Connected on 2007-06-29 14:00:00 from Cupterino, California , USA
- 2:22pm
- Teacher wow the presets look pretty cool
- Bugscope Team you can thank chas, he has the artistic eye
- Teacher how did th walking stick heads turn out
- Bugscope Team the head we put on was too juicy...
- Bugscope Team I believe we had to take the one off the sample because it was too juicy and would have kept us from pumping down in time for the session
- 2:27pm
- Bugscope Team You're off the stage there. We're seeing the rest of hte inside of the microscope. You can go back to the lower left to find the sample
- Bugscope Team choose a preset if you get lost, looks like you might have run off the stage
- Bugscope Team Cool, back in action
- Teacher are we stuck
- Bugscope Team you should be good to go
- Bugscope Team Having a problem with something? Far as I know you should be fine
- Bugscope Team On to the eye preset now
- Teacher I hit the eye preset but do not see a change
- Bugscope Team try refreshing your screen
- Bugscope Team Hmm... I can see the eye preset. Try a refresh of the browser window
- Bugscope Team not sure what it is on a mac, F5, or just the refresh button.
- Teacher ok
- Bugscope Team Not F5 on a mac. Apple-R
- Bugscope Team Did it work?
- Bugscope Team ah yeah, cool
- Bugscope Team Possibly just temporarily
- Teacher which insect does this belong to
- Bugscope Team I believe this is on the beetle
- Bugscope Team this the milkweed bug?
- 2:32pm
- Bugscope Team ok
- Bugscope Team One of the ones that arrived alive, a "stowaway" I'm told
- Bugscope Team If you take the mag down we can tell better.
- Bugscope Team It looks like you might need to refresh again, are you missing all the old chat text below?
- Bugscope Team Prob'ly metamorphosed along the way.
- Bugscope Team this was the extra passenger
- Bugscope Team sometimes we get mealworms that turn into adults on the trip here
- Bugscope Team Marie/Andrew, can you see the new chat coming up? You're showing up as "idle" from our side which makes me think you're not getting the new chat data
- Teacher were here
- Bugscope Team can you read this and do you see the prothorax on the screen?
- 2:37pm
- Bugscope Team because your name is grey in the who
- Bugscope Team 's online section we are concerned...
- Teacher Is this a darkling beetle?
- Bugscope Team Cate is that what this is? I think so.
- Bugscope Team Cate made the stub.
- Bugscope Team Yes, I believe this is
- Bugscope Team I could tell you if we zoomed out
- Bugscope Team there is a darkling beetle and another unknown beetle on this stub
- 2:42pm
- Bugscope Team now Marie is on but still grey.
- Bugscope Team Now she's red and starred...
- Bugscope Team so we're güd
- Teacher yes
- Bugscope Team OOF
- Teacher oof?
- Bugscope Team out of focus
- Bugscope Team out of focus :)
- Bugscope Team I typed that when we were up close
- Teacher sem im tlk
- Bugscope Team yeah I guess so
- Bugscope Team do you have a bunch of teachers coming in today?
- Teacher bck in 2 got to get class on cmptr
- Bugscope Team got it
- Bugscope Team we're getting txt-speaked
- 2:50pm
- Teacher ok teachers are logging on
- Bugscope Team Great! Hi laura
- Student hi
- Bugscope Team hello teachers, welcome to bugscope 2.0!
- Bugscope Team hello!
- Student i'm here
- Bugscope Team great! welcome!]
- Bugscope Team can't tyyype
- Bugscope Team kevin and patti hello!
- Bugscope Team Oh wow everyone is here.
- Bugscope Team This is the head of a beetle
- Student hello
- Student from underneath?
Bugscope Team Yes. We like to mount the bugs on their backs almost all the time because the underside is typically more interesting to look at
- Bugscope Team you can see the antennae, and the eyes tuncked in beneath
- Student this looks like a bug
- Bugscope Team FYI: One user at a time gets control, but on request from Marie/Andrew we can grant control to anyone so you can all take a turn from your spots, e.g.
- Bugscope Team yes we usu mount them upside down
- Bugscope Team there's more to see on the ventral side
- Bugscope Team like the legs, and what we see here
- 2:55pm
- Bugscope Team so Andrew has control of the 'scope now...
- Bugscope Team And he should be able to drive.
- Bugscope Team We can confer control to anyone who wants it, but as Chas says one at a time
- Bugscope Team be sure and let us know when you have questions
- Bugscope Team about insects or the electron microscope or about Mrs Wallace...
- Bugscope Team right
- Bugscope Team actually I just wanted to see if she was listening...
- Bugscope Team you can focus here
- Bugscope Team oof as scott likes to say
- Student looks like a honeycomb
- Bugscope Team a lot of compound eyes do look like honeycombs
- Bugscope Team This is a compound eye; you can see the ommatidia but need to focus better.
- Bugscope Team it's like the most efficient packing for 'spheres'
- 3:00pm
- Student looks like a honey comb
- Teacher I'm trying to drive the scope
- Student Can you zoom out?
- Bugscope Team Yikes, sorry guys. It should be OK now
- Teacher I can't seem to focus
- Guest Does it have a single pupil or one for each section?
- Bugscope Team We hit a soft limit on the number of concurrent users and I had to bump it up. Sorry about that, our fault. People hsould hit refresh if they aren't seeing everything properly
- Bugscope Team getting better
- Bugscope Team they are like individual eyes
- Bugscope Team not sure you could say they have pupils but each one gets a full image
- Bugscope Team Our brains form one coherent image from our two eyes, but imagine the complexity of putting together images from hundreds or thousands of eyes!
- Student what is all those little bubbles
- Bugscope Team Those are the individual "facets" or ommatidia of the compound eye of the beetle
- Bugscope Team the brain is often very heavily weighted, in flying insects, to optical processing
- Bugscope Team to visual processing
- Teacher Some of our screen are out of focus
- Bugscope Team ,mine is too, now
- Bugscope Team Yes, that's how the scope is. Use the focus tool and try one direction (+ or -). IF it gets worse, try the other one for a while
- Bugscope Team There, looking much better!
- Guest Do they deliver a single picture to the brain or muliple?
Bugscope Team The brain would have the integrate all the signals from the individual ommatidia, however nobody really knows exactly how they experience the resulting image
- Bugscope Team how about now?
- Bugscope Team OK, try the other direction now since that's making it worse
- Bugscope Team I think all of the images are processed into a single image.
- 3:05pm
- Student what is the job of the facets?
- Bugscope Team sometimes it takes a second to update on the screens
- Teacher I'm going to move to a waalking stick leg
- Bugscope Team The leg here has a ton of "spines", different shapes and sizes of hairs called setae
- Bugscope Team What's really cool is that the more complex hairs have intricate patterns, like the long striations here on this hair
- Bugscope Team having all of those facets means the eye can have closer to 360 degree vision
- Student Do these "spines" help the walking stick stay on surfaces?
Bugscope Team You can imagine how it might help it when crawling through a small space, with those backwards facing spines. However, most of the walking is done with claws at the end of the foot or sticky pads called pulvilli
- Bugscope Team the spines are mechanosensory, we think
- Bugscope Team they are attached to nerves beneath the exoskelton
- Bugscope Team exoskeleton
- Bugscope Team because there is an exoskeleton, the insect needs to have lots of sensory setae to stay in touch with its environment.
- Bugscope Team some of the setae are chemosensory
- Bugscope Team The spines/hairs may also play a role in heat dissipation for some insects, e.g. bees
- Bugscope Team By increasing the surface area tremendously
- Bugscope Team and some of the microsetae probably do not have a sensory function -- they add surface area and/or create a recognizable pattern.
- 3:10pm
- Student Our group did an experiment on stick bugs. The stick bug did not stick to paper when hanging past a 90 degree angle. Why do you think that is?
Bugscope Team If we could move to the end of the leg and see the "foot" that would help, but my rough guess is that the claw can grab onto paper fibers just enough for 90 deg, but past that gravity is pulling it away from the paper and it has no sticky pulvillus to continue holding it on
- Bugscope Team spines such as theses are probably for protection from getting eaten
- Bugscope Team stick bugs may not have tenent setae like flies do, for example
- Bugscope Team sounds like a fun experiment
- Bugscope Team they probably do not have a pulvillus, or sticky pad.
- Student It was. However, the stick bug attached to other surfaces, but not paper.
Bugscope Team What kind of surfaces. Things that are slicker like glass, or rougher like tree bark?
- Student Can you clarify tenent?
- Bugscope Team the end is towards the left
- Bugscope Team the pulvillus would be on each tarsus; sometimes beetles have two on each
- Bugscope Team tenent is Latin, like in the Spanish 'tener.'
- Bugscope Team Geckos are a great example of an alternate and fascinating method of adhering to surfaces:
- Student plastic, stainless steel, leaves, paper, water, running water
- Bugscope Team So it means to hold, in this case.
- Teacher Which way do i go to see the end of a leg of the walking stick?
- Bugscope Team to the left.
- Teacher ok
- Bugscope Team I guess I should say tenent is from the Latin
- Bugscope Team They have millions of micro-setae that are so small that they each feel a minute attraction to the surface called Van der Waal's force. Each force alone is tiny, but together they are enough to hang a baby by one gecko toe
- Bugscope Team The advantage of sticky chemicals like a typical pulvillus is that it never gets dirty, and can stick even to non-sticky things like Teflon!
- Bugscope Team oops, "the advantage OVER sticky chemicals"
- 3:15pm
- Bugscope Team I'd suggest zooming out to a low mag then trying the drive function to find the end of the leg
- Bugscope Team the microsetae on a gecko foot are I think one tenth the diameter of those on a fly pulvillus
- Teacher my view is taking a while to cahnge
Bugscope Team Your connection test showed your bandwidth was near the minimum needed, so it's possible having all the clients is backing things up a little bit
- Bugscope Team The explanation for Van der Waal's force I heard once relied heavily on Quantum Mechanics, something you typically don't think of as being directly relevant to small animals, insects, etc
- Bugscope Team Andrew you should be able to lower the mag, for starters.
- Bugscope Team I'm not getting updated images either.
- Teacher scott, can you give varina control of the scope
- Bugscope Team got it
- Bugscope Team Varina's got control now!
- Bugscope Team moving to the left...
- Bugscope Team Varina, I'd suggest zooming out to the lowest mag. The speed of driving scales with mag, so you'll be going for a VERY long time at 600x
- Bugscope Team it's a big leg...
- Bugscope Team Great, try to get to ~50x
- Bugscope Team cool. good job.
- Bugscope Team Yeah, we're at the lowest now
- Bugscope Team now it should go quite quickly
- Bugscope Team moving right along
- Bugscope Team you're seeing some other leg segments now
- Bugscope Team little further...
- Bugscope Team good sign that it is getting more narrow
- Bugscope Team the tarsi
- 3:21pm
- Teacher whoever has control their computer seems to take awhile to catch up
Bugscope Team They should have the most recent images if all is going well since they're the only ones getting live video. I fear we might be using a fair amount of your bandwidth with so many viewers online at once
- Bugscope Team now, the tarsi
- Bugscope Team great, we're right there
- Bugscope Team Thanks for letting us know, Andrew. We are always working on this.
- Bugscope Team for the past 8+ years
- Bugscope Team now we can zoom in and center in on the end there. you can see the other beetle hanging out below
- Guest What are tarsi?
- Bugscope Team tarsi are the final segments, the most distal segments, on a limb.
- Bugscope Team singular tarsus
- Bugscope Team when we say "segments" of a leg, we're referring to each part that's separated by joints. so a human leg would have 2 "segments". the insects though have many segments
- Bugscope Team hard to tell. can we back off like two times?
- Bugscope Team to see where we are?
- Bugscope Team one more zoom out and I think I could tell you
- Bugscope Team I thought we were on the claw
- Student It's moving out, it's just taking a little while...sorry!
- Bugscope Team I was answering a question and missed seeing what it was as we zoomed in
- Bugscope Team Varina you are doing a good job. It is hard to do this remotely.
- Bugscope Team Hmm, we're not seeing any movement here. Can you press it again?
- Bugscope Team As you are doing.
- Bugscope Team Are you waiting for the hourglass cursor icon? Is that what you mean by it's takign a while?
- Bugscope Team Oh, I know what this is!
- Bugscope Team this looks like someone's abdominal segments
- 3:26pm
- Bugscope Team This is the mealworm, we're seeing a few of the body segments
- Bugscope Team is this a mealworm? looks like it
- Student can you give me control back
- Bugscope Team we need to find the end of the leg again -- we were so close
- Bugscope Team should be
- Bugscope Team got it
- Bugscope Team either larva or pupa
- Bugscope Team larva
- Bugscope Team Because they have a rigid exoskeleton, they have their bodies in many short cylindrical sections connected by soft joints. Sort of like a knight's armor
- Bugscope Team this is the milkweed bug
- Bugscope Team its the one to the right of the larva. and yes they both dont look pretty
- Bugscope Team it has a long proboscis
- Bugscope Team Went past the bug there...
- Bugscope Team Now we're seeing bubbles in the carbon tape used to stick the bugs down
- Bugscope Team this is the doublestick carbon tab. a handful of sheets of these just cost us $640
- Bugscope Team outrageous
- Student help which way do i go
- Bugscope Team Back to the left to find the milkweed bug
- Bugscope Team you can see silver to the right
- Bugscope Team Or you can jump to one of the eight presets in the list to the lower right
- Bugscope Team Andrew wants to go to the end of the leg, right?
- Bugscope Team There are several nobody's explored yet
- 3:31pm
- Bugscope Team the leg should be to the right nearby
- Bugscope Team Yeah, that'd be a nice future feature
- Bugscope Team up or down?
- Student Is he sticking his proboscis out or does the proboscis stay out this far all the time?
Bugscope Team I believe this proboscis is fairly rigid so he folds it down along the bottom side of his body when it's not in use. Some get rolled up, like in moths or butterflies
- Bugscope Team doesn't it run right down the middle of the stub?
- Bugscope Team just head right, its right next to this guy
- Bugscope Team the leg is at an angle
- Bugscope Team he is holding his proboscis against his abdomen, or almost against it.
- Student It runs past his first set of legs. About how long is the proboscis? - literally.
- Bugscope Team normally when he is feeding it would be sticking out
- Bugscope Team we can see 3 mm of it now
- Student I know it comes out when he is eating, but in this picture is it in resting position or extended position?
- Bugscope Team It is resting
- Bugscope Team resting I believe. I think they flip it up to pierce it down inside of the plant stem/leaf when feeding
- Student Wow! It's long even when not extended.
Bugscope Team Yeah, I'm not sure that it ever retracts much in length, I think they just fold it under them to keep it out of the way when not in use
- Bugscope Team often what we see is a sheath and there is a piercing portion inside
- Bugscope Team like on a mosquito
- Bugscope Team or a bedbug
- Bugscope Team there's a lancet inside
- Student Ugh! Oops, Andrew wants me to say, "Oh, how interesting!"
- Student What am I looking at?
- Bugscope Team Yes, sometimes you'll see a protective sheath that splits down the middle and folds out to the sides, revleaing the lancet inside
- Bugscope Team e.g. on mosquitoes
- 3:36pm
- Student Are those hairs?
Bugscope Team but essentially yes... hairs are always called "setae" on insects, and they typically have a more diverse set of functions than our hairs do
- Bugscope Team on a mosquito the lancet is serrated at the end, like a doublebladed steak knife.
- Bugscope Team those are sensory setae, mostly
- Bugscope Team we're not supposed to call them hairs, even though we do all the time
- Student Okay. Thank you!
- Bugscope Team 'cause they're not on mammals
- Bugscope Team brb
- Bugscope Team insects have a lot of 'hairs' because they have exoskeletons, so they use them as a type of 'nerve ending' a lot of the time
- 3:41pm
- Student So they feel through their "hairs?"
Bugscope Team Yep. We have nerve endings embedded just below our skin that obviously can register the pressure put on our skin. If your skin was hard though, like their exoskeletons are, you'd have trouble, thus the need for the hairs to transmit the touch information through the cuticle to the nerves inside
- Bugscope Team Let's go to the stick bug leg again and see if we can get to the claw portion
- Bugscope Team yes they feel and taste sometimes, through their hairs
- Student As we "feel" through our fingers
- Student Okay!
- Bugscope Team it's the eating machine -- the wood eating machine
- Student Is that a claw?
Bugscope Team This is actually the head of the termine. You can see a serrated pattern there which is the mandibles, or main jaw
- Student I need to logout it seems that my computer has stalled
- Student Sorry! I can't visualize this stuff!
- Student would be able to see this better i color
Bugscope Team Because we're bouncing electrons off of the sample instead of light (photons), the image is formed very differently. With electrons there is no wavelength information (from which we distinguish colors) to detect, this no color. The electron image is also VERY topographical because everything is opaque, even water is not see-through
- Bugscope Team the setae go through the chitin and connect to nerves on the inside of the body cavity
- Teacher ok I'm mb now and need control of the scope again
- Bugscope Team we are using electrons to image and thus do not see color
- Student would we be able to see this more clearly in color
- Student where is the eye?
- Student Do termites have eyes? If so, where are they?
Bugscope Team Most of the workers don't have eyes. The few who in the "reproductive caste" typically do, and sometimes the soldiers do too
- Bugscope Team the wavelengths of the electrons are so much smaller than the wavelengths of visible light
- Bugscope Team i dont think they have eyes
- Teacher hey scott can you give me control of the scope
- Bugscope Team I thought they were blind -- they don't like light and I think usu are not pigmented
- Bugscope Team "thus no color"
- Bugscope Team k you have control
- Teacher thank you!
- Bugscope Team Cate did it.
- Student Are you all grad students or professors?
- Student When we were looking at termites, there was a small dark area at the tip of the mouth. Is that the mandible?
- Student We're teachers!
- Student Elementary school teachers in California!
- 3:46pm
- Bugscope Team Chas is a grad student. Cate and I are graduates, I guess.
- Bugscope Team someone needs to click again to have it stop driving.
- Bugscope Team I have been doing this since I got out of college, or I guess just before I got out of college
- Bugscope Team or hit "done". there we go
- Bugscope Team now you can go back to the preset
- Bugscope Team sometimes worker termites have compound eyes, but the only really developed eyes belong to the reproductive termites
- Bugscope Team Something I believe I remember hearing about ants, but probably is the same for termites, is that all the members of the colony have the same DNA
- Bugscope Team And Cate is the same; she started as an undergraduate. Chas started doing this in high school, as a sophomore.
- Bugscope Team However they can look very different, the reproducing ones are large, may have eyes, etc, the soldiers are huge, and the workers are tiny. But they all have exactly the same DNA, so their differences are all due to environmental factors that affect the way they transcribe their DNA
- Student How come there aren't "hairs" on the pointed edges of the claw but there are on the rest of the leg?
Bugscope Team Wonderful question, but I can't think any any good answers, sorry. Our entomologist who'd know is on a collection trip in CA
- Bugscope Team setae on the claw would get rubbed off, probably.
- Teacher Is this claw located on the ends of the legs?
Bugscope Team Yep, beetles typically have the two claws about about a 9-120 degree angle like that
- Bugscope Team yes on the end of the leg, each leg
- Bugscope Team on each leg
- Bugscope Team Some have a pulvillus, or pad (typically made of many sticky setae) right below the claws there
- Bugscope Team to help them cling to certain surfaces
- Bugscope Team if you see color in an electron micrograph it is false color
- 3:52pm
- Bugscope Team what we want to see is to the south a tiny bit
- Bugscope Team the sample moved since we made the preset
- Bugscope Team looks like maybe this preset drifted a little. I believe we were looking just below it. You could use click to center to go down a short bit
- Bugscope Team it's alive
- Teacher should we decrease mag
- Bugscope Team that worked
- Bugscope Team Sometimes the presets drift over time as the insect dries out in the vacuum and shrivels more or charges up with electrons and flexes
- Bugscope Team you can do click to center
- Bugscope Team You don't have to move far. If you hit done, and use click to center now you could center on the same spot as we originally set in the preset
- Bugscope Team now you can see, on the image, the shape of where the electrons have been
- Bugscope Team the square pattern is where the electron beam contaminated the sample
- Teacher which part is a bacteria - the long piece
- Bugscope Team might be, but it was more obvious near the bottom there if we could click to center and zoom in
- Bugscope Team if you can move down slightly and magnify
- Bugscope Team they look like the Advil Liquigels
- 3:57pm
- Teacher What is apalp
- Bugscope Team Whoops, looks like things got out of control there. I highly suggest using the Click to CENTER instead of dlick to drive
- Bugscope Team Ouw, lots more bacteria here
- Bugscope Team click to drive will take you to the edge of the world if you don't click again to stop
- Bugscope Team The mouth palps are like little "hands" that they use to maneuver food around or clean other mouthparts
- Bugscope Team This one seems to have a lot of sensory setae in it, perhaps for tasting food
- Bugscope Team and it is hard to do that -- if you click twice you are driving again
- Teacher there is a delay it looks like in the controls
- Bugscope Team bacteria are usually, the bacilli, about 2 microns long
- Bugscope Team we saw some on the way here
- Student whose palpa are they?
- Bugscope Team 2 microns is about 30 times smaller than the width of human hair
- Bugscope Team this is on a beetle I believe
- Bugscope Team Preset 5 is kind of interesting to me, because it looks a lot like a fingerprint. We found it on the inside edge of one of those big curved claws
- Bugscope Team so this is an accessory mouthpart that has chemosensory setae in it
- Teacher We are almost at the end of our session
- Teacher what pictures will be available from this session
- Bugscope Team we seem to have lost like 30 people
- Bugscope Team Yes, a full transcript complete with images is available, I'll get you the link here:
- Bugscope Team all of the images will be available
- Teacher they are lookin at the homepage to see how use bugscope at their school sites
- Bugscope Team hey cool
- Bugscope Team Wonderful!
- Teacher can i still look at the end of the walking stick leg?
- Teacher I was not able to drive the scope to it
- Bugscope Team You can click on the thumbnails there to get the full image size
- Bugscope Team yeah go ahead now
- Bugscope Team I can try driving there, one moment
- Bugscope Team or you can, I'll let you try first
- 4:02pm
- Bugscope Team now take the mag down, and then drive to the west
- Bugscope Team Ok, now try driving to the left left
- Teacher with less people on it seems faster
- Bugscope Team yeah we had a large group
- Bugscope Team pushing the software and the bandwidth
- Teacher it is taking awhile to refresh maybe you should just drive us there
- Bugscope Team yeah, like I said, we clocked your bandwidth at ~135Kb/s which is about the bare minimum needed for the live video feed
- Bugscope Team So we see tow claws and we see something in between that I would like to know about
- Bugscope Team two
- Bugscope Team claws
- Bugscope Team So there are the claws. Looks like there's some sort of pad below it, but it doesn't appear to have lots of setae like a pulvillus
- Teacher is this the end of the leg of the walking stick now
- Bugscope Team yeah it is a big pad, but it doesn't have setae on it
- Teacher are you guys in the same place
- Bugscope Team yes
- Bugscope Team we're in a few different offices all around the building
- Bugscope Team you mean on the screen?
- Bugscope Team Chas is at the 'scope.
- Teacher are you physcially in the same place or different location s in the building?
- 4:07pm
- Bugscope Team across several different floors actually
- Bugscope Team I am in my office like 15 feet from the 'scope, and Cate is in her office adjacent ot the 'scope room
- Bugscope Team sometimes our entomologist logs on from her apartment
- Bugscope Team she is collecting in CA now
- Teacher Thank you so much this was an awsome opportunity for the teachers
- Bugscope Team thank you
- Teacher we will be logging out now
- Teacher You guys and gals rock!
- Bugscope Team Glad to have you on, sorry few a few hiccups along the way
- Bugscope Team Thanks!
- Bugscope Team Let us know if you have any post-session questions about the transcript, data, etc
- Teacher where do i fill out the feedback form?
- Bugscope Team one sec:
- Bugscope Team http://bugscope.itg.uiuc.edu/apply/blank_form.htm
- Teacher ok i got it. Thanks so much again and I'm logging off bye!
- Bugscope Team cya
- 4:14pm
- Bugscope Team thank you!
