Session 2008-010 with auburndale hs

Application

The School

The Class

The Project

Miscellaneous

Live Session Transcript

Connected on 2008-03-14 08:00:00 from Auburndale, WI, US

• 6:56am
• Bugscope Team rxl started, session enabled
• 7:38am
• Bugscope Team vac started
• Bugscope Team 1.4...
• 7:44am
• Bugscope Team vac good, starting presets
• Bugscope Team yay!
• Bugscope Team eyeball

• 7:49am

• Bugscope Team mothman

• 7:55am
• Bugscope Team hi mark, welcome to bugscope!
• Bugscope Team we are still finishing up some presets, done real soon
• Teacher Hello what are we looking at today
• Bugscope Team well, we've got several insects for your viewing pleasure. a moth, grasshopper, shield bug, lady bug and a beetle
• Bugscope Team we are goign to make one more preset and then i'll unlock the session
• Bugscope Team anti
• Teacher Ok I am just looking at my controls!
• Bugscope Team cool, they won't work until we unlock the session

• Bugscope Team does everything make sense so far?
• Bugscope Team we're giving you control...
• Bugscope Team okay, presets are done, session unlocked. mark, you have control now
• Bugscope Team the current image is an ant head
• Bugscope Team you can at any time click on a preset to take you to another insect
• Bugscope Team or change mag, drive around where you are
• Bugscope Team if you have any questions please feel free to ask us
• Bugscope Team if you click to drive you need also to click to stop
• 8:02am

• Bugscope Team HI all

• Bugscope Team hey annie

• Bugscope Team Yay Annie@

• Bugscope Team this ant has ocelli
• Bugscope Team that is a paper tab in the background
• Bugscope Team Annie with a trademark.

• Bugscope Team insects have compound eyes, which are very interesting, they are composed of hundreds of individual facets, called ommatidia

• Bugscope Team ha ha ha

• Bugscope Team 40x is close to the minimum resolution, i think
• Bugscope Team those three bumps are the ocelli
• Bugscope Team yes, notice the small bumps to the left

• Bugscope Team the bumps are ocelli, they are also called simple eyes

• Bugscope Team you can see where the left antenna is busted off
• Bugscope Team ants generally get much more information from their antennae than they do from their eyes
• Bugscope Team insects are also very hairy. those hairs are called setae (pronounced sea-tea). setae can be mechanosensory or chemosensory. setae help the insect to sense it's environment
• Teacher How much does a SEM cost?
• 8:07am
• Bugscope Team this one was around $600,000
• Bugscope Team a little over 9 years ago
• Bugscope Team yes, and you are controlling it live!
• Bugscope Team but don't worry, it is not possible to damage it

• Bugscope Team sometimes the scope gets confused, but we can kick it back into gear ;)
• Bugscope Team this is a particularly nice SEM because it has a field-emission electron gun (an extra $200,000 item) as well as wet mode capability
• Bugscope Team we can image uncoated nonconductive samples using this 'scope

• Bugscope Team nice driving mark

• Bugscope Team and we can work at 100% relative humidity

• Bugscope Team though it is a lot more difficult to work in wet mode which is what we call it when 100% humidity
• Bugscope Team this microscope has 2 nm resolution -- with a perfect sample and under perfect conditions
• Bugscope Team each eye facet has a lens and can see a strait line outwards. the curvature of the entire compound eye ensures that the insect can see a wider range than just a strait line in front
• Teacher is magnification multiplied

• Bugscope Team Um we can change the mag however we want
• Teacher can we go to a different specimen
  Bugscope Team at any time you want, you can click on a preset, and it will move to that location

• Bugscope Team try another preset

• 8:12am

• Teacher what is that

• Bugscope Team you can also see a couple of pollen grains in there

• Bugscope Team a lot of these samples came from an entomologist's collection, so you will see a pinhole through the thorax
• Teacher where are the pollen grains
• Bugscope Team or as we saw with the ant, a paper tab
• Bugscope Team they were the little balls on the claw. so if you took the mag back up you will see them again
• Teacher new driver: this is echko
• Bugscope Team Hi Echko!
• Teacher how many times can this SEM magnify?
• Bugscope Team we can go over 800,000x
• Bugscope Team it can pretty high but you wont see anything interesting beyond 200,000x most of the time

• Bugscope Team insects especially we cant go very high with

• Bugscope Team but for meaningful, publishable images we rarely go over 200,000x, as Cate says

• Bugscope Team with insects it's easier to get good images anywhere from 40x to 30,000x
• Bugscope Team they dont have very interesting features at high mags

• 8:17am
• Bugscope Team when we use the microscope for bugscope we have the sample at a long working distance so you can image more of the insect at low mag
• Bugscope Team and with a long working distance we don't have quite the resolution
• Bugscope Team this is the hole where the pin had gone through, of course

• Bugscope Team this is a shield bug which is a true bug

• Teacher what are the four of you majoring in?
• Bugscope Team here you can see where one of the antennae is missing
• Bugscope Team I am working on my PhD in entomology
• Bugscope Team I got a degree in English and Biology. A long time ago.
• Bugscope Team scott is the senior electron microscopist here, he's past schooling
• Bugscope Team i majored in physics
• Bugscope Team i have two degrees in music
• Bugscope Team but i'm a sysadmin now
• Bugscope Team annie is the real entomologist here though
• Bugscope Team Alex is our sysadmin, and an uncommon one you can actually talk to and who actually likes to work
• Teacher we are a freshmen-sophmore biology class
• Bugscope Team very cool, your teacher is excellent for trying to find interesting projects for you all
• Bugscope Team I became interested in entomology when I was in high school
• Bugscope Team i liked bio in high school a lot
• Bugscope Team Until my senion year I wanted to be an opera singer
• Bugscope Team Or a musical theater actress
• Bugscope Team I took biology because I was in danger of becoming an english teacher
• Teacher This is Reba
• Bugscope Team My parents would have killed me!

• Bugscope Team Hi Reba!
• Bugscope Team hi reba! welcome to bugscope
• Bugscope Team hey reba!
• 8:22am
• Bugscope Team click on another preset if you would like

• Bugscope Team Reba, let us know if you have any questions about what you see on your screen

• Bugscope Team you can drive around using the navigation buttons or you can go to another insect by clicking on the preset picture
• Teacher Our computer is slow, bear with us

• Bugscope Team the insects were sputter coated in gold so you wouldn't see much color anyway

• Bugscope Team the images are all black and white because this is an electron microscope: the image is gathered via electrons that are bouncing off the insect, within a vacuum, and are collected by a secondary electron camera

• 8:27am
• Bugscope Team here you can see some of the tenent setae
• Teacher Are there are interesting projects you are working on with the SEM?
• Bugscope Team we train people to use the microscopes to do their own research

• Bugscope Team we train grad students, mostly, and postdocs, and sometimes undergraduates
• Teacher what do the tenet setae do?
  Bugscope Team the tenet setae help the beetle to adhere to surfaces

• Bugscope Team pollen
• Bugscope Team and the tenent setae
• Bugscope Team there you can see the setae better and the pollen ball

• Bugscope Team I use the SEM to look for pores that are associated with pheromone release in longhorned beetles. I think it is interesting.
• Bugscope Team the setae we see are the ones that allow the beetle to stick to the ceiling, or to glass, when it walks

• Bugscope Team if you are having problems with click to drive, sometimes click to center will give you better control

• Bugscope Team you can pretty much tell from looking at the tarsi whether a particular insect will be able to walk up a wall, for example
• Bugscope Team the other setae we see are mechanoreceptors -- like cat whiskers -- and chemoreceptors
• 8:33am
• Bugscope Team These partticular setate look like mechanoreceptors to me
• Bugscope Team oops, particular

• Bugscope Team yeah they are fluted, so they are sort of (designed!) to be able to bend in any direction

• Bugscope Team the hairs are the "setae" that we are talking about. setae is plural, seta is singular
• Bugscope Team so yes as Annie says these are very likely mechanoreceptors

• Bugscope Team I would say that mechanosensors are the most common setae on most surfaces

• Bugscope Team their exoskeleton is like a suit of armor and in order for them to feel whats going on is to have these setae stick through the armor. the setae are connected to nerves

• Teacher Do you do any work with honeybee mites?

• Bugscope Team we have some of them in the hood here but they are really gummed up.

• Bugscope Team but we have not had any projects involving them
• Bugscope Team Honey bee mites are kind of like tomatoes: any of them you can get in the winter are not worth having
• 8:38am
• Bugscope Team (I say that, but I buy tomatoes in the winter)
• Teacher What are the spear shaped things on its eye?
• Bugscope Team those are scales

• Bugscope Team analogous to feathers in birds

• Bugscope Team scales can be responsible for color patterns; they can help provide lift; and they can help the moth get out of webs

• Bugscope Team they're what make butterfly wings feel silky

• Bugscope Team the tongue of the moth is all rolled up

• Bugscope Team all of the chat and images collected during this session are saved onto your bugscope member webpage: http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/members/2008-010

• Bugscope Team the arrangement/spacing of the tiny ribs in the scales can produce structural colors -- colors that are not related to pigments

• Teacher How long is the tounge compared to the body?

• Bugscope Team well, good question, trying zooming out a bit and maybe we can get an idea

• 8:43am

• Bugscope Team also notice the measurement scale in the bottom left of the image
• Bugscope Team I think it depends, of course, but in some cases the tongue can be quite long
• Bugscope Team compared to the length of the body
• Bugscope Team mm is millimeters of course. um stands for microns. 1 um = one millionth of a meter.
• Bugscope Team it looks like if the proboscus was unwrapped, it'd be about 3-4 mm long
• Teacher what is the broken structure beneath the eye?
• Bugscope Team that is the base of one of those palps
• Bugscope Team you can see an unbroken one to the left

• Teacher The grasshopper doesn't work.
• Bugscope Team let me try

• 8:48am

• Bugscope Team yep, scope is confused, just a sec please
• Bugscope Team scope is confused, fixing now
• Bugscope Team cate fixed it, thanks cate!

• Teacher This is mark
• Bugscope Team hi mark
• Teacher class has ended could you take a couple screeen shots of the grasshopper for discussion on monday?
• Bugscope Team grasshoppers don't work as a rule ; )
• Bugscope Team yes mark, all images are saved automatically to your member page: http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/members/2008-010
• Bugscope Team Mark if you have time you can drive around it. Or we can just cruise a little to add images to your session.
• Bugscope Team an image is saved whenever the image is still for 2-3 seconds
• Bugscope Team also, all the chat is there as well

• Bugscope Team Thanks Annie!
• Bugscope Team thanks mark!

• 8:53am

• 8:59am

• Bugscope Team smushed piece of dirt or juju
• 9:10am
• Bugscope Team alright, good session everyone, stopping rxl, disabling session now