Connected on 2009-06-01 11:30:00 from , NC, US
- 10:47am
- Bugscope Team starting presets
- 10:53am
- 10:59am
- 11:05am
- 11:10am
- Bugscope Team done with presets, we are ready anytime
- Bugscope Team unlocked the session just now
- 11:15am
- Bugscope Team hello kristen!
- Bugscope Team hi kristen, welcome to bugscope!
- Teacher Hello!!
- Bugscope Team we are ready anytime
- Bugscope Team you should see microscope controls on your right, and presets below that
- Teacher We are waiting on another class to come in. They should be here on or before 11:30 your time.
- Bugscope Team you can try driving the scope now if you want to pratice
- Teacher Thanks! I will go for it.
- Bugscope Team cool
- Bugscope Team nice job driving. watch the edge of the scope though, if you run over the edge, we need to fix it. not a big deal, but there's nothing to see over the edge anyway :)
- Bugscope Team using "click to center" is a little easy than "click to drive", especially for fine tune control.
- Teacher So if I click to center, where should my mouse be?
Bugscope Team click anywhere in the image. it will center on that location
- 11:21am
- Bugscope Team wherever you point your mouse and click for click to center, it will center in that position
- Bugscope Team but you need to cancel the click to drive first
- Teacher whoaa!! Ok, sorry. I got it.
- Bugscope Team ok, we ran off the edge, and now i'm fixing the scope, clicked on a preset, now it's yours again!
- Bugscope Team :)
- Bugscope Team go for it
- Teacher Thanks Alex!
- Bugscope Team if you ever get lost driving the scope, you can click on a preset, that will take you to that location
- Bugscope Team can you cancel the click to drive function, it's on the right side of your browser, the navigation area
- Bugscope Team ooh nice
- Bugscope Team ok, it's yours again Kristen
- Teacher much better. thank you
- Bugscope Team :)
- Teacher What is this?
- Bugscope Team this is a centipede, it's head
- Bugscope Team it is upside-down, on its back
- Bugscope Team this is the head portion of a centipede; you can see its powerful piercing mouthparts
- Teacher way cool
- 11:26am
- Bugscope Team now you can see the multiple body segments
- Teacher Cel wants to know if we can print a picture of our guy out?
Bugscope Team well, you could use some software to print the contents of your browser window. but we do all the work for you already. all the images and chat from this session are saved to your member page: http://bugscope.beckman.illinois.edu/members/2009-036
- Teacher Are the smaller "legs" attached? They look like they might be broken?
- Bugscope Team all of these images go to your database, so the more you drive around and look the more you will be collecting images that you can download and print later
- Bugscope Team the centipedes sent weren't in this best condition. this is the better one that had some legs intact still
- Bugscope Team your bugscope member page is also linked in the original reply you got from us when you applied for bugscope
- Bugscope Team and if you have any trouble finding anything, you can always ask us at: bugscope@itg.uiuc.edu
- Teacher We had been collecting for some time so some of our friends might have come in pieces. Sorry.
- Bugscope Team no problem at all -- sometimes we get fresh samples that don't look this good
- Bugscope Team it's no big deal. we are used to seeing worse
- Bugscope Team be sure to take the mag up to look at interesting places
- 11:31am
- Bugscope Team hey cool you found this little fly!
- Teacher He's so interesting
- Bugscope Team see the compound eyes? they make up a huge proportion of the head
- Bugscope Team you can take the mag up to see them better
- Bugscope Team yay
- Bugscope Team now you can see the facets of the eye, called ommatidia
- Bugscope Team and lots of tiny hairs we call 'setae'
- Bugscope Team you can go still higher, of course
- Bugscope Team and you can use 'click to center' to help you center on the eye
- Bugscope Team if you would like
- Bugscope Team there are also setae in between the ommatidia
- Bugscope Team and you found what looks like a mold spore here
- 11:36am
- Bugscope Team the ball is a mold spore as scot says
- Teacher We are just amazed. Sorry we haven't asked a lot of questions but we are sitting in awe!
- Bugscope Team see the micron bar, in the lower left of the image?
- Teacher yes
- Bugscope Team a normal rod-shaped bacterium -- a bacillus -- is about 2 microns, or micrometers, long
- Bugscope Team this is the mouth
- Bugscope Team in the middle is the fly tongue
- Bugscope Team or as Cate says more specifically it is the tongue
- Teacher let's check it out!
- Bugscope Team it does not look as good as it would it real life because it has dried and shriveled somewhat
- Bugscope Team you can see a few more mold spores
- Bugscope Team sometimes we will find pollen grains, which are similar in appearance
- 11:41am
- Teacher alex wants to know if they have taste buds?
Bugscope Team many insects have tiny feelers called palps that function as accessory mouthparts and have very small setae on them. some of those setae are chemoreceptors, and an insect can taste its food using them. so they are much like tastebuds
- Teacher what are all the little hairs on the wing?
Bugscope Team those are microsetae, or microtrichae, and they likely do not have a sensory function. they may serve to help add surface area to the wing, and they may also help prevent wet wings from sticking together
- Bugscope Team i'm not sure what the hairs on the wing do for functionality
- 11:46am
- Bugscope Team just know that insects are a lot hairier than they seem, and a lot of the hairs serve the purpose of helping the insect to feel what's around them, kind of like how our soft skin works to help us feel temperature and touch
- Teacher The presets that are on the right bottom of the screen...do I just click on those? Are they our bugs?
Bugscope Team yes, click on the. those are just interesting locations that we saved for you, so you can go to them quickly whenever you want to
- Bugscope Team most of the insects in the presets are yours
- Bugscope Team we did add some of our own
- 11:51am
- Bugscope Team the dark spot is where it is starting to decay
- Bugscope Team some oil is coming out of the exoskeleton
- Teacher ok We thought it was a boo-boo ;)
- Bugscope Team i guess that is similar
- Bugscope Team this is a boo-boo
- Bugscope Team we are focusing for you every once and a while, makes better images
- 11:56am
- Bugscope Team focusing can be hard to control, so it's not a problem
- Teacher I thought so. Thank you for your help!
- Teacher Jake wants to know if this is a mole.
Bugscope Team no thats not a mole, it's another mold spore. There was quite a mold contamination among your insects
- Teacher We have another class coming in right now...more questions to come.
- Bugscope Team cool, we are ready
- Bugscope Team it is normal for insect specimens to get mold on them; if things did not rot there would be huge piles of dead insects and plants and animals all around us
- Bugscope Team look at the antennae, at the top of the head!
- 12:01pm
- Teacher What part of the antennae are we looking at? It looked like an egg with a "leg" sticking out
- Bugscope Team i'm not sure, can you zoom out and we can get a better look at it?
- Bugscope Team There are 2 parts to a fly antenna. I dont know their scientific names but there is a pad, furry part, and a branch
- Bugscope Team whoa
- Bugscope Team there are sensory area on the furry part used for smelling things
- Bugscope Team a lot of setae are used to smell things. those setae are called chemosensory setae
- Teacher Let's look at the mouth area
- Bugscope Team ok, that's a cool area. the proboscis is somewhere in there
- Bugscope Team one of the legs is covering up part of the mouth sadly, but you can still see part of the tongue
- 12:07pm
- Bugscope Team that's what the fly uses to spit out a digestive liquid, and then suck up its food, kinda gross, but hey, whatever gets the next meal into your belly...
- Teacher If we eat food that a fly has been on, is that liquid what makes us sick?
- Bugscope Team well, i'm not sure, but i kind of doubt that the fly digestive liquid would have any effect on humans. it's all the bacteria and the like that fly's touch, that's what hurts humans
- Bugscope Team of course if you created a gallon of that fly liquid, that would probably be bad for you
- Bugscope Team but any normal fly dose probably wouldn't hurt a human
- Bugscope Team ew alex
- Bugscope Team sorry ;)
- Bugscope Team ha
- Teacher well, we asked!!
- 12:12pm
- Bugscope Team these are special hairs that allow insects to walk on walls
- Bugscope Team tenet setae are very cool, they are what help the insect stick to walls and sucj
- Bugscope Team such
- Bugscope Team they act like suction cups or velcro
- Bugscope Team now you can see where we were
- Bugscope Team and you can see the claws
- Bugscope Team they actually don't use a sticky substance, the tenent setae use a force, called the van der waals force. it is a very week force, but when you have thousands of little tenent setae, the force adds up enough to hold the insect to a wall...
- Bugscope Team we can tell, pretty much, if a particular insect would be able to walk on a window, or on a ceiling, by looking at this part of the tarsi. The tarsi are the final segments of the leg or arm.
- Bugscope Team like in the movie spiderman when he has the hairs growing out of his hands
- Bugscope Team that he uses to walk on the building's walls
- Teacher cool stuff
- Teacher What is syrphid fly haltere
- Bugscope Team this is one of the halteres, which flies (Diptera, meaning 'two wings,' use to balance the motion of the wings.
- Bugscope Team a haltere is something flies have that they use to beat opposite their wings as they fly
- 12:17pm
- Bugscope Team a syrphid fly is also known as a hoverfly
- Bugscope Team they hover over flowers
- Bugscope Team and kind of look like a wasp because of the bands of yellow and black on their abdomen
- Bugscope Team this is where a pin was stuck in the insect
- Bugscope Team it was in a display case before i took it out
- Teacher OK. too funny. we were wondering if that was really a hole.
- Bugscope Team this claw is different. do you think this beetle would be able to walk on walls?
- Bugscope Team we would have to look further down the 'arm' to see if it had little pads of tenent setae like the fly had
- Teacher we vote no
- 12:22pm
- Bugscope Team I bet you are right.
- Bugscope Team there is a cord like a tendon inside this part of the 'arm' that pulls to close the claw
- Teacher yeah!
- Bugscope Team this beetle really got around, picked up a lot of junk
- Bugscope Team the beetle is covering its mouth with its forelimb
- Teacher One of our "bugs" looked like a fly with feather wings. they were white and feathery but when we put him with our other bugs, his wings got tangled up and caught on all the other bugs. I don't know what he was but we were sad that his white wings didn't make it.
- 12:27pm
- Bugscope Team aww
- Bugscope Team this is a little colony of mold
- Bugscope Team insect mouths open sideways compared to ours
- Teacher wow that is something else to see!! We are glad they don't BITE too!!
- Bugscope Team this is one of the jaws, which have sort of hinges and open/close like a gate
- 12:32pm
- Teacher Do we have the whole wasp? his stinger? or just the head?
- Bugscope Team the whole wasp is in there, but you cant see the stinger
- Teacher ok. thank you.
- Teacher I see our time is up. I can't believe it has been an hour. Thank you SO much for everything. We would love to do this again next year.
- Bugscope Team remember to check your member page for all the chat and images from this session
- Bugscope Team Yay! Thank you for logging on today. We will be glad to see you next year.
- Bugscope Team http://bugscope.beckman.illinois.edu/members/2009-036
- Bugscope Team thank you for participating today
- Bugscope Team Bye!
- Teacher Yay!! We are looking forward to it!
- Teacher Bye
- Bugscope Team :)
- Bugscope Team good bye
- 12:37pm
- Bugscope Team nice session, later!
