Connected on 2011-03-05 14:00:00 from Champaign, Illinois, United States
- 12:48pm
- Bugscope Team sample is pumping down...
- Bugscope Team it is 12:48...
- Bugscope Team 1.6 x 10-4
- Bugscope Team 1.5...
- 12:54pm
- Bugscope Team almost there...
- Bugscope Team okay now setting up
- 1:03pm
- 1:09pm
- 1:16pm
- Bugscope Team now we're making the presets for today's session
- Teacher hi scott
- Bugscope Team Hi Orpheum!
- Bugscope Team Hello!
- Bugscope Team Welcome to Bugscope!
- Teacher thanks! i'm going to hand over the controls to patrick and amanda who will be helping out the kids today.
- Bugscope Team SEM = Scot = sj = Scott
- Teacher patrick has a background in physics and amanda design - both of which will be helpful for the kids
- Teacher so what are we looking at now?
- Bugscope Team sweet
- Bugscope Team this is a potato beetle with a wound in its thorax
- Bugscope Team I am not done making the presets.
- 1:22pm
- Bugscope Team you can see the traditional symbol of martyrdom on this fruit fly's eye -- a palm frond
- Bugscope Team if you can give me another 20 minutes or so, I'll have a lot more cool places for you to check out
- Teacher can we move around while you are making the presets?
Bugscope Team no because I have to move around myself
Bugscope Team yeah
- Teacher sounds good
- Bugscope Team ha I am sorry I giving away the secrets before you have a chance to discover them yourself
- Bugscope Team but there will be more places you can go that I have not been to
- 1:27pm
- 1:34pm
- Bugscope Team looking for diatoms
- 1:41pm
- 1:48pm
- 1:53pm
- Bugscope Team Orpheum we are ready to roll!
- Bugscope Team Sorry it took so long but there are a lot of critters to look at!
- Bugscope Team you may drive whenever you'd like
- Bugscope Team bee right back...
- 1:58pm
- Bugscope Team this is the head of a stinkbug, and you can see where one of its antennae broke off, on the right
- Bugscope Team and there is a thrips
- Bugscope Team just above where we are now
- Bugscope Team this is the proboscis
- Bugscope Team this is part of the suction apparatus that lets it suck plant juices into its proboscis
- Bugscope Team it looks like a vacuum cleaner hose, in a way, except it sucks up fluids like sap
- Bugscope Team to the north is a flying insect called a thrips that crashlanded on the stinkbug
- Teacher is there a bee?
Bugscope Team not today, I'm sorry
- Bugscope Team this is the head of a male mosquito
- Bugscope Team The dots are the individual facets of the two compound eyes
- 2:03pm
- Bugscope Team only the female mosquitoes bite, or suck blood
- Bugscope Team Each facet forms a very simple image, then the brain merges all of those together into a coherent field of vision
- Bugscope Team you can tell a male because they have ornate antennae, whereas those of females are plain
- Bugscope Team ornate = fancy
- Bugscope Team the mosquito is lying on its back; we are looking at the ventral side of the body
- Bugscope Team you can see one of the legs sticking up in the foreground
- Bugscope Team you are driving a $600,000 scanning electron microscope
- Bugscope Team this is a large beetle
- Bugscope Team it is interesting that it has those flat frond-like pads on its leg
- Bugscope Team Yes, that's sort of unusual looking
- Bugscope Team we think that they fulfill the function of the sticky pads on other climbing insects' legs
- Bugscope Team they help the beetle cling to surfaces
- Bugscope Team the things they most resemble are wasp or bee tongues, but spread out a bit
- Bugscope Team Often times beetles will have a pad of dense hairs, called a pulvillus, at their equivalent of a "wrist". It usually has a sticky substance on the hairs so they can use it to adhere to walls, ceilings, etc.
- 2:09pm
- Bugscope Team a ladybug, for example, may have two or three pulvilluses along its legs. and of course being an insect it has six legs
- Bugscope Team The black circle is an empty hole in the center of a broken-off antenna
- Bugscope Team you can see the compound eyes to the left and right of the face of the stinkbug
- Bugscope Team You can see the eyes on the sides of the head; the large round balls with lots of dots
- Bugscope Team Each of those little structures is about the size of a single bacterium
- Bugscope Team this is a very dense mat of chemoreceptors in the butterfly antenna; this is only a small area of one segment
- Bugscope Team caterpillar!
- Bugscope Team they're not so pretty until they become butterflies
- Bugscope Team the facets of the compound eyes, called 'ommatidia,' are flatter than those of the mosquito
Bugscope Team The number, size, and shape of the facets are very interesting to compare across different types of insects. You can get a strong sense of how important vision is to them just by the morphology of the eyes
- Bugscope Team see the tiny eyes?
- Bugscope Team the eyes of a caterpillar are called 'stemmata.'
- Bugscope Team you can see all six of its regular legs, but toward the left, toward the back of the body, there are more legs, called 'prolegs.'
- 2:15pm
- Bugscope Team hey cool you can see the mouth - the mandibles and the palps
- Bugscope Team as well as a couple of eyes -- the stemmata
- Bugscope Team palps are like little hands that help manipulate food. They do a lot of what we use our tongue for: shifting around food in our mouth
- Bugscope Team the background is sticky carbon tape the insects are mounted on
- Bugscope Team the palps also have little chemosensors on them, like tastebuds
- Bugscope Team We use carbon tape because it is conductive. The sample is being blasted with electrons, so basically it's like it's hooked up to an electrical source. If the tape didn't allow the charge to conduct to ground, it would build up and ruin our image. In some cases it can even discharge like lightening inside the microscope
- Bugscope Team be sure and let us know when you have questions for us
- Bugscope Team For that reason, the sample is also coated with a nearly invisibly thin coating of metal to make it conductive too
- Bugscope Team Neat!
- Bugscope Team you can use the click to center function by clicking your mouse on the screen, and the image will center at that point
- 2:20pm
- Bugscope Team there are a number of these, kind of like sponges or sea squirts, that grow on the exoskeleton of the caddisfly larva, which lives in streams
- Bugscope Team caddisfly larvae only live in clean streams, so they are a good sign that a stream is not polluted, when you find them
- Bugscope Team they are sometimes used as bait, and fishermen make lures that look like them
- Bugscope Team this is the head of a butterfly
- Teacher is that the butterfly tongue?
- Bugscope Team The diagonal stripe is the coiled up "tongue" viewed side-on
- Bugscope Team yes it is!
- Teacher cool!
- Bugscope Team the tongue -- the proboscis -- is usually coiled when it is not being used
- Bugscope Team it is difficult to image butterflies and moths in an SEM because they are resistant to the coating we do to make them conductive
- 2:25pm
- Bugscope Team That's why the image is very contrasty, it's one of the effects when the electrical charge can't conduct to ground
- Bugscope Team sometimes as many as 20 nanometers
- Bugscope Team we coat our samples for Bugscope with gold-palladium alloy
Bugscope Team The choice of gold-palladium is simply because it's a combination that produces a very fine coating. Some metals would clump up and be more visible, ruining imaging of fine-features
- Bugscope Team insects like butterflies, moths, mosquitoes, silverfish, and very few weevils and beetles have scales on their wings and exoskeleton that have several purposes; one of those is to help them get away from spider webs
- Bugscope Team if a moth flies into a spider web it may be able to slip away by leaving its scales stuck to the web but getting out safely, otherwise
- Bugscope Team when you rub a moth's or butterfly's wings, the fine powder you feel is the scales
- Bugscope Team Similar idea to using flour to keep dough from sticking to the counter
Bugscope Team But in reverse I guess
Bugscope Team yeah they came up with the idea first
- Bugscope Team if you wanted to see the rest of the beetle you could drive up the arm there
- 2:30pm
- Bugscope Team the claws open and close when a tendon called an 'unguitractor' is pulled or relaxed
- Bugscope Team now we're looking right at the tongue
- Bugscope Team this might have moved -- just a sec...
- Teacher what is this?
- Bugscope Team Those column-like structures are hairs with striations along their length.
- Bugscope Team this is a diatom on a caddisfly larva
- Bugscope Team Scott is getting us moved back to the diatom stuck to one of those hairs, or "setae"
- Bugscope Team you can see a couple of bacteria lounging on it
- Bugscope Team A diatom is a unicellular organism that lives in water and constructs a shell around itself out of silica. They are renown for having beautifully intricate and artistic patterns
- Bugscope Team they come in different shapes, but we often see these, which look like canoes, sort of
- Bugscope Team d'oh 'diatoms'
- Bugscope Team There are also round ones, and ones that look like fans
- 2:36pm
- Bugscope Team caddisfly larvae have lots of fine setae to which all of this stuff sticks and helps disguise them
- Bugscope Team You can see the image shifting slightly every time it updates. This is the sample "drifting" as the energy of the beam causes it to flex, or perhaps as it dries out in the vacuum
- Bugscope Team for Bugscope this is kind of high mag, when we can see bacteria
- Bugscope Team Yes, we're at 21 thousand times magnified, or about 21 times better than a good light microscope can achieve
- Bugscope Team see how we're at the front of the body, which extends back to the left?
- Bugscope Team the prolegs are back further to the left
- 2:41pm
- Bugscope Team the tongue!
- Bugscope Team so usually this is neatly coiled, and when the butterfly wants to extend it, she pushes hemolymph into it to make it pop out like a New Years' party favor
- Bugscope Team Orpheum can we try to find the stink glands for you?
- Bugscope Team I forgot to do that earlier
- 2:46pm
- Bugscope Team they are usually between the 2nd and 3rd legs on the ventral side of the body
- Bugscope Team you could do it by moving to the south
- Teacher yes
- Bugscope Team Cool Ok just a sec!
- Bugscope Team isn't it cool looking?
- Bugscope Team this is where the stinkbug lets its bad smell out
- Bugscope Team stinkbugs do not like their own smell either
- Bugscope Team boy mosquito head
- 2:51pm
- Bugscope Team you can see the proboscis, which is covered with scale
- Bugscope Team scales...
- Bugscope Team look at the scales!
- Bugscope Team this is the same as the proboscis of a female, but she has piercing/cutting mouthparts inside this tube
- Bugscope Team if we go to the first preset we made we can see a more detailed scale
- Bugscope Team many caterpillars produce silk from glands near the mouth
- 2:56pm
- Bugscope Team so sometimes the things that look like palps are actually comparable to spinnerets
- Bugscope Team I can fix this for you -- the mag is so high it gets messed up as the sample dries in the 'scope
- Bugscope Team this is what paper looks like up close
- Bugscope Team cellulose fibers
- Bugscope Team this is the tab that a tiny Cephalotes ant is attached to
- Bugscope Team tiny paper tab, tiny ant
- Bugscope Team Cephalotes ants have funny flat heads that they use to block the entrance to their nest
- Bugscope Team you can see that the leg on the left is broken
- Bugscope Team cool
- 3:02pm
- Bugscope Team this is a parasitic wasp
- Bugscope Team insects often have jaws that open from side to side like a gate
- Bugscope Team you can see here that one of the wasp's jaws is open, there to the left
- Bugscope Team you can see its antennae, and its compound eye, and its ocelli -- the three simple eyes on the back of the head
- Bugscope Team you can also see the neat patterning on its thorax
- Bugscope Team insects have a head, thorax, and abdomen, as well as six legs
- Bugscope Team the wasp has lots of tiny setae on its head -- super tiny hairs
- Bugscope Team just below the back of the antenna are the ocelli
- Bugscope Team or the base of the antennae...
- 3:08pm
- Teacher do parasitic wasps have a stinger to inject the eggs? is it similar to the colonial wasp counterpart?
- Bugscope Team this is the outside of two halves of the ovipositor
- Bugscope Team which is the stinger
- Teacher cool!
- Bugscope Team the inner component is curved around so we cannot see it under the tip of the abdomen
- Bugscope Team piercing is not such a good idea if you are an insect
- Teacher what made that hole?
Bugscope Team this was once a pinned specimen from someone's collection
- 3:15pm
- Teacher what is this?
Bugscope Team this is a wing scale from another insect on this potato beetle's body
- Teacher cool
- Bugscope Team it looks like a fern frond, or a palm frond
- Bugscope Team this is very small beetle -- a potato beetle
- Teacher what is that?
- Teacher is it holding something?
- Bugscope Team that is an ant called Cephalotes
- Bugscope Team it is holding onto the paper tab
- Bugscope Team sometimes ants have stingers
- Bugscope Team almost all of the ants we see are females
- Bugscope Team the abdomen of an ant is called a 'gaster.'
- 3:20pm
- Bugscope Team there are two of its tarsi, and claws
- Bugscope Team this is the head of one of the Cephalotes ants
- Bugscope Team it has places for its antennae to tuck into
- Bugscope Team you can see its antennae, its mouth, and its compound eyes
- Bugscope Team oh and its mandibles!
- Teacher do they have teeth?
- Bugscope Team no insects have teeth, but sometimes the mandibles are hardened, with zinc or calcium, for example
- 3:26pm
- Bugscope Team compound eye here...
- Teacher what is that?
- Bugscope Team and this is one of the claws of the 2nd Cephalotes ant
- Teacher what is in the middle?
- Teacher in between the pincers
- Bugscope Team the thing in between the claws is what it uses to stick to vertical surfaces
- Teacher is it a suction pump?
- Bugscope Team I am not sure whether it can produce suction - but some insects have an arolium that they can inflate and deflate to help them get into cracks
- Teacher which insect is the best climber?
Bugscope Team flies are very good; they may be the best
- Bugscope Team this seems to be a combination between an arolium and a pulvillus, which Chas had described earlier
- 3:31pm
- Bugscope Team parasitic wasp
- Bugscope Team we had a guy who studies these here a couple of weeks ago
- Bugscope Team he said that there is a parasitic wasp for every other kind of insect, and also for every larva -- like caterpillars
- Bugscope Team one of the guys gave us a wasp that parasitizes roachs
- Bugscope Team oops roaches -- its specialty!
- Bugscope Team these wasps are quite small
- Bugscope Team and they would not be interested in depositing their eggs in you
- Bugscope Team Is that a row of little holes on the side of the thorax there?
Bugscope Team it is not holes but a kind of stitch-like ornamentation
- Bugscope Team it's how entomologists, and more usefully -- other wasps -- identify species
- Bugscope Team the ovipositor is dry and split into different components
- 3:36pm
- Bugscope Team ovipositors and stingers are the same thing, and it also emphasizes the fact that most of these are females
- Bugscope Team males in many of these species don't do much besides breeding
- Bugscope Team the thing that looks like a 'beak' here is one of the mandibles, bent outwards
- Bugscope Team you can see someone's scales on the ridge of the wing
- Bugscope Team bees and wasps have four wings, but when they fly they attach the two forewings to the two hindwings and use them as two wings
- Bugscope Team so flies -- Diptera -- have two wings and two halteres
- Bugscope Team but wasps and bees and flying ants (the male ants) have four wings
- Bugscope Team wasps, bees, and ants are Hymenoptera
- 3:42pm
- Bugscope Team cellulose!
- Bugscope Team isn't paper yucky up close?
- Bugscope Team really it is just plant fibers
- Teacher what kind of paper is this?
- Bugscope Team it is a coarse paper tab that entomolgists use to attach tiny insects to pins
- Bugscope Team it's for when the insect is so small it cannot be pinned
- Bugscope Team Don King
- Bugscope Team wow
- Bugscope Team the proboscis is like a straw
- Bugscope Team good job driving!
- 3:47pm
- Teacher thanks
- Teacher do you need to go soon?
- Bugscope Team you can see a few tiny strands of fungus
- Bugscope Team I can stick around for a little while longer if you have people who are enjoying this
- Bugscope Team or if you are enjoying it
- Bugscope Team did you get a good crowd at Orpheum?
- Teacher yes
- Bugscope Team Chas is at his apartment, and I am in the basement of Beckman
- Teacher there are a lot of people here
- Teacher although no on else looking at the electron miucroscope now
- Bugscope Team Friday and Saturday is Open House here, so people can come visit this microscope in person
- Bugscope Team we can shut down if it's a good time for you to do so
- Teacher 2 more minutes
- Bugscope Team ha no problem
- Bugscope Team these are covered with dirt, sorry
- 3:52pm
- Teacher can you focus for us?
- Bugscope Team when we run bugscope we work at a long distance from the sample, so we do not get the best resolution
- Bugscope Team sure!
- Teacher ok
- Teacher awesome
- Bugscope Team not that many insects have these super fine nano features on their eyes
- Bugscope Team those dots are maybe 150 nm in diameter
- Bugscope Team this is a single ommatidium
- Bugscope Team can you hold on a sec, and I will push the resolution?
- Bugscope Team it's one of the facets of the compound eye
- Teacher ok
- 3:58pm
- Bugscope Team I moved us a little closer to the pole piece
- Bugscope Team so you get better resolution
- Bugscope Team I also had us on the CCD view of the chamber for a sec
- Teacher cool
- Teacher we saw that
- Teacher joe was explaining it to us
- Bugscope Team I would like to try one more thing...
- Teacher ok go ahead
- Bugscope Team that didn't work -- I could not find what I was looking for
- Bugscope Team but let's go to the diatom
- Teacher thats ok
- Teacher if you want to shut down now
- Teacher that would be fine by us
- 4:03pm
- Teacher thank you!
- Bugscope Team hey Thank You!
- Teacher hey scott, chris here. we've really enjoyed it.
- Teacher lotta kids. lotta ooouwww's and ahhh's
- Bugscope Team good deal, Chris
- Teacher oh, how cool!
- Bugscope Team you did a good job driving
- Teacher thanks! that was all patrick and amanda. they were great with the kids!
- Bugscope Team okay the caddisfly larva says Bye!
- Teacher so where do these larva live? are they like maggots?
- Bugscope Team see you!
- Bugscope Team oh in the water, so they are like water maggots
- Teacher bye caddisfly larva!
- Teacher i see
- Bugscope Team they live in streams and are an indicator of water quality
- Bugscope Team they don't live in polluted water
- Bugscope Team ha See You!
- Teacher cool. interesting. well thanks again. talk to you soon.
