fun
awild | March 2, 2010What was that bizarre balloon-spangled creature?
It's the larva of a Theope butterfly in the family Riodinidae. Here is the full photo, from Panama:
Theope, tended by Azteca velox
An infinite number of highly valuable Myrmecos Points(â¢) go to commentator JasonC, who not only identified the larva but researched the function of the balloons.
awild | March 1, 2010
What's this?
Five points for picking the family, five points for the genus. And infinity points for figuring out what the those balloon-like structures are for. I have no idea.
awild | February 28, 2010A short clip from the BBC program "Ant Attack"
Driver ant males are astoundingly strange creatures. They are larger, more muscular, more exaggerated than most other male ants. The reason is likely linked to the behavior shown in the above video: males must first be accepted by a gauntlet of choosy workers.
A classic paper by Franks and Hoelldobler (1987) describes the theory. This preference of workers for bulkier males- and a corresponding slaughter of smaller or otherwise unsuitable ones- drives an evolutionary trajectory towards increasing monstrosity. It's an ant version of the peacock's…
cagapakis | February 28, 2010My labmates and I love Lady Gaga. Like, love love love. Enough to make a parody fan video of Bad Romance. It is my pleasure to present to you "Lab Romance", a production of Hydrocalypse Industries. Enjoy!
Lyrics after the jump!
ø⸨°º¤ø⸸âø¤º°¨¸âø¤º°¨ ¨°º¤øâ¸LADYâø¤º°¨ âø¤º°¨ GAGA `°º¤ø¨°º¤ø⸸âø¤º°¨¸âø¤º°¨ ¨°º¤ø
Music by Lady Gaga, lyrics by Tami Lieberman and Jake Wintermute, performed by Jake Wintermute, editing by me and Patrick Boyle, dancing by the Silver Lab.
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh!
Oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh!
Caught in a lab romance…
cagapakis | February 26, 2010Some of the responses to my post about synthetically expanding the genetic code have highlighted some of the weaknesses in my argument about the safety of using a different genetic code. Namely, that "life finds a way", that we can't really ever know for sure what will happen when we release a synthetic organism in the wild, or how natural selection will act on them. The science fiction scenarios where engineered organisms escape, break out of the designed restrictions on their growth and take over in new and terrifying ways are compelling, frightening, and instructive for thinking about…
awild | February 25, 2010Speaking of bug horror movies:
If you can make it to Champaign-Urbana this weekend, the 2010 Insect Fear Film Festival will feature The Black Scorpion (1957) and Ice Crawlers (2003). The grad students are assembling art displays, face painting, and an impressively large arthropod petting zoo. The've even shipped in live horseshoe crabs, as well as bess beetles, tarantulas, ginormous grasshoppers & cockroaches, and others. It's tremendous fun.
awild | February 23, 2010A video from Cambridge University highlights an infectiously enthusiastic Chris Clemente as he figures out how ants stick to smooth surfaces:
Wow.
Two things strike me about the video. First, they simplified the science for a lay audience without fundamentally changing it. That's something of a rarity, as any scientist who has seen their work covered in the media can attest. Second, they did this while retaining a sense of humor and the strong sense of humanity in the scientific process.
Most scientists I know have a similarly intense fascination with their subjects- that's a rich vein for…
stoat | February 20, 2010I was dragged screaming from work at the riducously early hour of 7:20 on friday night, by my wife, to listen to this. Being a barbarian, and knowing only that it was by Debussy, I assumed it was a concert. But no, 'tis an opera, although possibly a slightly odd one, since it is largely a transcription of Maeterlinck's play in which people sing lines others would just say. As the opera notes said, and wiki later confirms, this is a "symbolist" play, and we had good fun spotting "symbols", which was most of it. For example at one point there is an odd scene in which Yniold sees the sheep not…
cagapakis | February 19, 2010Here's my first little editing project for my documentary film class. A day in the lab, but much much faster paced.
awild | February 16, 2010I am impressed. Several of you* figured out the mystery behavior: reflex bleeding, a defensive response employed by some arthropods with especially nasty hemolymph to deter predators. A couple of you even pegged the identity of the mystery arthropod, a blister beetle in the genus Epicauta. Here's the uncropped photo:
An Epicauta blister beetle reflex bleeds when grasped with forceps.
Five points each to Tim, Ainsley, Neil, and Dave. And, ten points each to Pete and TGIQ.
So. Um. Don't spend them all in one place...
Posing on a mesquite flower.
*what's up with all the guessers-of-mysteries…
awild | February 15, 2010What's going on here?
Five points for naming the organism, and five points for the behavior.
cagapakis | February 15, 2010The future potential of synthetic biology is usually discussed in terms of applications in fields like medicine, food science, and the environment. Genetically engineered life forms are being designed to make medicines cheaply, to target tumor cells, to make more nutritious food, or to make agricultural plants that are easier to grow with less of an environmental impact, to clean up pollution or produce sustainable biofuels. What if synthetic biology systems were instead designed for use in culture or entertainment?
David Benqué, a student in the Design Interactions program at the Royal…
awild | February 15, 2010
We here at Myrmecos Blog don't care to voice our opinion of talk show host Glenn Beck. But we are rather enamored of dung beetles, those gorgeously ornamented insects who prevent the world from being buried in feces.
Thus, we were pleased to find the following Facebook project in our inbox this weekend:
Can This Dung Beetle Get More Fans Than Glenn Beck?
If you're on facebook, and you like dung beetles, now's your chance to become a fan.
h/t Jesse.
clock | February 11, 2010Guy in a Faraday Suite getting hit by 500,000 volts ... lightning shooting out of his fingertips.
Via Frank Swain and Johannes Wiebus
cagapakis | February 11, 2010BioShock2 came out a couple days ago, the sequel to the wildly successful video game BioShock. BioShock is a first-person-shooter video game set in Rapture, an underwater city overrun by violently insane genetically engineered mutants called "Splicers", creepy zombie-like girls, "Little Sisters", that harvest corpses for "ADAM"--sea slug stem-cells that provide super-human strength, regenerative powers, and the ability to rewrite the human genome with the injection of "plasmids"--and genetically engineered "Big Daddies" that protect them, mentally blank superhumans grafted into enormous…