Connected on 2011-12-05 09:30:00 from Hampden, Massachusetts, United States
- 9:09am
- Bugscope Team we are making presets for this morning's session
- Bugscope Team Good morning, Mrs V!
- Bugscope Team Welcome to Bugscope!
- Guest Hi Scott!
- Guest Thanks again for the awesome session on Friday!
- Bugscope Team That was fun.
- 9:15am
- 9:20am
- Bugscope Team Hi Mrs. V, Cate here
- Student Hi! We're both here and ready!
- Bugscope Team Great! We are finishing the presets for your session, so you are getting a preview.
- Bugscope Team moth head
- 9:27am
- Bugscope Team LEX we are ready to roll.
- Bugscope Team You have control of the microscope.
- Student ...quick bathroom run!!! :)
Bugscope Team no problem
- Student okay, we're here!
- Bugscope Team Yay! Alright, you can now drive, and you can select from any of the presets.
- Student Is this the eye?
Bugscope Team this is the fruitfly's eye
- Bugscope Team the compound eye
- 9:32am
- Bugscope Team and the little spines that are normally sticking out of those interstices
- Bugscope Team those are the spikes
- Student what are the spines?
Bugscope Team the spines are supposed to be mechanosensory
- Bugscope Team the problem with that explanation is that the antennae have a component that do the same thing
- Student wow! We see on that appears to be sticking out.
Bugscope Team if you drive around a bit on the eye there may be a better place in which they're still intact
- Bugscope Team you can see that the lower left portion of the eye has those bristles/spines/setae that are intact
- Bugscope Team fruitflies are flies, of course -- Diptera -- so they have only two wingas
- Bugscope Team um wings
- 9:37am
- Bugscope Team and that means they also have a haltere on each side that helps them balance their motion in flight
- Student this is amazing because fruit flies are so small to begin with.
Bugscope Team yes it is tiny, just a few millimeters across
- Student so, given how small the bug is, what is the size of each eye lens section and those spikes?
- Bugscope Team if you take the mag up again we can use the scalebar at the lower left to measure them
- Bugscope Team you know you can also choose from among any of the other presets, from the lefthand side of the screen
- Student that was our next question. :)
- Bugscope Team now we can see that an individual ommatidium is about 10 micrometers (microns) in diameter
- Student okay, that got a great stymied reaction!
- Bugscope Team the rod-shaped bacteria -- the bacilli -- are generally 2 microns long, so the eyes are about 5 bacteria, end-to-end, wide
- Bugscope Team a micrometer is a thousandth of a millimeter and a millionth of a meter
- 9:42am
- Bugscope Team when you go to the preset with the brochosomes on it, those are usually about 300 to 400 nanometers in diameter. so they're nanoscale objects
- Bugscope Team this is a super nice looking cricket
- Bugscope Team you can see its mouth now
- Bugscope Team Sometimes in movies and tv shows you will see colorful pictures of bacteria, insects, or a virus. Those were all taken by an electronic microscope most likely
- Bugscope Team insect mouths are very complicated
- Bugscope Team yes as Cate noted, the images we are seeing are in black-and-white -- in grayscale, and when you see images from electron microscopes in the media they are often artificially colored.
- Bugscope Team yes a lot of insects are a lot more hairy than we realize.
- Student don't realize how hairy they are in life
Bugscope Team the hairs serve a lot of purposes, especially because insects do not have skin -- instead they have an exoskeleton, which is like wearing armor
- Bugscope Team Cockroaches aren't too hairy though. They are very streamlined since they have been around for so long
- Student we just got very excited at all the presets!
- Bugscope Team the hairs, which we often call 'setae,' are sensory, or many of them are
- 9:47am
- Guest Hi Cate! Welcome back! We missed you in our session on Friday.
Bugscope Team Mrs V these are brochosomes, which we could not find good examples of on Friday.
Bugscope Team Yes I'm back as of today!
Bugscope Team Guess who is really happy about that.
- Student now, what is a brochosome...they look like zometool balls (if you've seen zometool kits)
Bugscope Team They are nano particles that only leafhoppers make. They are thought to help their eggs from drying out. Sometimes we find them on other insects that have been associating with them
- Guest The brochosomes are even cooler looking than I expected, Scott.
- Bugscope Team they are so small it is a little hard to get them perfectly focused.
- Bugscope Team we had a leafhopper in the 'scope Friday and could not find any good examples of those we just found on the cranefly's wing
- Guest We are "debriefing" our Bugscope experience and so we will be lurking for a while.
Bugscope Team please let us know when you have questions
- Student For a 9 year old who loves bugs and microscopes this is an awesome experience!
Bugscope Team we feel the same way; we are so lucky to have this kind of equipment
- Bugscope Team you can see the ant's mandible, one of them
- 9:53am
- Bugscope Team it looks like it has tines, like a fork
- Bugscope Team the mandibles on insects, when they have them, open from side to side like a gate
- Bugscope Team almost every ant you see is a female
- Bugscope Team when you see an ant with wings, that is a male
- Student it looks like a series of claws
Bugscope Team it really does
- Bugscope Team the females do the work in the ant world too
- Student really?? I thought worker ants, etc. were male.
Bugscope Team nope. The females (workers) do all the work, and the males (drones) are kept at home for breeding
- Guest Gianmarco would like to know if the brochosomes help leafhoppers escape spider webs?
Bugscope Team like scales? I really don't know. Maybe.
- Bugscope Team That is a good idea -- maybe the brochosomes are a bit slippery, like little ball bearings
- Bugscope Team speaking of females
- Student how on earth do determine gender in things like ants and flies?
- 9:58am
- Bugscope Team one of the fly entomologists we used to work with told us that often, not always, female fly compound eyes are far apart (like Uma Thurman's eyes), and those of males are often close together (like Mikhail Baryshnikov's eyes)
- Guest My class wants me to say "Hi!" from them.
Bugscope Team Hello!
- Bugscope Team usually, without opening them, you can tell by how big they are or even by the differences in features
- Student okay, that's a cool factoid
- Bugscope Team with spiders if there is not a huge difference in size (often the female can be huge compared to a male), you can tell by the size of the pedipalps
- Guest kids would like to know if those are setae?
Bugscope Team yes any type of hair you see on an insect are setae. Flies are full of them!
- Bugscope Team you can see the antennae to the right
- Bugscope Team I read that some large wasps can have as many as 17,000 ommatidia per eye
- Student does each one see it's own image, so that they see 17,000 of you?
Bugscope Team in a way yes. They would be at different angles since they are round. Plus since they go around the head they can see almost 360 degrees
- 10:03am
- Bugscope Team if you had compound eyes like this, you would have very good peripheral vision -- you would not have to turn your head to see most of what is around you
- Bugscope Team people who study fruitfly brains have found that to be so in that particular species
- Bugscope Team This is the head of the cranefly.
- Guest hey scott this is spencer have a good day
Bugscope Team You too, Spencer!
- Student it's all eyes!
Bugscope Team they resemble mosquitoes that way, and they also of course look like giant mosquitoes, but they do not bite like mosquitoes.
- Guest hi scott this is max. i just wanted to say thanks for working with us friday!
Bugscope Team Max it was really fun, a nice way to finish out the week.
- 10:08am
- Bugscope Team this is a whole bunch of palps with setae sticking out all over, hard to tell just what's going on
- Guest Are these the mouthparts?
Bugscope Team yes they are!
- Bugscope Team craneflies, as adults, feed on nectar from flowers, and some do not eat at all
- Guest Yes, kind of a mess. Good anticipation....I was just going to ask that.
- Student what's their lifespan?
Bugscope Team as adults they live for only around 10 days
- Guest Always makes me mad when people kill these, even when they know they aren't mosquitoes. ALthough a lot of people seem to think they are.
- Bugscope Team as larvae they may be predatory, and they are said to eat mosquito larvae sometimes, which means they must have an aquatic stage of life.
- Bugscope Team this is one of the ants from my house
- Student the craneflies resemble mosquito hawks,don't they? Or are the variants ofthe same thing
- 10:14am
- Student wow, there really are a lot of parts to the mouth!
- Bugscope Team they are often, according to Wikipedia, called mosquito hawks, mosquito wolves, mosquito eaters ('skeeter eaters'), etc.
- Bugscope Team yeah I have friends that think they are mosquitos as well. There are also those flies that look like wasps. If you look closely you can tell they aren't by the fact they have heads that look like a fly's (they have padded antennae an their eyes are shaped different)
- Bugscope Team many of the setae we see are helpful in letting the ant know when it is touching something
- Bugscope Team some of those setae may be thermosensory -- sensing hot/cold; and some may be chemosensory -- sensing smell/taste
- Student loving the vocabulary words!
- Bugscope Team ants perform most of their communication chemically, and they use the setae on their antennae, mainly, for chemorececption
- Bugscope Team oops chemoreception
- 10:19am
- Bugscope Team if you take the smell of a dead ant and rub it onto a live ant, the garbage-carrying worker ants will carry that dead-smelling ant away even if it struggles
- Bugscope Team they are little spurs on the legs that they rake over their antennae to help keep them clean
- Student okay, what's an antenna cleaner and where is it located?
Bugscope Team there are two of these, each on one of the forelimbs, and they are shaped like a comb that helps the ant clean its antennae. d'oh of course Cate beat me to it...
- Guest Hi Lex. We are a 6th grade science class in Pittsburgh, PA. We had a session on Friday and loved it. We are doing our "debrief" today. Hope you don't mind if we lurk in your session.
- Student Mrs. V - don't mind at all - it's fun hearing other questions
- Student That's what we thought.
Bugscope Team if you went to a slightly lower mag you might see better how it's curved to fix around the shaft of the antenna
- Bugscope Team the wasp has these as well, and it is not a surprise -- wasps, bees, and ants are related
- Student I think we'll be studying ants more -- there's so much! we've witnessed massive wars on our driveway
- Bugscope Team many insects have a huge variety of chemical defenses that are used, particularly, against ants
- Bugscope Team a week or so ago there was an article online about a spider that was found to have anti-ant chemicals in its web
- 10:24am
- Bugscope Team the moth keeps its proboscis coiled up when it is not using it
- Bugscope Team even scales, which we see plenty of now, are modified setae
- Bugscope Team they can shed some scales to get free from a spider web sometimes. It doesn't hurt them
- Bugscope Team but they don't grow back
- Bugscope Team scales can carry pigment and are responsible for the colors we see in moth and butterfly wings; the shape of the scales also can produce what are called structural colors, which reflect light in different colors
- Student it's so amazing -- you see similarties to completely different creatures -- here we thought Owl
Bugscope Team both moths and owls have eyes that allow them to see well in the dark
- Bugscope Team see the palps?
- Bugscope Team you can also see that this beetle has sharp pointy mandibles. I am sorry I don't know what kind of beetle it is
- Student clearly we are fascinated by the mouth bits. :0
- 10:29am
- Bugscope Team this may be a rove beetle
- Bugscope Team it has lots of setae to help filter its food, apparently
- Bugscope Team the tips of the pals have chemosensory setae in them, like tastebuds
- Bugscope Team palps, that is
- Student you guys have definitely taken Lex's love of bug to entirely new level.
Bugscope Team awesome
- Bugscope Team that is great!
- Student he's currently very sad that we can't have this equipment in our house. :)
Bugscope Team haha.
- Bugscope Team the SEM would take a whole room in the house, and it needs its own power, water, air, nitrogen, and air conditioning
- 10:35am
- Student yeah, that's bit big.
- Guest hi this is kayla. what is that?
Bugscope Team this is where it is broken
- Bugscope Team the antenna i think
- Student yeah, we zoomed to the end of the antenna
- Bugscope Team the holes around it are where setae fell off
- Bugscope Team yes I agree with Cate -- it's the broken tip of an antenna
- Bugscope Team this is how insects breathe
- Bugscope Team lucky for us it is not super efficient
- Student I was just going to ask.
- Bugscope Team or they could be much larger
- Student wow. where are they located?
- Bugscope Team they can open and close the spiracles at will
- Bugscope Team usually there are two per body segment, and they are on the sides
- Student :( I hate to say it but we actually have to wrap up...we'd stay on all day if we could.
- 10:40am
- Bugscope Team aw well sign up for another session next year and we will see you again!
- Student We so definitely will! Thank you so much you guys, this is an incredible opportunity!
- Student We'll get a link to the archived session, right?
- Bugscope Team http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/members/2011-104
- Bugscope Team that will bring you to your member page with transcipt and images
- Bugscope Team transcript*
- Student Thank you again -- this is a great program!
- Bugscope Team Thank you!
- Bugscope Team thanks for joining us today! We always enjoy doing Bugscope. It is a fun program
- Bugscope Team I had a lost person down here to talk with for a minute...
- Guest Thanks for letting us join in today!
Bugscope Team Thank you, Mrs V!
- Student Sure! We had a blast -- see you again!
- Guest Have a happy Monday! Bye!
- Bugscope Team be sure to sign up soon because we are now booking far in advance of the times you would want.
- Bugscope Team Bye!
