Beetle Byte (29 August 2014 edition)

As another summer, woefully, comes to a leaf-reddening and freedom-rending end – and I (hopefully) get back to regular-ish blogging – I’m equally hopeful that I’ll get around to regular-ish weekly Beetle Bytes as well. Here’s a start.

 

Sympatric speciation

At the center of the new findings is an evolutionary concept called sympatric speciation, the possibility “for a species to split into two species without any geographic separation,” Schultz says. “That’s usually been criticized and usually been rejected. It’s a very hard thing to prove.”

But Rabeling and Schultz believe they’ve done it.

 

Mites! On your face! And on mine too!!

They live in our hair follicles, buried head-down, eating the oils we secrete, hooking up with each other near the surface, and occasionally crawling about the skin at night.

 

Project Wild Thing

Stop buying iPads. Take your children outdoors. You’ve bought enough iPads now.

(Perhaps somewhat ironically, iOS and Android apps are available.)

 

Speaking of the internet…

…there is currently no evidence to suggest that Internet use has or has not had a profound effect on brain development. If we want to know how this highly connected world is impacting our brains, we will need to conduct studies that investigate brain measures and their relationship to behavior, cognition, and well-being in a representative sample of the population. 

 

ةيلمع Operación Operation Opération 作业 Oперация

…a poem by Moez Surani consisting of the names of military operations carried out by UN member states. The poem spans 193 countries and 69 years, and in March 2014 contained the names of more than 2,300 operations.

Beetle Byte (20 February 2014 edition)

A few bytes worth chewing on.

Kids have always been kids

It’s all a great reminder that even legendary scientists had family lives, and that when we think about history, it’s important to remember that famous figures weren’t working in isolation. They were surrounded by far less famous friends, family members, acquaintances, and enemies. And sometimes, when we get lucky, we see some of their artifacts from the past too.

 

Another reason to treat animals well

In a study carried out at an elephant camp in Thailand, we found that elephants affiliated significantly more with other individuals through directed, physical contact and vocal communication following a distress event than in control periods. In addition, bystanders affiliated with each other, and matched the behavior and emotional state of the first distressed individual, suggesting emotional contagion.

 

More on including field journals in coursework

A primary goal in assigning field notes is to help students realize that there are many ways to document and present natural history. In addition, educators hope to encourage the sentiment that natural history is a much needed and topical endeavor. Increasingly, colleagues fear that students situate natural history as an outdated practice of discovery. Requiring field notes allows each student to learn that natural history is a current and critical investigatory practice for understanding the natural world and for promoting conservation (Greene 2005, 2013).

 

It’s never too late to become a bobsledder

Their eyes and ears are everywhere, on the lookout for athletes who might never have dreamed of careering down an ice-encrusted chute in a carbon-fibre half-capsule. They’re at rugby pitches and football stadiums and every major track meet in the country. If you’re an athlete with decent numbers—or at least with conspicuous muscle mass between the waist and knees—chances are, you’ll hear from them.

 

“The Sims” software patch poetry

If you are on fire,
you will no longer be forced to attend graduation
before you can put yourself out.

 

If you like poetry, try this

Poem Viewer is a web-based tool for visualizing poems in support of close reading. It is part of an on-going research project and is a work in progress. … You can either start creating your own visualization for your chosen poem or have a look at a collection of sample visualizations that we have created.

Beetle Byte (27 December 2013 edition)

Only one link this week, as the holiday draws to a close.

Taking Down the Tree – by Jane Kenyon

With something more than caution
I handle them, and the lights, with their
tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along
from house to house, their pasteboard
toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.
Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.

Beetle byte (6 December 2013 edition)

This, that, and the next thing(s) for your reading enjoyment.

The pink/blue divide in the toy aisle

No sharks here. Just dolphins. And Andrew, your shaggy-haired boyfriend or male acquaintance, on his jet ski, in his blue polo with the sailboat on it. You are only allowed into the girl aisle as a male toy if you are wearing a polo shirt. That is how they can tell you’re safe. You also have the option of being a non-human creature, like Sniffy or Nasal Congestion or whatever the dragon’s name was.

 

A better gift for any child

The network has therefore drawn up an “alternative Christmas list for kids” that suggests a stick makes a brilliant gift. Sticks, it helpfully suggests for baffled parents, are “easy to pick up, perform a thousand different uses and can be thrown away as easily as you found it. Great for helping with imaginary games, playing Pooh sticks, building things.”

 

And no smartphone gifts either (Infographic)

 

Maybe a gift of POEtry? (Poetic comic!)

 

Birds have a better grip than we do, it seems

“The bird’s foot closes and grasps automatically as the ankle and knee joints are bent,” we read. “This grasp cannot be released until the limb is straightened again.”

 

Monarchs are losing their grip on existence

So you get back to the philosophical aspect of it: How many natural phenomena are we going to kill off? I think the monarch is the canary in the coal mine telling us that things are beginning to go really wrong, when you can take a widespread migration of this sort and completely dismantle it as a result of human activity.

Spider Monday

To help to celebrate Spider Monday, here are a few spider-related papers from the archives of the Journal of Entomological Society of British Columbia.

Bennett, R.G. 2001. Spiders (Araneae) and araneology in British Columbia. J. Entomol. Soc. Brit. Columbia 98:83-90.

A fantastic survey of everything spider in British Columbia. My favorite paragraph:

Large areas and many specific habitats of BC remain uncollected and no doubt many list additions are still to come, especially from northern areas and the deep south of Be. No effort has been made to produce a comprehensive, habitat-specific spider inventory for any area in BC. That new records can be made with relative ease is suggested by the following examples: hundreds of specimens of a gnaphosid previously only known from a couple of  Washington specimens turned up in a simple pitfall study in Burnaby (see cover of Journal of the Entomological Society of BC, Vol. 96, 1999), the first specimen of a new family record for Canada came from the carpet of a provincial government office (Bennett and Brumwell 1996), and a new species record for BC came from the bathtub of an Osoyoos motel (Bennett unpublished data) in 2001.

Bennett also quotes himself, writing in another excellent article that can be found here at the Biological Survey of Canada:

…spiders are ruthless storm troops in the matriarchal anarchy that is the arthropod  world: theirs is the most diverse, female-dominated, entirely predatory order on the face of  the earth. As such, spiders are key components of all ecosystems in which they live.

 

And, since I already linked to the 1999 spider cover, above, I should also link to a couple of others from the covers of the 2004 and 1993 issues.

 

Speaking of new records, there is this paper on a new spider family record in Canada:

Bennett, R.G. and Brumwell, L.J. 1996. Zora hespera in British Columbia: a new spider family record for Canada (Araneae: Zoridae). J. Entomol. Soc. Brit. Columbia 93:105-109.

That article also contains some helpful drawings of spider genitalia. In case you didn’t know, arachnologists and entomologists are into that kind of thing.

 

Of course, the only way that we’re ever going to know what lives in remote locales is to go and visit those places ourselves. Nothing beats boots on the ground. This paper covers just that type of work, surveying spiders in a part of the world that very few of us will ever see:

Slowik, J. 2006. A survey of the spiders (Arachnida, Araneae) of Chichagof Island, Alaska, USA. J. Entomol. Soc. Brit. Columbia 103:61-70.

 

Here is an addition to a checklist of the spiders of British Columbia. The addition points back to a previous revised checklist from 1984 that we have yet to get online in the JESBC archives. Here is the addition:

West, R.C., Dondale, C.D., Ring. R.A. 1988. Additions to the revised checklist of the spiders (Araneae) of British Columbia. J. Entomol. Soc. Brit. Columbia 85:77-86.

 

Species checklists (and regular updates) are vital for understanding biodiversity and monitoring shifts in diversity over time. Along with that, it is important to get down to the natural history of the individual species on those checklists. Each species is, in itself, several careers-worth of work… at least. This type of work is arguably even more important when human influences (e.g. agriculture) are present. Here is a paper that outlines the emergence times of a variety of arthropods, including a mixture of spider species, in pear orchards:

Horton, D.R. 2004. Phenology of emergence from artificial overwintering shelters by some predatory arthropods common in pear orchards of the Pacific Northwest. J. Entomol. Soc. Brit. Columbia 101:101-108.

 

Humans (and other factors) do indeed have massive effects on biodiversity. Unfortunately we often only notice those effects when we start to see the decline in the numbers of one species or another. This, of course, assumes that we are even taking notice of some of these small creatures that are so prevalent, but often so hidden from our literal or metaphoric view. This occasional paper published by the Entomological Society of British Columbia offers an extensive coverage of likely-or-actually-at-risk spineless animals in this province that often escape notice, but which provide many of the so-called “ecosystem services” that we all rely upon. There is a long list of spiders, starting on page 10:

Scudder, G.G.E.  1994. An annotated systematic list of the potentially rare and endangered freshwater and terrestrial invertebrates in British Columbia. Occasional Paper 2.

Have a happy Spider Monday, and be sure to say hi to one of our eight-legged friends if you happen to come across one.