Connected on 2008-08-25 10:00:00 from Hoisington, KS, US
- 9:54am
- Bugscope Team good morning!
- Bugscope Team would you like to log in as teacher?
- Bugscope Team rather than as a student?
- Bugscope Team Pepper just gave you control of the microscope.
- 10:01am
- Bugscope Team please let us know if you have any questions or any problems using the 'scope
- 10:08am
- Student I am logged on as a teacher
- Bugscope Team for some reason our software awarded you a student login but Pepper fixed you up
- Bugscope Team this is the housefly
- Bugscope Team in profile
- Bugscope Team if you drive to the left there is some sort of hymenopteran
- Bugscope Team note that you can click on amy preset to get to what it depicts
- Bugscope Team that we did not recognize
- Student what are we looking now
Bugscope Team this is some sort of hymenopteran (like a bee)
- Bugscope Team it is pretty cool looking but we are not sure -- like Pepper says it seems to be a small bee
- Student what are the hairs
Bugscope Team they are just that-- hairs! but we call them setae (or seta for singular) on insects
- Bugscope Team the hairs (setae) are usually sensory
- Bugscope Team they give the insect information about its environs
- Bugscope Team some setae are mechanosensory -- like a cat's whiskers
- 10:13am
- Bugscope Team and some setae are chemosensory and pick up smells from the air
- Student how big is this insect in real life
- Bugscope Team I think less than a cm long
- Bugscope Team you can see here that it has four wings
- Bugscope Team you can see the scalebar in the lower left corner says 1 mm
- Student how many eyes does this insect have
Bugscope Team we can't tell, but it probably has 2 compound eyes and 3 simple eyes called ocelli
- Bugscope Team most flying insects have a total of 5 eyes
- Bugscope Team the compound eyes have hundreds of facets called ommatidia
- Bugscope Team like flies, bees, and wasps
- Student are we seeing the eye
- Bugscope Team the facets are like individual lenses
- Bugscope Team yes near the middle of the screen is one of its compound eyes
- Bugscope Team the eye is almost in the middle of the image
- Bugscope Team one of the compound eyes, that is
- Bugscope Team you can use click to center to get to it, and then you can take the mag up
- Bugscope Team you can see the pattern all of the ommatidia make
- 10:18am
- Bugscope Team close-packing shapes them into hexagons
- Bugscope Team the Adjust function allows you to fix the contrast/brightness on the screen
- Student how many lenses does it have
- Bugscope Team looks like we could safely say a few thousand
- Bugscope Team people have counted them in some species
- Bugscope Team it is easier to count in ants, because their compound eyes are smaller
- Bugscope Team you can zoom in and adjust the focus if you want
- Student how many eletron microscopes do you have
Bugscope Team we have 2-- a scanning electron microscope, which we are using now, and a transmission electron microscope
- Bugscope Team you can see the jaws here...
- Bugscope Team each microscope has its own room, and air, water, nitrogen, fitlered electrical power
- Bugscope Team filtered..
- Student what kind of food do you think this insect eats
- Bugscope Team probably something in liquid form
- Bugscope Team pollen maybe
- 10:23am
- Bugscope Team the mouth is confusing -- or maybe as Pepper said it eats pollen
- Student how large are your microscopes
- Student how expensive are they
Bugscope Team you are controlling a $600,000 microscope right now. the TEM (transmission electron microscope) was considerably more expensive
- Bugscope Team the SEM is like a large desk with a taller component on the side
- Bugscope Team and the TEM is much taller and has a high tension tank and a power supply
- Student how many schools do this each year and how many insects do they send you
- Bugscope Team they really do fill a small room
- Bugscope Team not all schools send us insects. Thank you for sending yours by the way! We had some leftovers that we can use for other schools
- Bugscope Team during the school year we will have, often, three sessions a week
- Bugscope Team typically they send between 3-10 different insects. The number varies.
- Bugscope Team we have had over 350 sessions since we started in March 1999
- Bugscope Team sometimes we will get big bugs like cockroaches or cicadas which we can't really use on our stubs because they are so big
- Bugscope Team we have more per year now
- Bugscope Team this is the head of the grasshopper
- Bugscope Team we could not put the whole dude on the stub -- it was too big
- Bugscope Team you can see one of the simple eyes now
- Bugscope Team there are usually three simple eyes, which are called ocelli, as Pepper had told us earlier
- Bugscope Team the edge of the world
- 10:28am
- Bugscope Team below there is a screw that holds the stage on
- Bugscope Team the eye kind of looks like a golfball
- Bugscope Team oh no!
- Bugscope Team the body is missing!
- Student what do you see
- Bugscope Team scott is just playing around
- Student do we only have the head
- Bugscope Team to the south and a little west is a junebug
- Bugscope Team yeah we had to make a choice of what to keep -- the sample stage is only about 50 mm in diameter
- Bugscope Team you can imagine if we had a cicada for example it would be all you could see
- Student is this the mouth
Bugscope Team yes, it looks like it is pretty dry since it is cracking
- 10:33am
- Student who built the microscope
Bugscope Team FEI Philips manufactures the one we own, but there are other companies like Hitachi
- Student Do they need batteries or do you plug it in
- Bugscope Team some insects ooze hemolymph as a defense against predators, like ants, and we may be seeing some of that on the grasshopper's face
- Bugscope Team the microscope runs on a 220-volt circuit, and some of that power is kicked up to as much as 30,000 volts
- Student is this what an ant using to clean itself
- Bugscope Team this is how the ant keeps clean
- Bugscope Team yes!
- Bugscope Team sorry I was writing and you beat me to it
- Student how many lenses does an ant have
- Bugscope Team they often clean their antennae, which are much more important, generally, than their eyes
- Bugscope Team some ants have no eyes at all. The average is around 20-50 lenses. But some can have more than that. It just depends on how much that species of ant relies on its eyes
- Student how do the ants carry their food
- Bugscope Team well it is handy to have six legs so you can use two of them to carry things and four to walk, but they might normally carry things in their jaws
- Bugscope Team now you can see the eyes
- 10:39am
- Bugscope Team this has a more complex compound eye than we normally see
- Bugscope Team you can imagine that it has a few hundred ommatidia between the two eyes
- Student how do you tell the difference between a boy and girl
- Student why does the antennae seem to be bent
Bugscope Team ants have elbowed (bent) antennae
- Student what is ammatidia
Bugscope Team ommatidia are the eye facets
- Bugscope Team that is how you can tell an ant is an ant and not a termite of some sort
- Bugscope Team a lot of ants are male
- Bugscope Team but we don't have an easy way to tell just looking at them
- Student are all the worker ants males
- Bugscope Team I think that is correct
- Student do bugs have brains
- Bugscope Team the worker ants are female
- Student do ants have ears
- Bugscope Team they are sterile though
- Student to girl ants have wings
Bugscope Team the winged ants are fertile adults, both male and female.
- Student how do ants communicate
- Bugscope Team yes they have brains -- a fruit fly's brain is mostly devoted to processing visual signals
- Bugscope Team I am sorry -- I got that completely backwards about the worker ants
- Bugscope Team ants communicate using their antennma
- 10:44am
- Bugscope Team antennae
- Bugscope Team the antennae include chemosensors, and a lot of the information ants get is in the form of chemical triggers
- Student how big is their brain
- Student do ants have hearts and what color is their blood
- Bugscope Team the brain is pretty small. it has to share space with the muscles that control the jaws
- Student can we see the ants mouth
- Bugscope Team their blood is clear, generally, and it is called hemolymph
- Bugscope Team i tried to get the ant to show its mouth better, but it was kind of hidden at that angle
- Bugscope Team this is the june bug's claw
- Bugscope Team they have an open circulatory system, so they don't have a heart quite the way we think of one
- Student where was the microscope built
- Bugscope Team yeah you could not see the mouth very well
- Bugscope Team this one was built in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands
- 10:49am
- Bugscope Team http://www.itg.uiuc.edu/ms/equipment/microscopes/esem/
- Student where was the first micrscope built
- Bugscope Team that is from our equipment page and shows a photo of the microscope
- Student are we seeing joints
- Student are we seeing hairs
- Bugscope Team the first electron microscope was built in Russia, or at least by a Russian scientist, in about 1931
- Bugscope Team yes to both
- Bugscope Team there are different segments to the leg and those spikes are setae
- Bugscope Team flies are 2 different parts to their antennae. they have the part that looks like a branch and then they have the part that looks like a flap
- Bugscope Team the branch part is shown really well in this fly
- Bugscope Team the first microscope was built, it is thought, in Holland as well, in the 17th century, by van Leeuwenhoek
- Bugscope Team yes usually we do not get a good image of the antennae
- Student what is the heaviest insect
Bugscope Team The heaviest insect is probably the goliath beetle (Goliathus goliath) of Africa, which is reputed to weigh up to 100 grams (more than a small bird)!
- Bugscope Team lobster
- 10:55am
- Student are lobster insects
- Bugscope Team since lobsters are not really insects
- Bugscope Team lobsters are crustaceans and have two pairs an antennae, among other differences
- Bugscope Team fairy flies (a type of wasp) are less than 0.4 mm in length, and these are regarded as the smallest insect
- Student what is the lightest insect
- Bugscope Team the fairy fly would be a good contender
- Student Thank you so much for allowing us to see our insects you did a nice job answering all our questions
- Student I think our time is up
- Bugscope Team thank you for all of your great questions
- Bugscope Team Thank You!
- Bugscope Team you can access your transcript and saved images at your member homepage located: http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/members/2008-061/
- 11:00am
- Bugscope Team and of course you can email bugscope if you have anymore questions
- Bugscope Team We are logging off. Thank you and see you next year!
