Connected on 2010-01-20 10:00:00 from Yarmouth, ME, US
- 8:44am
- Bugscope Team coating the sample
- 8:58am
- Bugscope Team sample in scope, starting vac
- Bugscope Team starting presets
- 9:05am
- 9:11am
- 9:16am
- 9:23am
- 9:29am
- 9:36am
- 9:42am
- Bugscope Team done with presets, session unlocked
- Bugscope Team we are READY!
- 9:48am
- Bugscope Team Welcome to Bugscope!
- Bugscope Team Please let us know when you have questions.
- Bugscope Team MVU are you working with us today?
- Bugscope Team click tp stop, one click
- Bugscope Team to
- Guest yes but can't stay long
- Bugscope Team so you are just testing things out and your real connection is later
- 9:53am
- Bugscope Team that's okay, we've got a school login in a few minutes, and will need to give control to them
- Guest yes. thats fine
- Bugscope Team this is one of the ants, which are tiny
- Guest this is great!
- Bugscope Team welcome to bugscope mrs. gautreau
- Bugscope Team we are ready for you and your students
- Bugscope Team Good morning Mrs Gautreau!
- Bugscope Team Mrs G you have control of the microscope.
- Bugscope Team this is a very small ant, one of three
- Teacher Hi, this is Cathy Wolinsky helping Stephanie Gautreau's class. We're waiting for the class to come in from recess.
- Bugscope Team okay, no problem
- Teacher About 5 more minutes
- Bugscope Team if you have any questions please go ahead and ask
- Bugscope Team Cool we have worked with you before. Let us know if you need anything. Feel free to test drive.
- Bugscope Team So yeah Hi Cathy!
- Bugscope Team this is the head, of course
- Bugscope Team you can see one antenna, one eye, and the jaws
- Bugscope Team looks like the other antenna is busted off
- 10:01am
- Bugscope Team MVU let us know if you have questions in the meantime. I think you have a pretty good idea of how things work.
- Teacher Hi, we're all set.
- Bugscope Team great, we are ready too
- Bugscope Team this is an ant
- Bugscope Team the head of the ant
- Bugscope Team you can see the compound eye in the upper left
- Bugscope Team the part of the antenna with all of the segments on it is called the flagellum (which is used to describe a motor tail, normally, in a single celled animal) or funiculus.
- Bugscope Team The non flexible part of the antenna, closer to the head, is called the scape
- Teacher Sean, how many little facets does it have in th compound eye.
- Teacher From Catie, can you tell how old the ant it?
- Bugscope Team looks like 35 or so, hard to tell
- 10:06am
- Bugscope Team it is probably just a month or so old
- Bugscope Team those facets are called ommatidia, there are only 40 or so here, but other insects, especially those that fly, have hundreds, sometimes thousands of ommatidia
- Bugscope Team now we see the compound eye much better. good job driving!
- Teacher From Zach, does an ant have any hairs?
Bugscope Team well, yeah, it looks really hairy doesn't it? but those aren't hairs like ours. they are called setae (pronounced see-tee)
- Bugscope Team some ants do not have eyes; they all seem to depend more on their antennae
- Bugscope Team setae are sensory, they help insects to sense their environment
- Teacher Connor, is this ant a male or a female?
- Bugscope Team setae can be mechanosensory, sense mechanical movement. they can also be chemosensory, and sense chemicals, smell, tastes, etc.
- Teacher Emily, on the ant where is its jaws and mouth?
Bugscope Team you can see the jaws just under the antenna, the jaws are covering the mouth area
- Teacher Kara, what are the dots (structures) near the eye?
Bugscope Team i'm not sure, some kind of deformation in the exoskepeton
- Bugscope Team I think that the workers are female, like in bees, trying to check
- Bugscope Team exoskeleton, i mean
- Teacher Are we centered on the mouth?
Bugscope Team yep!
- Teacher How many teeth does it have? Randy
Bugscope Team they don't have teeth but they have hardened tips to their jaws
Bugscope Team insects don'
- Bugscope Team it's maybe a little bit up and to the right, but only slightly
- 10:11am
- Teacher IS this a real ant? Emma
Bugscope Team oh yeah, totally real
- Bugscope Team insect's don't have teeth like we do
- Teacher Is this an insect? Emma
- Guest this was lots of fun but got to go - thanks alot - we will be back on the 28th :)
Bugscope Team thank you!
- Bugscope Team insects do not have teeth or bones
- Bugscope Team see you mvuscience!
- Bugscope Team yes it is an insect, and it is real
- Bugscope Team insects have six legs, a head, thorax, and an abdomen
- Teacher Are there any ants that don't have eyes? Allie
Bugscope Team yep, totally. ants have great sensory setae, and some are totally blind but can move so well because of their sensory setae smell the world around them
- Bugscope Team they all have antennae, and they depend on them often more than they do their eyes
- Bugscope Team the antennae have many of the sensory setae Alex mentioned on them
- Teacher What type of ant would this be? Mason
Bugscope Team there are so many kinds and so many shapes for each kind we don't know for sure. it is a very small brown ant
- Teacher What is the round thing on the thorax in this view?
Bugscope Team that is a coxa, which is the first segment of a leg, closest to the body. the rest of the leg is broken off.
- Teacher How big is the ant? Catie
Bugscope Team It is about 2 mm long
- 10:16am
- Teacher Can we look at another specimen?
Bugscope Team yes just click on another preset
- Bugscope Team I can do it for you...
- Bugscope Team at any time, you can click on any of the 24 presets, and the scope will move there
- Bugscope Team do you recognize this?
- Bugscope Team it is a kind of crustacean, not an insect
- Teacher They would like to see the dragonfly head?
- Bugscope Team oh...
- Bugscope Team ok
- Bugscope Team ok, preset 16 is the dragonfly head, i just clicked on it
- Bugscope Team hold on the scope is confused, rrying to fix
- Teacher OK, I did too, sorry
- Bugscope Team ok, mrs g, try again
- Bugscope Team we are stuck looking at the roly poly for a sec while Alex restarts the server, which just hung up
- Bugscope Team i think when 2-3 people try to click on a preset at the same time, it gets confused... no biggie though
- Bugscope Team can you click on preset 16 mrs g?
- Bugscope Team you did not do anything wrong, really
- Teacher I clicked on it, but no luck.
- Bugscope Team ok, we are working on it
- Teacher I think when I scrolled it tried to show each one.
- Teacher All set
- Bugscope Team this dragonfly head is upside down
- Bugscope Team ok, i think we are good, try it again mrs g
- 10:21am
- Bugscope Team you should have control back
- Teacher What color is dragon fly? Joey
Bugscope Team I think it is brown
- Bugscope Team you can see the compound eyes on either side, and the jaws are in the middle, very small
- Bugscope Team we think it was brown
- Teacher Does it have a smell?
- Bugscope Team the microscope images here are all black and white because we are using an electron microscope, not a light microscope
- Bugscope Team now it is silver because we coated it with gold-palladium
- Teacher What are the two square things on the head?Sean
- Bugscope Team they usually smell like dust, to me
- Bugscope Team when using an electron microscope, the image is gathered via electrons, not light. since color is a product of the frequency of light, and we aren't using light, we don't have color
- Bugscope Team the square things are some of the mouthparts, which open sideways
- Teacher How old is it? Emily
Bugscope Team it is just a few weeks old, I bet. it is hard to know
Bugscope Team not sure, sorry emily, maybe a few months at most?
- Teacher How big are the setae we can see? Ben
Bugscope Team oh yeah, you can see them, they look like hairs or cat whiskers
- Bugscope Team notice the setae on the head as well, insects need setae all over their bodies so they can sense the world
- Bugscope Team insect mouths are different from ours -- they open to the side rather than up and down like ours
- Bugscope Team see the compound eye now?
- Teacher How many facets are on both eyes altogether? Kara
Bugscope Team in this case, thousands! many thousands of ommatidia
- Bugscope Team you can start to see the ommatidia, and there are thousands of them
- Teacher Do dragonflies have a sense of smell? Zach
Bugscope Team yes they can smell chemicals in the air
- Teacher How do dragonflies eat? John
- Bugscope Team they can also, perhaps obviously, see very well
- Bugscope Team check out the shape of the ommatidia, they are hexagons, that allows the surface of the eye to be curved
- Teacher How fast can a dragonfly fly? John J
- Bugscope Team they eat other insects, and they catch them while they are flying
- 10:26am
- Bugscope Team they have four wings, and they can fly very fast: 19 to 38 miles per hour
- Teacher About how long does a dragonfly live? Olivia
Bugscope Team most less than a month! but some species can live up to 6 months
- Teacher What type of insects do dragonflies eat?
Bugscope Team they eat other insects, mosquitos, even other dragonflys
- Bugscope Team you can see that the head fell off, and when Cate put it on the stub she propped it up on a stick, on a piece of wood
- Bugscope Team nice work mrs g, this is the jaw
- Bugscope Team the jaws open from side to side
- Bugscope Team dragonflies, i mean... silly me
- Bugscope Team you can see a scale from a moth or butterfly that might have been a snack
- Bugscope Team this is the face of a caterpillar
- Bugscope Team i like this view because you can see the broken exoskeleton. very cool looking
- Teacher We didn't see the answer, for how big or small are the setae? Ben
Bugscope Team well, they can be long, but some are very very small, called microsetae. 100 microns to 300-400 microns maybe
- Bugscope Team the bumps are its eyes, which are simple eyes called stemmata
- Bugscope Team microns are one thousandth of a millimeter
- 10:31am
- Bugscope Team a micron is one millionth of a meter
- Bugscope Team well, setae aren't really long. relatively maybe. they are short of course because they are sensory parts that stick out of the exoskeleton of the insect.
- Bugscope Team and a bacterium -- the rod-shaped kind -- is often 2 microns long
- Teacher How many legs does a caterpillar have? John J
- Bugscope Team the caterpillar has six regular legs, and it also what are called 'prolegs' toward the back of the body
- Teacher How old is this caterpillar? Joey
Bugscope Team well, it's hard to know really, probably a few weeks?
- Teacher What color is this caterpillar? Dylan
Bugscope Team It looked black this morning, but I am not sure what its real color would have been
- Bugscope Team we can see some of the regular legs here. they are much like those of the rolypoly
- Bugscope Team insects do not live as long as human, not even close
- Bugscope Team but what they lack in longevity, they make up for in reproductive overflow... :)
- Teacher How big was the bug that the caterpillar was eating? SEan
Bugscope Team the caterpillar was probably eating part of a plant, and we did not get to see that
- Bugscope Team Yay! This is one of the prolegs, and we see some of the hooks called crochets
- Bugscope Team nice, this is a wing of a dragonfly
- Teacher What would eat the caterpillar?
Bugscope Team birds, mice, larger insects, bats
- 10:36am
- Bugscope Team sometimes parasitic wasps attack caterpillars and lay their eggs inside them
- Teacher This wing looks like broken glass when I catch them. Randy
Bugscope Team cool, yeah, i know what you mean
- Bugscope Team some caterpillars do not taste good, and they have fewer predators
- Teacher We can see markings that look like letters of the alphabet. Jonny
Bugscope Team yes isn't that cool? those are scratches
Bugscope Team no doubt, there's a A in the upper left!
- Bugscope Team claws are used to grab food, maybe hold onto walls, or maybe even defense from other insects
- Teacher What are the pointy things we see on the claw? Allie
Bugscope Team setae, setae are all over the place
- Bugscope Team the claws work like those reaching/grabbing devices you see sometimes that have a spring in the handle
- Bugscope Team the setae are mechanosensory, which means that they are sensitive to touch
- Bugscope Team grasshopper head
- Bugscope Team the grasshopper!
- Bugscope Team see the broken antenna in the upper left?
- Bugscope Team this was a baby grasshopper, very small
- 10:42am
- Teacher What is the grasshopper's predator? Alex
Bugscope Team birds, beetles, spiders, rodents, reptiles, etc.
- Bugscope Team grasshoppers have hardened jaws. if you ate leaves of grass and other parts of plants your teeth would wear down quickly
- Teacher How many facets are in the grasshopper's eye? Catie
Bugscope Team there are likely a thousand per eye. it is very hard to tell because with grasshoppers they are very smooth
- Teacher About how long does a grasshopper live? Olivia
Bugscope Team well, the total lifespan can be up to a year, but that's with the egg, nymph, and adult. the adult lifespan is 30 days or so
- Bugscope Team goodness it looks like there are more than a thousand
- Teacher What would be the size of the largest grasshopper in the world? Mason
Bugscope Team we think it's the australian giant grasshopper, which can be 3 inches long.
- Teacher What color is the grasshopper? TJ
Bugscope Team I think this was green before we coated it with gold-palladium
- Teacher How long did it live? Connor
Bugscope Team it was an adult, like this, for only a week or so, we think
- Teacher Why do the eyes pop out? Jesse
Bugscope Team well, when they pop out like that, that enables the grasshopper to see a wide angle, up to 180 degrees, that's important for it's vision: field of view
- Teacher We can really see the hexgons on this one--
Bugscope Team yeah, this is a fly eye, flying insects usually have this very pronounced hexagonal shape
- Bugscope Team when grasshoppers fly they may have a 4 or 5 inch wingspan -- the largest ones
- 10:47am
- Bugscope Team this is the tip of the tongue
- Teacher Is the fly we were looking at a mayfly?
- Bugscope Team ok, cool now see the microsetae, or maybe they are microtrichae...
- Bugscope Team this is not a mayfly. it seems more closely related to a housefly
- Bugscope Team it has a very long proboscis
- Teacher Was the grasshopper a male or a female? Joey
Bugscope Team we think it was a boy because we didn't see ovipositor
- Bugscope Team nice, this is a very high magnification of a moth wing scale
- Bugscope Team the ovipositor is what insects use to lay eggs
- Bugscope Team this is part of the moth's antenna
- Teacher How long was the moth wing? Sean
Bugscope Team about 1.5 centimeters, it was a small moth
- Bugscope Team often the males have more frilly antennae
- Bugscope Team there is a scale bar in the image (lower left) that can give you an idea of scale
- Bugscope Team now this is way cool
- Bugscope Team this is kind of creepy
- Bugscope Team we do not see this very often
- Bugscope Team the fungus is growing onto the eye
- Bugscope Team this is like alien intruder on a moth eye! ack!!!
- Teacher Did the fungus grow while the moth was still alive?
Bugscope Team Probably not. Usually, when the moth is alive, it is able to clean off spores before they germinate. Also, the moth's immune system will attack invading organisms like fungi
- Bugscope Team when things die they are attacked by fungus and bacteria, which break them down
- 10:53am
- Teacher What type of fungus is attacking the moth? Emily
Bugscope Team sorry but we don't really know
- Bugscope Team hey cool!
- Teacher HOw many legs does a centipede have? Kara
- Bugscope Team The taxonomy of fungi is very complicated. I am sure they would welcome any new scientists who are interested in studying how to identify fungi ;)
- Bugscope Team this is the head of a millipede -- I think I called it a centipede at first
- Teacher OK, how many legs on a millipede?
Bugscope Team the idea is that a millipede has a thousand legs and a centipede has a hundred, but neither of those is really true
- Bugscope Team i changed the preset so it now says millipede
- Bugscope Team Yes as Annie says there are lots of things that people have not fully studied yet.
- Bugscope Team this is a crystal of some kind of salt
- Teacher Thank you for this session. It was awesome!
Bugscope Team don't forget your member page: http://bugscope.beckman.illinois.edu/members/2009-133, all the chat and images are saved there
- Bugscope Team Centipedes have one pair of legs per segment, and millipedes usually have two pairs per segment
- Bugscope Team Yay! Thank You!
- Teacher Thank you for showing us these awesome pictures. We'll look at them again.
- 10:58am
- Teacher Bye!
- Bugscope Team good bye, thank you! great job!
- Bugscope Team Mrs G you were driving an electron microscope, so you were collecting images in real time. They were not really just pictures.
- Bugscope Team nice session everyone, goodbye
