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Beetle byte (2 November 2013 edition)

A day late, but surely all the better for it…

Also late for Hallowe’en… but still fascinating

Perhaps it’s just the old, faded photos but it seems to us from looking at these vintage photographs that Halloween costumes used to be much much creepier and weirder than it is now.

 

Seamus Heaney’s last poem

Heaney was invited by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, to contribute to a memorial anthology marking the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war. She asked poets to respond to poetry, letters and diary entries from the time.

Heaney chose Edward Thomas’s great poem, As The Team’s Head Brass, which he wrote in 1916 shortly before he asked to be posted to the front – a decision that led to his death at Arras the following year.

In response Heaney wrote In a Field, completed in June, two months before his own death and now published for the first time.

 

Don’t expect human service at restaurants in the near future

As if struggling actors didn’t already have it hard enough. In Japan, changing times have given rise to a new breed of mercilessly efficient automated restaurants that can easily service an entire busy day’s worth of hungry patrons without the need for a staff of waiters, chefs or even dishwashers.

 

And don’t bother talking to anyone while eating either

If you typically spend your nights alone at home digging into a bowl of hot ramen noodles while wishing you had someone to hang out with, then we’ve got some good news. You never again have to eat your noodles in solitude thanks to an ingenious new product! The anti-loneliness ramen bowl (that’s the actual name) comes with a built-in iPhone dock so you can browse your social networks, watch videos, or listen to music while enjoying your favorite cheap dinner.

 

Yes, I’ve been editing all week

Some people seem to think love for language means memorising the longest possible list of grammar rules and style shibboleths. This is too often coupled with smug self-congratulation. But a real understanding of language acknowledges which rules are truly ironclad, which ones are in dispute and which ones are mere style choices.

 

Please get me this calendar for Christmas

In collaboration with photographers Charlie Naebeck and Jordan Matter, creator of the New York Times bestseller “Dancers Among Us,” we’ve produced a 2014 wall calendar featuring 13 powerful portraits of climate scientists and their research.

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It’s cold out there!

Most of us would find it pretty hard to live outside all winter anywhere in Canada, let alone in places where temperatures routinely dip below -30ÂșC. But this is exactly what the mountain pine beetle (and many other insects) does. The question is, of course, how does it pull this off? What is it about mountain pine beetle larval physiology that allows the insects to make it through long months of deep cold?

A paper by Tiffany Bonnett and others, that recently came out of our lab, probes this process in pine beetles in a way that has not been done before. The publication is entitled “Global and comparative proteomic profiling of overwintering and developing mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), larvae” and is available as an open access publication. We have also published the raw genomics data online at figshare. You can find those data here, here, and here.

 

What did we do?

Larval mountain pine beetles were collected from trees near to Valemount, BC during the early autumn and late autumn, and then again during the early spring and late spring. The larval beetles were prepared in the lab so that we could use a process called iTRAQ to assess all of the proteins present in the larvae at each of the different collection time points. Essentially we took four snapshots – two in the autumn and two in the spring – an then compared them to each other see what was changing. This gave us a huge amount of data to work with and we used statistics to tell us which proteins increased or decreased in prevalence across either the autumn or the spring.

 

What did we find?

Among other things:

  • Larvae expend a fair amount of energy on detoxification of host resin compounds, both in preparation for the winter, and then during feeding after winter is over.
  • Stress physiology plays a large role in this entire process, particularly in the autumn as the larvae are dealing with host tree resin toxins and readying themselves for the upcoming onset of winter.
  • We saw evidence for the involvement of several compounds that may play an antifreeze role.
  • There is an evident shift between emphasizing overwintering preparations (in the autumn) and emphasizing completing development (in the spring), consistent with expected shifting priorities at different points in the life cycle.

 

Why is this novel?

The overwintering larvae of the mountain pine beetle remain nestled under the protective bark of their host tree. This makes them quite difficult to work with, and until now not very much information had been generated on this life stage, particularly in the context of winter survival. This work, which has harnessed the power of some very useful genomics databases, has cracked the door (or the bark?) open to allow us to see in broad sweeping terms what is going on in this insect during this vital time in its life cycle. We have seen aspects of larval mountain pine beetle physiology that have never been seen before, and that provides the power to ask new questions and to investigate key genes and pathways in a much more directed manner.

 

Why is this important?

Up until now, the main known winter survival mechanism for larval mountain pine beetles was the accumulation of glycerol in the autumn. Glycerol acts as a natural antifreeze and is part of the overwintering survival tool kit of many insects. But in most known cases, glycerol is not the only part of the equation, and we didn’t think that it was the sole story in mountain pine beetle either. And it turns out that we were correct with that guess – there are a lot of other things going on as well.

In a larger sense, this means that we now have targets to focus on as we work to understand how deep winter cold can impact populations. Overwintering mortality is one of the major factors contributing to control of bark beetle populations. Now that the mountain pine beetle is moving from the cold interior of British Columbia into even-colder central Alberta, a major research question relates to the climate in its expanding geographical range and how that is going to affect the insect’s potential spread to other regions. Overlay that question with the impacts of climate change, and it should be apparent that understanding mountain pine beetle overwintering physiology is becoming more and more vital.

 

Where do we go from here?

We now have numerous potential gene targets to look at, any of which is a project unto itself. Because we have shown in other work that larval mountain pine beetles in the late summer are feeding on potentially very toxic food, we are interested in finding out how larval ability to detoxify and digest their food in the autumn can make or break their chances for winter survival. We suspect that certain larvae are better adapted than others at dealing with the nutritional challenges that they face, and thus better able to produce antifreeze compounds and the other components that allow overwintering success.

In other words, we suspect that there is variation in the mountain pine beetle population that results in some larvae surviving the winter while others don’t. We, along with collaborators, hope to determine which genes are important in this process and how selection pressure in their historical and expanding ranges are changing mountain pine beetle populations.

Some of our key questions are:

  • How do specific proteins function in protecting larvae from the cold?
  • What happens if we “knock out” some of those proteins?
  • What characteristics of tree defense and nutrition make some host trees more or less likely to allow the resident larvae to survive a winter?
  • Do adult beetle parents choose trees based in any way on how their young may fare?
  • Where in the genome should we expect to see natural selection as the insects move into colder and more inhospitable regions? How will these evolutionary shifts be observed in changes in behavior and physiology?
  • What are the larger implications of climate change on these processes?

As you can see – and as is the case with science in general – this paper not only provides some answers, but also provides fertile ground for more questions. This work, and other related work in our larger mountain pine beetle system genomics project, has given us the means to chase down some of the answers. We are looking forward to the interesting work ahead. Since this publication and its associated data are all open access, we also look forward to seeing what other people might find to do with our data.

ResearchBlogging.org
Tiffany R. Bonnett, Jeanne A. Robert, Caitlin Pitt, Jordie D. Fraser, Christopher I. Keeling, Jörg Bohlmann, Dezene P.W. Huber (2012). Global and comparative proteomic profiling of overwintering and developing mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), larvae Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.ibmb.2012.08.003

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Beetle byte (25 October 2013 edition)

After a great week at the 2013 ESC JAM, a few bites for the upcoming weekend.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Of course, we humans don’t have dye coursing through our brains. We have a substance far more sinister: amyloid plaques, proteins that build up over time and that, for years, have been the prime suspect for what causes Alzheimer’s. Beta-amyloid plaques must be removed from the brain, or they gradually clog healthy pathways, degrade the neural connections within the brain and collapse the neuron’s transport system. Scientists now believe sleep is the only way to adequately fight beta-amyloid buildup.

 

Are you an editor?

An illustrated guide to achieving grammatic nirvana.

 

Vampires, just in time for Hallowe’en

In 1997 a Brazilian man claimed that while he was urinating in a river, a candiru swam up and into his urethra. Doctors removed a 13-centimeter-long specimen, but the account has been met with extensive skepticism.

 

Maybe wait for the DVD

The filmmakers have cleverly removed those criticisms with the origin story of their giant spider: “DNA crossbreeding from a Martian microbial fossil.” You don’t “crossbreed” DNA, and DNA degrades in fossils, but hey, you get the idea. It’s an ALIEN GMO SPIDER.

 

Monarch worries

Rather than the dozens of monarchs I typically see feeding by day on the inn’s asters, goldenrods and other fall-blooming plants—and the hundreds clustering for warmth on yew, holly and hackberry branches once the sun starts to go down—I spotted just a handful of monarchs in total and never more than one individual at a time.

 

This should not happen (photos)

The minerals in our electronic devices have bankrolled unspeakable violence in the Congo.

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Why conferences matter

After a drive from Guelph and then a long flight from Toronto into very foggy Vancouver and then not-quite-as-foggy Prince George, I arrived home last night from the Joint Annual Meeting of the Entomological Societies of Canada and Ontario (#ESCJAM2013). I have been away from my family and from UNBC for close to a week now, and though somewhat fatigued (and slightly jet lagged), meetings like these are valuable.

I have come to particularly enjoy ESC meetings over the past few years as I think that they really hit the sweet spot in terms of having just the right number of attendees and topics. Don’t get me wrong – there is nothing wrong with huge meetings or small niche meetings. I enjoy those too. But if I were Goldilocks, this one would be “just right.”

So, why should a scientist bother to use up part of a research grant to pick up and travel to some far-flung location and spend several days eating and sleeping relatively poorly in a generic conference facility? Here are the reasons that I came up with, and perhaps you can think of more:

Learning and connecting – Nothing beats being fully immersed in a topic that you love, with a ton of likeminded people all around. Conferences provide this type of environment, ranging from excellent student talks (and wow! there were so many of these at the ESC JAM this year!!), to detailed symposium talks, to workshops, to simply chatting with colleagues at coffee breaks. After a conference I generally return reinvigorated and excited about what is going on in my own personal research and the research of the folks in my program. I’ve had a chance to hear cool things and to ask in-person questions and receive in-person answers. I’ve been reminded that there are a lot of other people out there working on interesting problems too – I’m not toiling alone. I’ve been able to troubleshoot some of my scientific and red tape issues with people who have had more experience than I in certain areas. I’ve found out about new theories, new technologies, and new frontiers of study. I’ve re-met old friends and colleagues, and I’ve made contacts with new people as well.

You can read all of the literature all of the time in complete solitude, and you will be very well educated on a topic. But nothing beats the human element in terms of deeply understanding the state-of-the-art in a particular field. In fact I’d go so far as to say that the best learning is done in community with other humans. And the best way to encounter other humans is
 to actually spend time with them.

Being challenged – Not everyone does this –and I’m not suggesting that it is the only way of doing things – but I try to go to sessions that do not necessarily major on my own research topic. The reality is that I hear a lot about the type of things that I do on a regular basis from my closest colleagues who also do that type work. I read their papers, talk to them on the phone, collaborate on projects, etc. So I already have a pretty good idea of what is going on in their programs and what they are thinking about. What I don’t necessarily know is what is going on in other entomological fields because my interactions are not as frequent nor is my network so solid. Conferences allow me to sit in on sessions as a fly-on-the-wall (pun intended!) to see what others are up to. Sometimes this gives me new ideas for research or for potential collaborations. If nothing else, it reminds me of how cool entomology is. Like others during this conference, I tried to send out a tweet from each talk that I attended, so if you’re interested, you can get a quick idea of the diversity of topics that I was able to enjoy, here.

Tours – Most conferences that I’ve been to feature one or two of these. Admittedly I don’t always get to go due to conflicts with other events. But when I do, I generally really learn. This year a few of us were treated to a tour of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario facility at the University of Guelph. Besides the fact that what is going on there is highly impressive, it was great to be able to talk to some of the facility experts and to ask specific questions. At other conferences I’ve been able to head out on field trips to see some of the local insect pest problems. Nothing beats seeing, hearing, feeling, and smelling a topic first hand for later understanding. I find that after such field trips, reading the literature is a much more living experience than it can be when I just approach a paper “cold” with no actual life connection with the subject.

History – This year was the 150th anniversary of the Entomological Society of Ontario and (in conjunction with the ESO
 I won’t explain it here) the Entomological Society of Canada. As Dr. Laura Timms pointed out in her excellent Heritage Lecture, we’re the oldest entomological society on the continent. With 150 years of history comes a lot of deep tradition as well. Laura’s talk was excellent and reminded all of us of the fact that the ups and downs that we see in our profession today are nothing particularly new. We have a solid foundation built by others before us on which to grow. It is up to us to carry on that legacy. This hit home during the banquet when Dr. Thelma Finlayson was honored for her contributions over her 98 years (!!!) to students, to entomology, and to our Society. The reality is that, barring incredible medical advances, most of us will not be very active in the profession – if we are around at all – at the 200th anniversary. Our history should remind us of our ongoing responsibility to those coming after us over the next 50 years and beyond.

Cookies at coffee breaks – need I say more?

For a great summary of the meeting, please head over to Sean McCann‘s photograph-filled post (featuring my Ph.D. supervisor in the first photograph).

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Aside: During the conference there was a bit of a Twitter squall that is summarized/linked with this tweet:

 

I won’t add much more to the conversation here, others have already responded nicely. Suffice it to say that, for me, Twitter is the next best thing to an ongoing conference. It allows realtime and authentic interaction with others on various topics that interest me.

Twitter is, by no means, as substitute for a good conference or a good blog post. But neither is a blog post or a conference a substitute for Twitter or any other medium. It is what you make of it.

And much was made of Twitter at this conference. For instance, a bit of intense web wizardry by David Shorthouse gave those in attendance using Twitter this fantastic tool that added value to the already useful stream of #ESCJAM2013 tweets.

During this discussion there have been quotes of Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” mantra.

To this I’ll add a quote from Neil Postman:

One way of looking at the history of the human group is that it has been a continuing struggle against the veneration of “crap.”

Any medium will end in a fecal morass if the only contributions to it are scat.

I have experienced just the opposite of that with Twitter on a variety of subjects because the people who I follow contribute useful content and ideas. Twitter at the 2013 ESC JAM was a prime example of that.

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Beetle byte (18 October 2013 edition)

Oops, two bytes in a row with no intervening “content.” Ah well, I’ve been prepping for the upcoming 2013 Joint Annual Meeting of the Entomological Societies of Canada and Ontario (150th anniversary!!!) starting tomorrow. So that’s enough of an excuse, right?

So, here are the weekly half-dozen…

Flying, for six months without landing?

But a year later, when three of the birds returned to the same breeding site and the scientists removed their tags to collect the data, the electronic tags revealed something unexpected. “When we looked at the data, we were totally blown away,” Liechti said. “During their non-breeding period in Africa, they were always in the air.”

 

Yes, I’m obsessed with bristlecone pines

From this elevated perch, these elderly trees have borne witness to the rise of a new geological age, a successor to the Holocene. This new age is called the Anthropocene, or ‘age of humans’, and it refers to the stretch of time during which we have begun to reshape the Earth’s chemical makeup. The idea of this new age arose just over a decade ago, as scientists began to realise that the geological record would likely bear the marks of human activity for aeons to come. There is still a question as to whether the term will enter the official geological lexicon, and there is fierce debate about whether the Anthropocene began with the Industrial Revolution, or with the development of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. But this much is certain: one of its signature features is massive deforestation.

 

Don’t wear cologne into the jungle

According to Ordeñana, a Bronx Zoo researcher once tried a bunch of different scents and discovered that jaguars really liked the Calvin Klein cologne. A researcher might spray some of the cologne on a tree branch that sits within the camera’s field of view.

 

Bookmobiles

Long before Amazon was bringing books to your doorstep, there was the Bookmobile! A travelling library often used to provide books to villages and city suburbs that had no library buildings, the bookmobile went from a simple horse-drawn cart in the 19th century to large customised vehicles that became part of American culture and reached their height of popularity in the mid-twentieth century. Let’s take a little trip down memory lane with this forgotten four-wheeler


 

Watched any TED talks on “creativity” lately?

And that’s when it hit him: He had heard these things before. Each story seemed to develop in an entirely predictable fashion. He suspected that in the Dylan section, Lehrer would talk about “Like a Rolling Stone,” and that’s exactly what happened. When it came to the 3M section, he waited for Lehrer to dwell on the invention of the Post-it note — and there it was.

 

Ninja walking

With Halloween just around the corner, there’s no better time to learn how to walk silently through the night like a ninja. It’s an incredibly useful skill, allowing you not only to stealthily assassinate your archenemy, but also steal cookies from coworkers, check to see if toddlers are still sleeping without waking them, or sneak across your creaky wood floors to scare the bejeezus out of your roommate.