago, dragonfly-like creatures with wingspans stretching 70 centimeters patrolled the skies of a world nothing like our own. These griffinflies, as paleontologists call them, were the largest flying insects ever to exist, roughly five times the size of any dragonfly alive today. For three decades, scientists thought they knew why such animals could never return: modern air simply doesn’t contain enough oxygen to power them. New research published in Nature dismantles that explanation entirely. A team working across five years and more than a thousand microscope images has found that the respiratory structures of insect flight muscles occupy so little anatomical space that insects could, in principle, easily compensate for lower oxygen levels by growing more of them. The oxygen content of Earth’s ancient atmosphere, the theory goes, was not the reason griffinflies grew enormous. And it almost certainly is not the reason giant flying insects don’t exist today. That second question, what actually does limit insect size, now has no clean answer. The long-extinct griffinfly (left) dwarfs even today’s heavyweight …

New Scientist recommends Cirque du Soleil’s insect-themed OVO show

New Scientist recommends Cirque du Soleil’s insect-themed OVO show

Published by skeptic

Cirque du Soleil’s Ovo show Joseph Okpako/Getty Images I have always thought insects deserve more appreciation, so I was excited to catch a circus show dedicated to the tiny critters at London’s Royal Albert Hall, as it passed through en route to European venues. OVO, from Cirque du Soleil, is named after the Portuguese word for egg. It is a simple tale about a quirky fly that brings an egg to a bustling ecosystem and tries to win a ladybug’s love, with the help of an insect clown. But what it lacks in plot it makes up for in amazing acrobatics. In one spectacle, a contortionist spider (pictured) balances her whole body on a pole held in her mouth. In another, ants juggle fruit with only their feet. Then, in a nail-biting finale to the first half, acrobats fling each other with extraordinary precision at great height. Another stand-out moment sees crickets trampolining up and off a wall. This is a show to entertain the whole family – and, hopefully, improve our appreciation of the …

Ants capture carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into armour

Ants capture carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into armour

Published by skeptic

Electron microscope image showing an ant with dolomite in its exoskeleton Hongjie Li An ant that can turn carbon dioxide in the air into dolomite stone in its exoskeleton may hold clues to how humans can sequester greenhouse gases to avert climate disaster. Fungus-farming ants forage for vegetation to feed cultivated fungi that are grown inside their colonies. In turn, the fungi serve as the primary food source for the ants. The high density of ants and fungi can result in high concentrations of CO2 inside the nests. In 2020, Cameron Currie at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues found that the ants of the species Acromyrmex echinatior incorporate a carbonate biomineral into their armour. The ants do this through a symbiotic relationship with Pseudonocardia bacteria, which transform CO2 into rock using chemical processes that aren’t yet properly understood. Now the team has discovered that another fungus-farming ant, Sericomyrmex amabilis, which is found in Central and South America, can do the same thing without symbiotic bacteria, becoming the first known animal to have evolved …

Everyone’s a queen: The ant species with no males or workers

Everyone’s a queen: The ant species with no males or workers

Published by skeptic

Temnothorax makora ants are parasitised by the related species Temnothorax kinomurai clurarit/iNaturalist A parasitic species of ant from Japan is the first ever found to have done away with both males and female workers – instead, every individual is a queen that tries to take over the nests of other species. Typically, ant colonies consist of a queen, female workers and short-lived males that die after mating. For more than 40 years, researchers have suspected that the rare parasitic ant Temnothorax kinomurai only produces queens, but until now there has been no definitive proof. Young queens of this parasitic species take over the nests of a related species, Temnothorax makora, killing the host queen and some workers by stinging them. They then reproduce asexually, producing cloned offspring in a process called parthenogenesis, which is rare in ants but common among some other insects. The T. makora workers are duped into helping raise the young T. kinomurai queens. Jürgen Heinze at the University of Regensburg, Germany, and his colleagues collected six colonies with T. kinomurai queens …

Ants attack their nest-mates because pollution changes their smell

Ants attack their nest-mates because pollution changes their smell

Published by skeptic

Harvester ants attack nest-mates whose scent they don’t recognise JorgeOrtiz_1976/Shutters​tock Common air pollutants like ozone and nitric oxide can change the way ants smell, prompting their nest-mates to attack them as if they were intruders. Ants recognise their comrades by scent, and when they encounter an ant whose smell they don’t recognise, they respond aggressively, biting and sometimes killing the trespasser. But ozone, a greenhouse gas produced by cars and industrial activities, can break down the structure of alkenes, chemicals that make up part of the colony-specific scents. Markus Knaden at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, and his colleagues knew from previous work that ozone-induced changes in alkenes can impair the way insects communicate with each other. They witnessed fruit flies mate with the wrong species and pollinators such as tobacco hawkmoths lose interest in flowers if their scent had been altered by ozone. To test the impact on ants, Knaden and his colleagues set up artificial colonies of six ant species. They removed one individual ant from each and …

Color-coded mosquitoes safely enables male-only releases to combat Dengue and Zika

Color-coded mosquitoes safely enables male-only releases to combat Dengue and Zika

Published by Jenni Sidey

Across much of the world, a tiny striped insect shapes whether families stay healthy or get sick. The Asian tiger mosquito carries Dengue, Zika and Chikungunya, and traditional control efforts often struggle to keep up. A new genetic trick that literally changes how these mosquitoes look could help tip the balance in your favor. Why Separating Mosquito Sexes Matters Only female mosquitoes bite and pass on viruses. Males drink nectar, not blood. Many modern control programs release large numbers of males that are sterile or carry a trait that reduces survival in the next generation. When those males mate with wild females, fewer disease-carrying offspring survive. There is one big catch. These programs must release only males. If too many females slip through, they will still bite, still spread disease and may even weaken the program. Today, most facilities separate sexes by size during the pupal stage. That work is tedious, hard to automate and far from perfect. Characterization of the yellow mutant phenotype. (CREDIT: Nature Communications) Researchers led by Doron Zaada and Prof. Philippos …