The femme fatale Photuris. Photo by Bruce Marlin; click image for Creative Commons license and image source.

If I read my notes correctly, Thomas Eisner once had a pet thrush named Sybil who rejected only five insects out of the hundreds the entomologist offered her. They were all beetles. And one of them was a firefly.

For any other bird owner, this observation would have simply limited their pet’s meal options. But this was Thomas Eisner — one of the great entomologists and chemical ecologists of the 20th century. To him, it was a tantalizing clue, and he decided to find out what made the fireflies have all the thrush plate-appeal of haggis. What he stumbled onto was one of the great new natural history stories of the 20th century — and the latest in a string of Eisner’s greatest hits.

I know this because in fall of 1998 I was a student in BioNB 221 — Introduction to Animal Behavior — at Cornell University. Eisner, a professor at Cornell, taught the last six or so lectures, which I still have preserved in my notes. What I did not know at the time, and did not learn until afterward, was that Eisner was one of the great biologists of the 20th century. I found this out in later years, when his discoveries were featured in many an article at the New York Times, where I had a mysterious feeling of deja vu.

What I did know at the time was that I could not take my eyes off the screen while he was lecturing. I’m a fan of a good natural history story, which you may perhaps have gathered. Eisner — who was once E. O. Wilson‘s college roommate — was overflowing with them — and in many cases, because he’d figured them out himself. Sadly, Eisner died March 25. You can read more about his life in this fine remembrance by NYT reporter Natalie Angier*, whose daughter was lucky enough to inherit the contents of Eisner’s old burlap field bag and was, frighteningly to me, born around the time I sat listening to Eisner’s lectures. Angier wrote about his life. I want to share with you a few of the natural wonders I learned from him, sitting rapt in the darkened Uris Hall auditorium.

This Means War

Eisner’s specialty was the world of chemical warfare among plants and insects. Insects produce, steal, and reuse chemicals from plants and each other constantly. Millipedes can deploy hydrogen cyanide, whip scorpions acetic acid, and ants formic acid, but for Eisner, the poster child for entomological chemical defense was the bombardier beetle. “If you live on the ground,” he said, “you must either take flight quickly or defend yourself instantly.” The bombardier beetle went with option B.

The beetle takes chemicals called hydroquinones, mixes them with hydrogen peroxide and catalytic enzymes (peroxidase and catalase) in a reaction chamber in its hinder, and uses the resulting explosive formation of benzoquinones and heat to persuade frogs, ants, and spiders that their best meal options lie elsewhere.

Using grainy films he had shot himself, he showed us how beetles touched with probes could deploy a vicious defense with pinpoint accuracy in nearly any direction. He suspended the beetles over pH paper, so the 100°C benzoquinones they released would reveal their precision firepower.

This British film (which seems to have been created by intelligent design advocates who tried to abuse Eisner’s research for their ends**, so ignore the bit at the end. I couldn’t find another version, unfortunately.) incorporates some of the movies I saw that day, as well as explains how the beetle uses physical barriers to control its chemical defense system. I think you can even see Eisner in one of them for a few seconds at the end — he’s in the foreground.

And here’s David Attenborough describing the beetle in HD:

Don’t Feed on Me

Plants, too, load up on poison in hopes of warding off the hungry crowd. Nettle spines are filled with irritating chemicals, as are the latex canals or resin canals of flowering plants and conifers, respectively. Some plants store poisonous chemicals in their tissues like caffeine or nicotine, which in spite of their uplifting effects on humans, are actually insecticides.

But some insects have picked up on this gig, and begun using it to their advantage. Sawflies slice into the resin canals of pines and steal the sticky sap, storing it in special sacs for defense against ants. Monarch butterflies sequester milkweed toxins from their food, rendering themselves distasteful to predators. Assassin bugs coat their eggs with the noxious excretions from camphor weeds. Their young then reuse the chemicals for defense and to catch prey. We do this too, Eisner pointed out, by stealing the defense chemicals from fungi and other bacteria. We call them antibiotics.

Eisner told us of plant chemicals stolen and presented as nuptial gifts among moths, where female choose males whose flirting, aromatic antennae tell them they have stored the most alkaloid derivatives. That implies the male is both fittest and has the most to give to the pair’s offspring. For if the female mates, the male will transfer not only his sperm, but his alkaloid collection, which the female will carefully store with her eggs for the use of her young. Other moths do the same with salts they siphon from puddles.

And he told us of the evesdropping of kairomones — chemicals that, unlike pheromoes, used for intraspecies communication (like the moths), or allomones, which benefit the emitter of an interspecies pair (like the benzoquinones of the bombardiers or the stinking of skunks), benefit the receiver and betray the emitter. Think, for example, of the carbon dioxide that gives you away to mosquitoes; any scent, really, that betrays prey to predators can qualify. Eisner called it a “chemical gestalt”, the effect of “inevitable chemical leakage”. But the tables can also be turned. Predatory rotifers called Asplanchna unwittingly emit chemicals that alert prey rotifers called Brachionus to grow defensive spikes (read more about rotifers from this blog here and here).

One of my favorite Eisner stories, one that has especially stuck with me all these years, was about true bugs entomologists were attempting to rear in petri dishes on damp paper towels. The bugs’ development was, however, stalling; they could not be coaxed to adulthood. The scientists were baffled. Until, that is, someone noticed the paper towels were made from balsam fir, a tree that emits allomones to stunt insect development. This chemical was, apparently, surviving the paper-making process and continuing to thwart the trees’ insect enemies — even in death.

Bolas spiders use imitation pheromones — another allomone — to lure male moths in search of a date (the females, apparently, are immune to the spider’s charms). This video depicts the unfortunate result:

You may have heard of parasitoid wasps — the Alien-style predators of spiders, caterpillars and other insects that lay their eggs in their prey, where the young maggots proceed to devour their hosts’ organs while still alive before finally using their hosts’ spent husks as pupae from which young wasps emerge. But perhaps you did not know that some plants injured by caterpillars or aphids call out chemically to parasitoids to defend them. But the story gets better; the immune system of the host in some cases is destroyed by viruses injected by the parasoitoid wasps along with their eggs. “And(I underlined this in my notes) the viruses have also been incorporated into the wasp genome.” To which I further wrote, “1 organism now? Whoa.”

He told us how mammals, too, use pheromones. Babies can distinguish their mother’s milk from others, he said, and the scent of male armpits can regularize erratic female ovulation. In mice, the scent of strange male urine blocks implantation of fertilized eggs in female mice; the effect and reason may be similar to an article I just saw last week about mares aborting fetuses to save themselves investing energy in foals likely to be killed by rival stallions anyway. This could explain the spectacularly high miscarriage rate in mares (around 30%) who are trucked out to mate with top stallions but housed while pregnant with other males. That this is likely to have not one whit of effect on the way breeders practice horse husbandry is testament to the often hidebound thinking of humans.

The Bee-Letters of Flowers

But on top of all this research into chemical crossfire, Eisner also dabbled in the world of light and visual communication. Those who have studied physics know the electromagnetic spectrum of which light is a part is a vast array of energy. Earth’s atmosphere filters much that arrives, and most of what makes it through falls in the 320 to 2300 nm range. What we perceive as visible light falls in the 380 to 750 nm range. But that leaves a large part of the spectrum invisible to us. What if other animals could see different colors or different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum? As it turns out, they do.

We cannot see ultraviolet. But, through experiments worked out by a whole host of Germans, we know bees do. Conversely, bees cannot see red. Their vision lies in the 340 – 650 nm range. Blue, red, and green are the human primary colors. But the bee primary colors are yellow, blue, and ultraviolet. That implies there are a spectrum of colors that they see that we cannot. My mind bent a bit as I heard this — there’s a whole world of color out there that we can’t see!

And those colors needed names. Yellow + blue we can see along with bees — we call that blue green. But what about blue + ultraviolet? That was dubbed “bee blue”. Yellow + ultraviolet? “bee purple”. And, as it turns out, flowers are adorned in these shades, invisible to us but brilliantly displayed for bees. Flowers probably first used UV-absorbing pigments as sunscreen, Eisner said, and only later turned to them to decorate their petals. Now, bee blue and bee purple form pollen guides for bees, often flecking the tips of flowers and leaving a yellow disc in the center as a bullseye. You can see the effect in this photo collage of black-eyed susans with ultraviolet tips and a yellow center, though the bee would see both yellow and ultraviolet simultaneously as bee purple.

Cucumber flowers in natural light(left), and in ultraviolet falsely colored yellow(right). To bees, the flowers would appear bee purple with a yellow target -- the pollen guide. Creative Commons kevincollins123. Click for license and link.

The inability of bees to see red means that pink are red flowers are almost never pollinated by bees. On the contrary, only butterflies and hummingbirds — which are not red-blind — are attracted to red flowers. Eisner wrote papers about his experiments in this world as well, examples of which you can see here and here.

Which brings us back to what is likely his most famous experiments in light communication — the Tale of Photinus and Photuris. Following up on the expectorated clues provided by Sybil, Eisner extracted chemicals from the fireflies with various solvents. He discovered that the firefly she spat out — Photinus — contained a steroid called lucibufagin. When fireflies are caught, they “bleed” hemolymph full of this chemical. Spiders who catch and taste them let them go. They even release fruit flies merely painted with the chemical, the scientists discovered. Eisner found Photinus was chock-full of the chemical right from the start of the season. A larger firefly, Photuris, also contained this chemical. But only the females. And only later in the season. He began to glimpse the truth of a dark story.

Male fireflies searching for females make a species-specific pattern of flashes. Females respond with a single blink, but with a species-specific time delay from the male call. Photuris, coveting the chemicals of Photinus, imitates that response. When the male lands thinking he is about to get lucky, he gets eaten instead, and the female accumulates the chemical that allows her to escape predation by spiders and yes, thrushes.

How could one man do and learn so much? Perhaps because he never let the Lab get in the way of Life. This passage from Angier’s piece, in particular, explains why I love Eisner — and to a large degree why being a modern biologist was not for me.

Ian Baldwin, a professor of molecular ecology at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany, who studied with Dr. Eisner  in the 1980s, said of his mentor: “He articulated the value of natural history discovery in a time of natural history myopia. We train biologists today who can’t identify more than four species, who only know how to do digital biology, but the world of analog biology is the world we live in. Tom was a visionary for nonmodel systems. He created narratives around everything he did.”

In today’s “shiny polished science world, he was proof that there is no experience that can substitute for being out in nature,” said Dr. Berenbaum. “It’s classy, not low-rent, to stay grounded in biological reality.”

Thank you for the stories, Dr. Eisner, wherever you are.

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*My answer to the question of “Who are your favorite science writers?” with “Natalie Angier” probably terminated my interview for a science journalism internship at a major daily newspaper about seven years ago. The editor seemed to lose interest in me at that point. I wasn’t going to lie, and I’m still offended on her behalf.

** Indeed, they have also done so to my graptolites post. They linked to my blog post as part of a post using graptolites as proof of “stasis”.

Even as I write, a hungry, hungry swarm of one of America’s legendary scourges is crunching and munching and chewing up hay, wheat, and alfalfa fields in that part of the country. Airborne sprayers dispensing moult-disrupting chemicals are currently getting slimed every time they fly with a film of grasshopper goo. In a normal year, one sprayer said he might tackle 2,000 acres. This year he is looking at flying one million. 

Americans have, I think, a particular trauma about these insects, which may be part of our national aversion to insects in general, a topic I’ll shortly be exploring in a guest post over at the Beetle Queen blog, where I’ve kindly been invited to guest-blog. For now, let’s just say we and grasshoppers have had issues.

Grasshoppers belong to the Orthoptera (Look for and explore them here), an order of insects that also includes the katydids and crickets. The notorious “Mormon crickets” that legendarily nearly wiped out the Mormons’ first crop (they attribute their deliverance to the miraculous intervention of California gulls, which are even now the state bird) in Utah were actually katydids, but still in this order. The members of Orthoptera have enlarged hind legs (the better to hop with), well-developed compound eyes (the better to see you with), and very efficient mandibles (the better to annihilate crops with).

You may think of insects as always developing from squelchy, soft-bodied larval young, but it turns out this is not the case. Many insects, including grasshoppers, use an alternative system involving nymphs, pint-sized (pea sized?) versions of adults. No maggots necessary.

The insects that do this are called hemimetabolous, which means something like partially metamorphic. This distinguishes them from the ancestral form, called ametabolous (“not metamorphic”), found in silverfish (fun fact: one alternate name is “carpet sharks”), bristletails, and other less-derived (aka primitive) insects in which the animal just keeps moulting and growing its whole life, and holometabolous insects like butterflies, in which there is an Extreme Makeover: Insect Edition that usually involves some sort of hideous larva and walled-off pupa.

Hemimetabolous insects like grasshoppers, cockroaches, mantids, true bugs, dragonflies, damselflies, mayflies and stoneflies* hatch looking more or less like their elders.

That’s not to say there’s *no* difference between nymphs and adults. Notice anything odd about this picture?

Creative Commons D. Gordon E. Robertson

Look at the wings — they’re just little flaps. In fact, in grasshopper nymphs, the little flaps have an even stranger behavior. They go from right-side-up to upside-down and back again. Or actually, upside down to right-side-up and back, since the part of the wing with the thickest vein (like the front edge of a fly’s wing) is actually on their stomach side in the adults. Yes, that’s right. They’re flip-flopper hoppers. In the above photo, the wings are in their intermediate position.

Other nymphs undergo sometimes significant changes in color and shape, but the overall form remains the same. The different juvenile stages of insects, whether larval or nymphal, are beautifully called instars (Instar, by the way, is one of my cellar doors).

The reason I mention all this is that the plane-sliming swarms of grasshoppers currently occupying Wyoming were, as of a week and a half ago, still only tiny nymphs. From the NYT:

On Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Mahnke from the county Weed and Pest office drove out to one particular hatching ground that she said was without equal. In recent days, she said she easily counted 40 to 50 or more tiny grasshoppers, many still the size of a grain of rice, per square yard. If multiplied across five million affected acres, they would yield a trillion insects or more.

Walking through the calf-high grass in such a field feels like something out of primordial biology 101. Every step stirs a tiny, nervous crowd, jumping every which direction — up, down, away and onto one’s pants. Adult size in such numbers, vastly larger, jumping and flying — and by the adult phase, eating in volume — would do Alfred Hitchcock’s best nightmare one better in a dozen paces.

Stay tuned.

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*Nymphal aquatic insects are, for historic and confoundingly confusing reasons, referred to as larvae even though they are technically nymphs. Or, just to make things more confusing, they’re sometimes called naiads, a holdover from the days all biologists (and really, all students), had to master Latin, Greek, and the classics. Is it naughty of me to sometimes wish for those days?

This is an abstract, arty, and contemplative film that, though it takes no overt position on its subjects and never states it explicitly, poses the question: Why are the Japanese, alone among world cultures, so into insects? There is no pat answer. The filmmaker presents clues, and it is up to you, the viewer, to process what you’re given and draw a conclusion. The ordering seems important sometimes; confusing, contradictory, or enigmatic at others. Along the way, there are many scenes that are difficult to fit in — possibly by design — like jigsaw pieces that may or may not belong in the box. Many are beautiful little treats that can be savored visually in their own right. One short shot, possibly my favorite of the film, simply focuses on the soft patter of rain on water and shows an Escheresque and seemingly impossible illusion of the water moving both left and right at the same time. It must be seen to be believed.

It takes some patience, and perhaps repeat viewings, to fully digest Oreck’s film. In addition to the enigmatic scenes, the film is in Japanese with subtitles, and the subtitles sometimes move a bit quickly, making it tricky to take in both the visuals and the narrative at the same time. But the film was creative, original, and unique. Oreck said after the screening that she *had* to make the film — there was no choice about it. No one else had or would tell that story unless she did.  I can relate to and support that kind of vision and passion. I’d rather watch 100 Beetle Queens than 5 McNature documentaries (*cough* Mcgillivray-Freeman *cough*). Oreck opens a window into a beautiful little world of beetles and a culture of insects that you’d probably never stumble upon otherwise. It was so heartening to see Japanese children actually playing with beetles instead of video games, learning to pin butterflies in school, and going along on insect catch-and-release expeditions or firefly appreciation trips with their parents as a fun way to spend a Friday night. If only we should be so lucky here. Recommended.

I also love the way natural patterns are repetitive*. Similar patterns pop up in the oddest places. Look at the Charter Oak on the Connecticut quarter

and you’re looking at the search pattern of a feeding plasmodial slime mold (a giant ameoboid eukaryote), Physarum polycephalum,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomtruth/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

which sends out protoplasmic veins in all directions in search of its prey: bacteria, fungal spores, and other microbes.

Does math underlie that too?

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*I also love how this video was for his mom. : )

It’s a whip scorpion, in the order Thelyphonida, although this one has sadly somehow lost its long thin tail, or “whip” (called technically, like those of protists and sperm, a flagellum — but they are *not* evolutionarily-related structures). This one seems to be very well fed, though thankfully not on Jen. I’m taking a short arachnology class at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science right now, and this was one of our subjects. According to my classmate, these animals, also commonly called vinegarroons because of the defensive acetic acid (vinegar) glands they possess near their tails, are the nerds of the arachnid world: “They just kind of bumble along, smelling like a salad.” Raptoral pedipalps (big scary pincers) aside, the one I held did seem to be a sweet, gentle creature. I’ve now held a whip scorpion! Yay!

I haven’t talked about arthropods at this blog much yet, and a paper published in Nature a few weeks ago together with my play date with Stumpy, above,  provide the perfect opportunity to correct that. This post is called “The Creepy-Crawly Branch of the Family Tree”, but it could equally well be called the Floaty-Swimmy Branch, or the Bloody-Sucky Branch or the Borey-Eggs-Iny-that-Hatchy-and-Devour-the-Insides-of-your-Hosty Branch. There are arthropods that do all these things. So let’s have a look at the broad shape of the tree as revealed by this new analysis of the evolutionary relationships among members of Arthropoda:

Arthropod relationships revealed by phylogenomic analysis of nuclear protein-coding sequences Jerome C. Regier, Jeffrey W. Shultz, Andreas Zwick, April Hussey, Bernard Ball, Regina Wetzer, Joel W. Martin & Clifford W. Cunningham Nature 463, 1079-1083(25 February 2010) doi:10.1038/nature08742

Now there are a lot of scary words on this diagram, it’s true. But take heart! Look how many drawings of awesome creatures there are! And it’s way better than the alternative that most biologists have to deal with, which I also had to learn to read in school. Before I get to what’s new and cool about this tree, let’s talk a little bit about what trees like this are, and then about the main groups you see on it.

This tree is called a phylogeny, or phylogram (you also hear cladogram). It is a hypothesis of evolutionary history. That doesn’t mean scientists are hypothesizing that these creatures evolved. That’s a foregone conclusion. The hypothesis is what the specific relationships are between the different groups. In other words, the question is, “How is everyone related?”, and this tree is one possible answer. In some trees, as appears to be the case here, the branch lengths are proportional to the evolutionary distance between the different groups. That is, the longer the branches, the more evolvin’ that’s been going on. Evolution, in this case, is measured in DNA nucleotide changes. DNA, as you’ll recall, is made of many base pairs called nucleotides. There are four kinds. When one changes to another, that is called a point mutation. The more of these changes that build up, the greater the evolutionary distance between groups.

For this tree, scientists studied 62 genes in 75 arthropod species. They sequenced them all and compared the changes. They put all the data into a special computer program designed to figure out which sequences are most similar to which other sequences in the five-jillion possible combinations of relationships embodied by 62 genes in 75 species. Then they cranked the computers up to 11 and probably waited a few days (or maybe even weeks! I have heard stories of scientists locking computers in closets during this time) for them to churn out the solution to this hyper-space chess problem. The lone tree you see above is the result.

So what do we see? At the top is Hexapoda, which as you may guess are insects and friends — the six-legged among us. Below them you see an interesting group called Xenocarida. More on them later. Below that group are the Vericrustacea and Oligostraca, which are both, as far as I can tell, basically crustaceans. In both groups you see some old friends: the copepods (some freshwater species of which carry Guinea Worm larvae, a topic I covered in January), the ostracods (who we looked at in a post on deep-sea bioluminscent organisms last year), and the Decapoda, which has a high taxonomic tastiness index: it includes lobsters, crayfish, crabs, and shrimp.

Next are the myriapods: centipedes and millipedes. Below that are the chelicerates, or organisms with special mouthparts called chelicerae — sea spiders (pynogonids), horseshoe crabs, scorpions, ticks, mites, tarantulas, spiders, and Stumpy. And rounding out the base of the tree are the outgroups — the groups we use to “root” the tree, or give it a direction. They are usually the most closely related organisms not in the group of interest, here arthropods. In this case, they are the ridiculously cutely-named water bears or moss piglets — the tardigrades — and velvet worms, the onychophorans. Velvet worms are half of the subject of a crazy-*** theory that somehow got published last year hypothesizing that metamorphosing insects like butterflies were the result of an unholy chimerical union between velvet worms and a larva-less insect.

Also looming large in the arthropods but not on the tree simply for reasons of chronological discrimination (and also because, being extinct, we have no DNA to sample) are the the trilobites. According to my copy of Colin Tudge’s Variety of Life, they branched off somewhere between the Tardigrades and Chelicerates.

OK, so now that you’ve waded through all of that, what were the surprises in this new tree? Scientists also used to think millipedes and centipedes were closely related to insects. They’re both land arthropods, after all. My two college biology texts (published 1995 and 1996) show this relationship, though Tudge(2000) is agnostic on whether millipedes and centipedes or crustaceans are more closely related to Insects. Now it appears certain that, since all crustaceans are aquatic, insects and centipedes/millipedes represent a seperate evolutionary invasion of land by arthropods, much as seals and whales represent two seperate re-invasions of the sea by mammals.

This study also supports the hypothesis that insects evolved from a crustacean, which is why we can’t use the term “Crustacea” any more — the group as traditonally defined doesn’t include the insects, but this tree shows that it should (since the principles of modern evolution-based taxonomy require proper groups to include an ancestor and ALL of its descendants). The term “Reptiles” poses the same dilemma, because it should technically include  birds. So some scientists have stopped using that term as a taxonomic classification, too. Little-r reptiles is OK, though, as informal name for the group.

Finally, it appears hexapods’ (insects’) closest relatives are an obscure underwater-cave-dwelling group newly dubbed the Xenocarida. Carl Zimmer goes into that in admirable detail here.

But the take-home message of this tree for you is simple: look, admire, and marvel at the variety and abundance. In fact, I give you a homework assignment, should you choose to accept it: pick a group on that tree that looks interesting that you’ve never heard of before. Look it up. Find out what it is, what it does for a living, and where it directs its mail. You’ll be glad you did, I promise.

Then six years later he produced “Winged Migration”, another stunning yet nearly wordless work of art that was an order of magnitude better than the popular favorite “March of the Penguins” released a few years later*. Again he displayed his talent for engaging us emotionally in the lives, struggles, and wonders of being a bird.

Though I still prefer “Microcosmos” (insects are more intriguing to me than most birds), this film has also stuck with me. I’ll never forget the moment when a sage grouse first performed (WARNING: SPOILER. Do not click link if you plan to see the film. Which I hope I have convinced you you should) its mating tupperware burp and Dolly-Parton-inspired ladies’-man dance in the film (clip not from the film but this must be seen to be believed). The whole audience gasped, and then laughed. Several years later I was lucky enough to see this live when I moved to Wyoming.

So it was with great excitement that I read today that Perrin has released a new film in France, “Oceans“, that is dominating the box office. I cannot, cannot wait until it surfaces here.

From the Time Magazine article on the film:

Most French reviewers seem to agree, however, that Océans is Perrin’s most effective work yet in terms of evoking solidarity with endangered nature. It is part of his agenda. He told Le Monde, “We’re entertainers, and I don’t want to be pretentious and start moralizing. But Océans is part of our means of persuasion. We must react urgently, protect, create blue helmets for the sea. Otherwise, humanity is headed toward an unbearable solitude.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1957939,00.html#ixzz0eLpwgXH8

You all know that I couldn’t agree more. It is the philosophy of this blog too.

And in case you’re curious, if you want to see how they packaged it for “American” audiences, see here. This does not speak well of our national character, or at least what Hollywood thinks is the only way they can market to “American” audiences. Apparently, if it’s not warm-blooded and fuzzy, or involves a gripping action scene with a pounding techno soundtrack, we’re not interested. Sigh.

Still can’t wait to see the film. Yay, Jacques Perrin! The world needs as many of his films as we can get. And Jacques, in case you’re reading this, the world is ready for the first big-screen protist, slime mold, diatom, lichen, alga, and fungus documentary. Trust me. Thank you.

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* I actually felt March of the Penguins was only an average nature documentary. My feeling at the time was its popularity could only be explained by the disappearance of all other good old-fashioned nature documentaries, and people remembering what they liked about them. I’ve already talked about “The Animal Bothering Show” style pioneered fairly colorfully by Steve Irwin but copied rather lifelessly by many others. Most of these shows teach you very little coherent about nature — certainly not in the way a David Attenborough documentary does or Wild America did, calmly and quietly following the cutthroat trout through the seasons of its life for a year, inviting you to meditatively take in the sound of the bubbling brook as the fish goes about the business of life. Then again, I’m a nerd. I probably wouldn’t get bored at an 8-hour Proust lecture. : )

Isn’t it cute that they make a heart shape when they mate? It almost makes up for the fact the male has a penis from hell. Although it’s by no means the most frightening I’ve seen. There are many insects (of which bedbugs are a prime example) that mate by “traumatic insemination“, in which the male stabs the female with his often-horrible, spiky penis and injects sperm directly into the female’s body cavity. [Pause while female readers silently scream in horror.] Brought to you by the James Cameron School of Insect Adaptations Worthy of Sci-Fi Horror Flicks (TM).(Motto: “They mostly come out at night. Mostly.”)

In any case, notice that these are damselflies. Many people confuse them with dragonflies. Here is your natural history lesson for the day. This is a damselfly:

And this is a dragonfly:

Note the chief differences: Most damsels neatly fold their wings behind them when they land. Dragons hold them out like biplanes. Careful observers will also note that dragons’ wing pairs do not match as closely as damsel wings (the dragonflies’ hind wings tend to extend tailward farther) and damselfly eyes are much further separated. Almost googly, one might say.

Here’s a tree to show you how they’re related. Their clades’ (groups’) technical names are Zygoptera (damselflies) and Anisoptera (dragonflies). Notice that the uneven wings are right in dragonflies’ formal name: an-iso-ptera: “not — same — winged”.  They’re both in the insect order Odonata; back out via the little arrow on the left to see how they fit into the Insects.

This weekend I climbed to the top of Green Mountain for the first time. If you are familiar with Boulder, it is the right mountain of the two bearing flatirons visible from town. But the top didn’t just contain the usual stunning views. As I neared it, I noticed a few small swarms of lady bugs. Notice the plants on the left. Here’s what was on those plants:

And as I climbed higher, I steadily saw more. Soon the ladybug population exploded beyond all reason. The air was filled with ladybugs flying to and fro, landing on our packs, clothes, and faces. The orange masses in the following pictures are not orange Xanthoria lichens. They are carpets of ladybugs.

This guy clearly cannot believe how many ladybugs he is seeing. Either that, or he is laughing at the lady bugs on the photographer.

After consulting the interwebz, it seems what we saw were not native ladybugs, but the Multicolored Asian Lady Beetle, Harmonia axyridis. Unlike our native and presumably sober, upstanding, red-shelled and red-blooded All-American ladybugs, these introduced (from Asia for pest control) guys/gals have multi-colored and variously spotted orange shells. They swarm at the end of summer to find cracks and crevices in which to kick back, order pizza, hook up the cable, and watch 800 hours of the Home & Garden network until spring. Life’s rough sometimes.

In case you were wondering, it’s more proper to call ladybugs “lady beetles” (the scientifically PC term), because true bugs are in the taxon Hemiptera, and our friends are not bugs, but beetles, which form the massive taxon Coleoptera. The most distinguishing character of the beetles are those hard wing covers, known to science by the beautiful name “elytra” (sing. = elytron), which sounds as if it should be the name of a character in a play by Aeschylus. Here you can find the tree containing Coleoptera (the beetles) at the Tree of Life Web Project.

To give you a feel for the kinetics of the situation, here’s a video of the same event taken above Boulder somewhere at the end of July. Next time you want to terrorize the local aphid population without actually buying a gallon of lady beetles, just show this film in your garden.

5D and EX1 Lady Bug Swarm from Michael Ramsey on Vimeo.

And finally, just for kicks, here’s the picnic that inspired this “block party” — a blast from the past for some of us:

I love the smell of cyanide in the morning. Smells like . . . Desmoxytes.

Because nothing says, “Don’t Eat Me!” quite like a neon pink millipede (unless you’re two, in which case it says, “All You Can Eat Candy Buffet!”), I give you: The Pink Cyanide Millipede.

In addition to its easily pronounceable Thai (Mangkorn chomphoo) and Latin (Desmoxytes purpurosea) names, it features a pleasing almond aroma (courtesy of the cyanide it’s oozing).  Pink millipede saté sticks, anyone?

To see more bizarre animals either discovered or more fully investigated in the last few years (including our old friend the barreleye fish and the can’t-miss flesh-eating ghost slug), check out this gallery of bizarre animals over at New Scientist. You’ll be glad you did!