understorey:

An Inside Look at Pitcher Plants

A pitcher plant’s work seems simple: their tube-shaped leaves catch and hold rainwater, which drowns the ants, beetles, and flies that stumble in. But the rainwater inside a pitcher plant is not just a malevolent dunking pool. It also hosts a complex system of aquatic life, including wriggling mosquito, flesh fly, and midge larvae; mites; rotifers; copepods; nematodes; and multicellular algae. These tiny organisms are crucial to the pitcher plant’s ability to process food. They create what scientists call a ‘processing chain’: when a bug drowns in the pitcher’s rainwater, midge larvae swim up and shred it to smaller pieces, bacteria eat the shredded pieces, rotifers eat the bacteria, and the pitcher plant absorbs the rotifers’ waste. But that’s not the whole story. Fly larvae are also eating the rotifers, midge larvae, and each other, and everybody eats bacteria. It’s a complex food web that shifts on the order of seconds.

Predicting food-web structure with metacommunity models

Image: http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/press-resources-inside-look-pitcher-plants-4113

Related:

Nepenthes pitfall traps are an anti-microbial environment

guardian:

Scientists say it is possible that there have never been fewer butterflies in Britain since it was first inhabited by humans due, in part, to the miserable weather of 2012. The orange-tip population (above) dropped by 34%. Habit loss and agricultural intensification mean that many species live in isolated colonies in small nature reserves, making them particularly vulnerable to extinction after adverse weather. Photograph: Butterfly Conservation

sagansense:

Charged bees can sense electric flower fields

Positively charged bees are able to recognise electric signals given off by flowers as part of the plant pollination strategy.

The electrical signalling works in tandem with other signs such as colour, pattern and fragrance to tell bumblebees (and other insect pollinators) about the amount of nectar and pollen they may contain.

“This novel communication channel reveals how flowers can potentially inform their pollinators about the honest status of their precious nectar and pollen reserves” said co-author Heather Whitney of the University of Bristol.

Generally the flowers are negatively charged and generate a weak electric field while the bees become positively charged as they fly around — the study suggests the charge can build to around 200 volts. The sensation felt by a positive bee meeting a negative plant can be enough to convey snippets of information while its absence could reveal whether the flower has recently hosted another insect.

The biologists noted that not only could the bumblebees tell the difference between various floral electric fields, but when learning to tell two colours apart having an electric field involved sped up the process.

“The co-evolution between flowers and bees has a long and beneficial history, so perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that we are still discovering today how remarkably sophisticated their communication is,” said Daniel Robert, who also worked on the study. He also stressed how a bee’s intelligence made it necessary for the flowers to develop an effective communication strategy: “bees are good learners and would soon lose interest in such unrewarding flowers”.

The exact mechanics by which the bees detect these electrical variations is not fully understood, although the explanation favoured by the researchers is that coming near the charged flowers causes the bees’ fur to “bristle”, like when you hold the back of your hand a couple of millimetres from an old TV screen.

Image: Laurent Jégou / CC BY ND 2.0

biocanvas:

All insects have antennae, which allow them to respond to free-floating molecules much like noses do in higher organisms. This is a high-magnification view of an antenna from a moth.

Image by Dr. Donna Stolz, University of Pittsburgh.

currrentbiology:

This is a stereoscopic SEM (scanning electron microscope) view of an empty dragonfly larva skin after 25 nm platinum sputter coating. Magnification 500x (relative to medium format film).

afracturedreality:

Eye of a Damselfly

Shown here are actually two distinct confocal image stacks that, when overlapped completely, form the composite image posted previously. (Nuclei are colored red; cytoskeleton is in blue.)

Image by Igor Siwanowicz, Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology, Munich, Germany.

mothernaturenetwork:

Fire ant monarchy ruled by ‘social chromosome’

A study found that whether fire ants bow to one queen or accept many rulers depends on one long strand of genes.

jtotheizzoe:

Nabokov on Kafka on Insects

Vladimir Nabokov, celebrated author of Lolita, and other novels, was not merely a writer. Not that being a writer is any sort of a “mere” thing, but go with me here. Nabokov was a professionally-trained entomologist, a lifelong student of insect biology.

He curated Harvard’s butterfly collection, contributing a great deal to the practice of lepidoptery and even getting parts of his work published in our day and age. Nabokov was a fan of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the story of Gregor Samsa, who turned into a bug. That’s Nabokov’s teaching copy of Kafka’s book up there, scrawled with notes. Nabokov lectured on Kafka, and using his knowledge of insects he offered a theory as to what kind of bug Gregor may have become (not a cockroach as usually assumed):

Now what exactly is the “vermin” into which poor Gregor, the seedy commercial traveler, is so suddenly transformed? It obviously belongs to the branch of “jointed leggers” (Arthropoda), to which insects, and spiders, and centipedes, and crustaceans belong. If the “numerous little legs” mentioned in the beginning mean more than six legs, then Gregor would not be an insect from a zoological point of view. But I suggest that a man awakening on his back and finding he has as many as six legs vibrating in the air might feel that six was sufficient to be called numerous. We shall therefore assume that Gregor has six legs, that he is an insect.

Next question: what insect? Commentators say cockroach, which of course does not make sense. A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight … He is merely a big beetle.

Nabokov also offered this nice note to the Joes and Janes in the audience:

Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.)

Nabokov isn’t the only entomologist who has studied Kafka’s work. Donna Bazzone of St. Michael’s College in Vermont wrote about the impossible biology of an insect the size of Gregor Samsa, based on the study of thousands of insect species:

None could be as big as the “new Gregor.”  If the body with its exoskeleton were to scale up to human size, it would be so heavy that even appropriately sized legs and musculature could not support it.  Such an insect could not move.  Also, because insects do not have a respiratory system with tubes connecting to internal lungs that have large absorptive areas, a giant like Gregor the roach would not be able to get enough oxygen to survive.  Furthermore, our circulatory systems are powered by a large muscular heart that sends blood to all cells in the body through an elaborate network of blood vessels.  Insects lack such a sophisticated circulatory system, so if you scaled the body to human size, insect blood (containing oxygen and nutrients) wouldn’t be able to reach all cells.

I always knew something bugged me about that story.

Thanks to Open Culture for the Nabokov book link that sent me down this rabbit hole.

(via theladygoogle)

jtotheizzoe:

The Sticky Stick Insects of Lord Howe Island

That’s Ball’s Pyramid, a dormant volcanic spire off the coast of Australia’s Lord Howe Island, and yes, it’s a real place. It’s a starkly beautiful place, and it’s home to this enormous insect, the “tree lobster” (aptly named, because holy crap):

Those insects live under a single bush on the edge of a single cliff on a lonely crescent of rock in the South Pacific. How in the world did that happen?

They used to live all over Lord Howe Island, the larger neighboring land mass, until a ship ran aground there in 1918. In the process, a handful of rats swam ashore and turned the island into a stick insect-eating buffet/mating playground. In short, the tree lobster was wiped out, extinct, kaput, finished. Or so they thought …

In 2001, a team of climbers ascended the face of Ball’s Pyramid, looked in the rocky soil beneath a lonely, windswept bush, and found a couple dozen tree lobsters, alive and well! How did they get there? The best guess is that they hitched an airborne ride on some nesting material brought to the cliff faces by birds that inhabit the Pyramid. A couple of them landed beneath that bush, and the rest is history. A lonely, 80 year history.

Later this month, Bespoke Animation will be releasing a short animated film about this bug-gone-missing story titled Sticky (and they could use some help crossing over the finish line on their funding, so if you’d like to help check here). Here’s the trailer, which looks simply wonderful:

Captive breeding of the insects has commenced, and once the rat problem on Lord Howe Island is under control scientists hope to reintroduce them to their native habitat. It’s an extinction story with a happy ending! For more on Ball’s Pyramid tree lobsters, check out this Robert Krulwich story, or this feature from Becky Crew. And you definitely want to see a video of one of these guys hatching from its egg … wow!