Connected on 2007-11-09 09:00:00 from , WI, US
- 1:13pm
- Teacher hi there- our next class is almost here....
- Bugscope Team Hello Teach!
- Bugscope Team hello!
- Bugscope Team We redid the presets for this afternoon.
- Teacher I noticed- thank you!
- Bugscope Team Also added some fruit flies and cleaned the millipede up a little.
- Teacher our morning class was really excited about the session.....
- Bugscope Team is that you cruising around Ms H?
- Teacher yes it is....now that I'm a pro :)
- Bugscope Team this is a spiracle on the fruit fly next to the haltere
- Bugscope Team a spiracle is a breathing hole
- Bugscope Team Annie are there like two spiracles per body segment?
- Bugscope Team one on each side?
- Bugscope Team the blood of insects doesn't carry oxygen, so they have spiracles all over the body because each individual cell has to get its own oxygen supply
- Bugscope Team Umm, I think so. I am not sure for all insects
- Teacher are you enjoying answering each other's questions
- Bugscope Team ha ha, yes
- 1:18pm
- Bugscope Team we have to entertain ourselves, and Annie is the expert bugologist
- Bugscope Team something
- Teacher we are having some issues getting our second set of computers going
- Bugscope Team what are they not doing?
- Teacher we are using a different set of computers that aren't in the computer lab....they are slower
- Teacher we are going to try something else.....
- Bugscope Team that could be part of it -- they will run differently when they are slower -- the software modifies itself a bit for slower confusers.
- Teacher I'm going to log off and project what I have so we can at least see what I see
- Bugscope Team that sounds good -- many of our participants work that way
- Bugscope Team brb
- 1:25pm
- Bugscope Team okay
- Bugscope Team Teach you are back!
- Teacher we are back!
- Bugscope Team Are you projecting?
- Teacher yes I am
- Bugscope Team Very big spiracle...
- Bugscope Team *waves to class*
- Teacher what are the hairy things around it
Bugscope Team the hairy things are just that hairs! but on insects, we have to call them setae (or seta singular)
- Teacher *waves back*
- Teacher who is the entemologist?
Bugscope Team annie is our bugologist
- Bugscope Team If you go to Magnify, to the right, you can take the mag down, and down, and see where you are on the fly
- Bugscope Team insects are a lot hairier than they seem
- Bugscope Team the hairs protect the opening from dust
- Bugscope Team they keep big things from getting sucked in
- Bugscope Team now the thing that looks like a boxer's speedbag? -- that is the haltere
- Bugscope Team there is the fruit fly
- Bugscope Team ah now you can see the whole fruit fly, almost
- Bugscope Team this is the dragonfly eye
- Teacher what is the stuff on the eye
Bugscope Team sometimes there will be dirt on it, or what seems to be lint (the stringy stuff)
- Bugscope Team now we are looking at the ommatidia -- the individual facets of the compound eye
- 1:30pm
- Bugscope Team and we see a lot of dirt
- Teacher can you clean a bugs eye
- Teacher do they have eyelids....can they blink
- Bugscope Team we always tell our participants that insects are hairier and dirtier than you would expect
- Bugscope Team you have probably seen a housefly clean it eyes
- Bugscope Team except when we look at ants, i expect them to be caked in mud, but they seem decently clean
- Teacher have you ever been seriously injured from an insect
- Bugscope Team we could blast it gently with air
- Bugscope Team btw, annie went AFK for a few, but should be back shortly
- Bugscope Team I have been stung a few times but nothing bad
- Teacher what are your favorite arthropod movies
- Bugscope Team Annie might have heard of some pain stories from her bug friends if nothing bad happened to her
- Bugscope Team And I used to get a lot of spider bites but they are not insects
- Bugscope Team I liked The Fly with Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum.
- Bugscope Team And I remember Mothra when I was little.
- Bugscope Team I dont know what mine would be, but that is a good question
- Bugscope Team i think i always liked arachnaphobia
- Bugscope Team This is a tangle of limbs from the millipede.
- Bugscope Team For some reason the millipede had some oily stuff on it, and I tried cleaning it over the interim.
- Bugscope Team the millipede you sent us had a lot of stringy limbs, i wonder if it ever tripped on himself
- Bugscope Team You can always take the mag lower to see where you are.
- Bugscope Team a little lower anyway
- Teacher insect humor......
- 1:35pm
- Bugscope Team the samples are in a vacuum chamber, coated with gold-palladium, and we are beaming electrons at them and getting these images back, in real time
- Bugscope Team you are driving a $600,000 microscope.
Bugscope Team dont worry we wont charge you if you break it XD
- Bugscope Team there is the head, its eye is not as big around its head like the fruit fly's. this means that it doesnt depend on the eye as much
- Bugscope Team you can see the eye to the left, and those nasty fangs.
- Bugscope Team theses are some bad little dudes
- Bugscope Team these
- Teacher what do they use the fangs for, since they are herbivores
- Bugscope Team maybe they are for defense
- Bugscope Team probably to help cut and shovel food into its mouth
- Bugscope Team or that too
- Bugscope Team this is one of those critters that you see running along the walls -- it looks like a living mustache.
- Bugscope Team this is a centipede then...a house centipede
- Teacher we caught it on the wall of our school, in fact
- Bugscope Team they can get pretty big
- Bugscope Team i just do not like them
- Teacher why would it be a centipede instead of a millipede
- Bugscope Team they are considered a beneficial arthropod because they eat other insects
- Teacher about how many insects have you collected for bugscope
- Teacher what is the largest insect that you have collected
Bugscope Team The largest insect I have collected was a black witch moth that I found dead at a gas station in Costa Rica. I had a wingspan of about 8 inches
- Teacher what is the most unusual insect you have collected
Bugscope Team I don't really know what the most unusual insect I have collected would be. I collected some crazy stick insects in Costa Rica, and have seen some amazing owlflies and ant lions. And lots of huge beautiful moths. And lots of longhorned beetles, of course
- Bugscope Team A centipede has one pair of legs per body segment and a millipede has more than one
- Bugscope Team yeah I always call them millipedes because they don't look like what I think of as a centipede.
- 1:41pm
- Bugscope Team Annie is the collector.
- Teacher do you have the antennae of the butterfly
- Bugscope Team no i didnt see that...i might have mistook it for a limb of the centipede dude
- Bugscope Team We just got a pseudoscorpion the other day, and that was the most unusual critter we have seen for awile.
- Teacher cool
- Teacher would it be easier for bugs to move if they had a backbone?
Bugscope Team Insects wear their "bones" on the outside of their bodies. Their exoskeleton is a strong tube with muscles on the inside...they are the opposite from us! If they had a backbone it would completely change their anatomy and probably their ability to do all the insect-type things they do (like fly and live in huge colonies and occupy many different niches)---it is a hard question to answer. It would be a very different world if insects had backbones
- Bugscope Team Okay this is what is called a house centipede, and they use their fangs -- they eat other insects.
- Teacher how big is your microscope?
Bugscope Team it is about the size of a desk, there is a picture of it on our website
- Bugscope Team they have their bones on the outside; if they had a backbone they would be so very different
- Bugscope Team this is the face of the cicada
- Bugscope Team the microscope has its own air, water, electricity, nitrogen, its own room...
- Teacher I'm lost looking for the overall head
Bugscope Team decrease the magnification
- Bugscope Team you know Teach the head is so big that we cannot see all of it at once
- Bugscope Team the eyes are to the northeast and northwest
- 1:46pm
- Teacher are we able to see the butterfly antennae
- Bugscope Team this part of the head functions like a pump so that the cicada can suck juice out of plants that it sticks its proboscis into
- Bugscope Team Teach the best antennae today are on the beetle. We didn't mount the butterfly today -- I am sorry.
- Teacher is that why we can't fly, because we don't have exoskeletons
Bugscope Team well, we are certainly heavy and not very aerodynamic...and we don't have wings. Insect cuticle is lightweight, flexible and strong. And insects are very small. I think that would make it easier for them to evolve flight
- Teacher should I go to the beetle head to see the antennae - number 10?
- Bugscope Team yeah try it!
- Bugscope Team there is a variety of changes you would have to make in order to be able to fly.
- Bugscope Team it's not just that you would need an exoskeleton
- Bugscope Team to some insects the air feels thick, like water does to us
- Teacher we can't change the image for some reason
- 1:51pm
- Bugscope Team now you can see the antennae on either side of the head
- Teacher can cicadas fly
Bugscope Team As adults cicadas do fly
- Bugscope Team yes the can fly, but not super well
- Bugscope Team they are kind of dumb..they will fly into things
- Bugscope Team they are not very aerodynamic
- Teacher what direction are the antennae
- Bugscope Team they are left and right, at the edges of the head
- Teacher why is a cockroach's insides white
Bugscope Team All that white goo is called fat body.
- Teacher do you have control of the microscope as well?
- Bugscope Team youve opened a cockroach up?
- Teacher Brett has crushed one
- Bugscope Team we can drive the microscope if we want to but when we do bugscope we want the class to understand that they have control
- Bugscope Team It is fat
- Bugscope Team yuck, because i wouldnt want to willingly open up a cockroach is all
- Teacher is that why cicada's adult span is so short, becuase they fly into things
Bugscope Team Cicadas have a very long lifespan actually, most of their life they are underground sucking juice from tree roots. They don't live long as adults because they don't eat as adults, they are living on their food stores
- Bugscope Team and the classroom controllers can make the same mistakes that we do -- you can go out of focus or off the stage, etc.
- Bugscope Team It serves several functions: it stores energy, like our fat; it can store toxins so that the toxins don't affect the insect
- Teacher is it true that cockroaches are the only insects that can survive a nuclear bomb
- Bugscope Team other insects will certainly be able to survive as well
- Bugscope Team the less speciallized they are the better they will fare
- Teacher like what? and why???
Bugscope Team I think it depends on whether the insects food source survives. If all the flowers are obliterated, then nothing that lives on pollen or nectar or fruit will be able to survive. Cockroaches (and silverfish and roly polies and earwigs) and other generalists will survive because they will have garbage and rotten things to eat. And then the predatory insects will survive becaue they will eat the generalist insects
- 1:57pm
- Bugscope Team cockroaches are very streamlined and can live in a huge diversity of place/conditions
- Bugscope Team that also makes cockroaches less interesting to image in the electron microscope, because they do not have lots of specialized functionalities
- Bugscope Team like for example a tick, or a louse.
- Teacher what is the difference between a bumble bee and a honey bee
Bugscope Team They are in different tribes within the insect family Apidae. Honey bees are smaller, less fuzzy, they have larger nests, they have barbed stingers. Bumble bee colonies only live one year (typically), they have few individuals in a nest, they have unbarbed stingers, they are not domesticated, they are larger (generally) and they are fuzzier
- Teacher what about a bee and wasp
- Bugscope Team kind of a long winded answer, that was
- Bugscope Team a fruit fly is more radiation resistant than a roach according to wikipedia
- Teacher can you move the microscope for us....the kids want to see you do it
- Bugscope Team but i understand what annie is saying about what survives longer after plantlife is gone
- Teacher what are the holes...spiricles
- 2:02pm
- Bugscope Team these holes are where things fell off it looks like
- Bugscope Team those holes are places where mandibular and maxillary palps broke off
- Teacher what kind of things
- Bugscope Team the palps are sort of like limbs that are used for manipulating food, and tasting it
- Bugscope Team another long-winded answer
- Bugscope Team when you see video of an insect eating, and all of those things are moving at once...
- Bugscope Team when you have a barbed stinger, it is meant to fall off and stay in you
- Bugscope Team the unbarbed stinger means the bee can sting you multiple times
- Bugscope Team or wasp
- Bugscope Team it also means that the bee or wasp doesn't not die after it stings
- Bugscope Team you can see the eye to the right, and the jaws folded over each other in the middle
- Bugscope Team this is on the fruit fly
- Bugscope Team it is part of the haltere, which stabilizes the fruit fly as it flies
- Bugscope Team these are hypertrophied mechanosensors on the haltere
- Bugscope Team they sense their own motion with respect to the wings and modify their own motion in time with the wings -- they function sort of like gyroscopic stabilizers
- Bugscope Team flies are among the only insects with only two wings
- Bugscope Team most insects have two full sized sets of wings
- Bugscope Team now you can see the whole haltere, right ion the center
- 2:07pm
- Bugscope Team like a punching bag
- Teacher what is the average temperature of an insects blood
Bugscope Team Insect blood is the same temperature as the air. There are some insects that do generate heat with their muscles when they fly.
- Bugscope Team sometimes, on a four-winged insect like a wasp, we can see the little hooks they use to make the fore- and hindwings stick together in flight
- Bugscope Team I think the temperature will be the same as the external air
- Bugscope Team the blood, which is clear, not green like I usually tell people, is called hemolymph
- Teacher so why don't they freeze
Bugscope Team Some insects do freeze...that is why we don't see a lot of adult insects in the winter. Insects usually hibernate in some way during the coldest months. There are some insects have have antifreeze proteins in their blood that allow them to live through the winter.
- Bugscope Team They can freeze. But sometimes they are cool with it : ) they just unfreeze and wake up again
- Teacher we need to go.....thanks so much for everything...we'll do this again next year
- Bugscope Team hey are we lost?
- Bugscope Team all right, well we look forward to seeing you again, and i hope you all had fun!!
- Bugscope Team I just moved us...
- Bugscope Team thank you all
- 2:12pm
- Bugscope Team Thank You!
- Bugscope Team you can log into your home page and find the images you saw today and a script
- Bugscope Team I'll have alex send you an email about the images and the script
