Dragonflies, Insects, and Creepy Crawlies

[pg]

And of course- not to be outdone, Chef Bun Lai is excited that he can put cicadas on his sustainable sushi menu. He believes that eating insects is the future of food. Apparently once boiled and prepared lightly cicadas taste a lot like soft shell crabs. Hmmm...

[LFC]

Who knew that cicadas were Republican terrorists?

Journalists set to accompany Joe Biden on his first overseas trip as president were delayed on their outbound flight to England on Tuesday night — because of cicadas.

A swarm of the noisy insects ― members of the billions-strong Brood X that emerges across the United States every 17 years ― flew into the engines of the chartered White House press plane as it was on the runway at Dulles International Airport, reported The New York Times.

The pilots were forced to return the aircraft to the departure gate. The bugs were to blame, a spokesperson for Delta Air Lines told The Washington Post.

A different charter plane was set to leave early Wednesday, when Biden will also depart on Air Force One, reported CNN.

[LFC]

Aaaaaaand they're back.

Just as the world prepares to say goodbye to one 2020 horror in COVID-19, it says hello, again, to another: murder hornets. The first “murder hornet”—officially named the Asian giant hornet—was spotted near Seattle earlier this month and confirmed by both the Washington State and U.S. Departments of Agriculture on Wednesday. Experts from the agencies believe the male hornet is from a prior season, as males typically don’t surface until at least late July, and they aren’t sure how it ended up in Marysville, located in Snohomish County. A USDA plant administrator announced plans to survey Snohomish to determine whether hornets have formed nests there.

[AnBr]

[LFC]

[LFC]

Mark Hammil as moths.

[LFC]

I'll toss this in here rather than starting a plant thread.

In the boglands of the northwestern United States and Canada, an unassuming plant has been trapping and eating insects, totally unbeknownst to science. Today, researchers report that Triantha occidentalis is now the 12th known independent evolution of carnivory—the consumption of animal flesh—in the plant kingdom.

Different families of plants developed a taste for meat separately, and T. occidentalis, in the order Alismatales, now adds its name to the 630-odd plant species that eat animals, usually because their local soils are nutrient-poor, particularly lacking nitrogen and phosphorous, important nutrients for carrying out photosynthesis. This plant was targeted because a previous genetic analysis showed it lacked a gene that is often missing in carnivorous plants, tipping off the researchers that T. occidentalis may be more than it seemed.

Though T. occidentalis lives relatively close to urban centers, it was not officially recognized as carnivorous until now. The research team, hailing from the University of Wisconsin and the University of British Columbia in Canada, determined that the plant traps insects on its stem using specialized sticky hairs that aren’t strong enough to catch bigger, pollinating insects. The new finding is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[andydp]

I never thought I could add something relevant to this thread, but here it is:

[LFC]

Aug 12, 2021 17:05:22 GMT andydp said:

I never thought I could add something relevant to this thread, but here it is:

I think I actually posted an article about this over on the old TRS board.

[andydp]

Aug 12, 2021 19:40:02 GMT LFC said:

Aug 12, 2021 17:05:22 GMT andydp said:

I never thought I could add something relevant to this thread, but here it is:

I think I actually posted an article about this over on the old TRS board.

I was actually reliving some of my dating adventures.

[AnBr]

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Attachments:

[pnwguy]

Aug 15, 2021 5:02:41 GMT AnBr said:

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That's some damn good Photoshop work.

[LFC]

Chicago to Mexico is one hell of a flight for a butterfly.

An Orland Park, Illinois, woman who raises butterflies in her home hit the monarch migration jackpot: A tiny tag affixed to one of her 2020 butterflies was recovered in the mountainous region of central Mexico where Midwestern migratory monarchs spend the winter.

The female butterfly, listed as ACBM486, flew about 2,000 miles from Orland Park, in suburban Chicago, to the El Rosario nature reserve near Ocampo.

“I was super, super excited,” said Debbie Kostolansky, 62, who grows butterfly and hummingbird gardens, and has raised monarchs for five years.

“I just kind of felt like I did something good.”

The monarch population has been in decline in the last 20 years, spurring conservation efforts, including large-scale tagging with tiny stickers. The nonprofit Monarch Watch education and research program, which provides stickers and compiles lists of those recovered, puts the odds of having a tag turn up in Mexico at about 1 in 100.

Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum chief curator Doug Taron, who has tagged hundreds of monarchs over the past eight years, said he has never had a monarch turn up on a list of recovered tags.

“It is very, very unusual to get tags retrieved,” Taron said. “Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the released tagged monarchs get found.”

[LFC]

This is "citizen science" at work. Amateurs are producing amounts of data for fun that science would never have the money to collect.

The scientific community around Lake Tahoe is buzzing after an amazing discovery by the Tahoe Institute for Natural Science (TINS). The non-profit organization was hosting a citizen science event in June in the Donner Lake area when participants discovered a Spiny Baskettail (Epitheca spinigera) dragonfly. The species was first discovered in the region over 100 years ago but had not been seen here since.

The species is relatively common across forested Canada and parts of the northern U.S., but in California, it is known from only four sites, three of which are close to the Oregon border. Within California, the Spiny Baskettail was first spotted at Donner Lake in 1914 by Clarence Hamilton Kennedy. They were never again seen anywhere around Tahoe despite considerable effort to relocate them. The accepted wisdom among California dragonfly enthusiasts and biologists was that this population was long gone, perhaps a victim of heavy recreational use at Donner Lake.

Kathy Biggs, who has written regional field guides on dragonflies and keeps careful track of odonate records in California, was thrilled by the rediscovery. “Never, in the last three decades of intensive California dragonfly studies, has any species ‘returned from the dead.’”

[LFC]

There's some big spiders showing up in Georgia.

[AnBr]

aeon.co/videos/witness-the-majesty-of-moths-taking-flight-at-6000-frames-per-second

[Bact PhD]

Florida Woman extracts a seven-foot beehive from behind a shower in St. Pete.

www.fox13news.com/news/7-foot-beehive-removed-from-st-petersburg-home-revealing-100-pounds-of-honey-behind-bathroom-wall

She said there were about 100 pounds of honey in the wall and estimated between 60,000 and 80,000 bees were living in the hive.

Once she got the queen safely removed, Bixler said all the bees were taken back to her bee farm, "How’s Your Day Honey."

[LFC]

I'm not particularly fond of millipedes but I know they freak some people out completely. Good thing for them that these babies don't still roam the planet.

A massive ancient millipede has snatched the crown for the largest ever found. Discovered on a beach in Northern England, the fossil also breaks another record – it’s the largest arthropod of all time. Knocking the sea scorpion off the top spot, the giant is estimated to measure a whopping 2.7 meters (almost 9 feet) and weigh in at 50 kilograms (110 pounds). That’s roughly the size of a car.

Just imagine that scuttling about and be thankful you weren’t around 326 million years ago to witness it.

[AnBr]

social.digitaltrends.com/s/hairy-critter-virginia

[goldenvalley]

Here's a sad bee story.  A confluence of negligence and agriculture conducted in places that are not suited to it.

When Sarah McElrea arrived at the Anchorage airport last Friday to pick up the 800 pounds of honeybees she was having shipped from Sacramento, she got the first sense of a disaster in the making: The bees — some five million of them — were in Atlanta, not Anchorage.The 200 crates of bees were the first of two shipments coming in from Sacramento designated for more than 300 beekeepers in Alaska and to provide much needed pollination services for apple orchards and nurseries, she said in an interview.

Previous honeybee shipments had made their way to Alaska aboard Delta Air Lines flights from Sacramento to Seattle and then on to Anchorage, a route Ms. McElrea has used many times. But this shipment, the airline told her, did not fit aboard the Seattle-bound flight and instead had been rerouted through the Delta hub in Atlanta. The bees would complete their circuitous, cross-country journey to Anchorage on Saturday.

Ms. McElrea was worried, considering that shipping bees comes with certain complications: The bees must be fed along the way (generally sugar water), and they must be kept cool. Her concerns were well-placed — millions of the bees would die.

Why import bees to Alaska?

Honeybees are not native to Alaska. Ms. McElrea sells many of the bees she imports to local backyard beekeepers but also helps with pollination services.

Commercial migratory pollination has become essential to agriculture in many regions, as pesticides have decimated the world’s native pollinators, Jimmy Gatt, a certified beekeeper and president of the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association, said in an interview on Thursday.

“Pollinated crops such as blueberries, cranberries, oranges, almonds, watermelons — too many to list — depend on these commercial beekeepers,” he added. “That is the primary importance of honeybees in our culture.”

Some of Ms. McElrea’s customers, especially apple orchards and nurseries, depend on the bee shipment to pollinate their crops and have an abundant spring and fall harvest.

Alaska sounds like the ideal place to grow fruits?

[LFC]

May 3, 2022 15:50:06 GMT goldenvalley said:

Alaska sounds like the ideal place to grow fruits?

Especially as the climate grows milder you have an area with abundant water and extremely long days during the growing season. If you have trees and shrubs that can handle the winters or plants that grow and produce in a limited 3-4 month warm period it may very well be excellent. Less extreme but Maine is a big producer of blueberries.

[goldenvalley]

May 3, 2022 16:01:47 GMT LFC said:

May 3, 2022 15:50:06 GMT goldenvalley said:

Alaska sounds like the ideal place to grow fruits?

Especially as the climate grows milder you have an area with abundant water and extremely long days during the growing season. If you have trees and shrubs that can handle the winters or plants that grow and produce in a limited 3-4 month warm period it may very well be excellent. Less extreme but Maine is a big producer of blueberries.

Eventually bees may migrate to Alaska of their own accord when the climate conditions are right for them.  But...there's been a big bee die off and there is a shortage of them.  CA almond growers import bees from the Dakotas during almond flowering time because there aren't enough here.  Part of that is of course, because there are so many more acres of almond trees than there were...another example of ag trying to bend nature to the will of capitalism...and of course there is the water issue too.  Really screwed up situation...  

[pnwguy]

May 3, 2022 16:01:47 GMT LFC said:

May 3, 2022 15:50:06 GMT goldenvalley said:

Alaska sounds like the ideal place to grow fruits?

Especially as the climate grows milder you have an area with abundant water and extremely long days during the growing season. If you have trees and shrubs that can handle the winters or plants that grow and produce in a limited 3-4 month warm period it may very well be excellent. Less extreme but Maine is a big producer of blueberries.

I had a friend who interacted considerably with the US Patent and Trademark Office.  I joked with him a dozen years ago that we needed to trademark Arctic Circle Vineyards for a winery name in northern Alaska that sadly might be possible.

[goldenvalley]

We don't have a reptile thread so I'll put flying salamanders here. Go the article to see video.

In a study published Monday in Current Biology, researchers tested the skills of arboreal and ground-dwelling salamanders using a wind tunnel to simulate flight from the tops of trees.

“We climb trees to study them,” said Christian E. Brown, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of South Florida and an author of the study, “but studying the flight is difficult in nature, almost impossible. For that, we needed the wind tunnel.”
Even in the laboratory, working with the animals presents problems.

“They just jump out of your hands,” Mr. Brown said. “We had to slow things down, and the wind tunnel is safer for the animals as well. We had vets checking on them between trials, and we did three trials a day with each animal, no more. It took many weeks to get to 45 trials.”

They gently dropped a non-arboreal species into the tunnel, and watched it tumble head over heels to the bottom.

But when a wandering salamander slipped from a researcher’s hand into the tunnel, it extended its legs as soon as it felt the breeze, stayed perfectly upright, glided up and down with the stream of air and turned gracefully, apparently very much at ease while defying gravity. These are useful skills for an animal that lives at the top of a 250-foot tree.

Wandering salamanders have some physical characteristics that could contribute to their gliding ability. Their bodies are slightly flatter than those of non-arboreal species, and their limbs are long. Their large feet and long toes form concave surfaces that may function as a kind of parachute, slowing their fall through the air.
But these bodily features do not completely explain their remarkable ability to twist and turn to slowly change direction, control their speed and maintain an upright posture.

“They can make moves and spin on a dime,” Mr. Brown said.

The flight controls appear to be the legs and tail. When the researchers dropped the wandering salamanders into the wind tunnel upside down or backward, they could immediately whip their tails around and spin into an upright position. When they tuck the back right leg in, the body pivots around that leg. They can assume postures that change their speed. Still, exactly what makes the animal capable of these moves remains a mystery.

Watching a film of the wandering salamander floating and hovering like an astronaut aboard the space station leaves the impression that the animal is having a very good time. Is it?

[AnBr]

Of course a salamander is an amphibian, not a reptile.