Connected on 2013-09-12 11:30:00 from Lee, Florida, United States
- 10:23am
- Bugscope Team still coating the sample...
- 10:38am
- Guest are those a group of bugs
- Bugscope Team yes they are!
- Bugscope Team we're waiting for the vacuum to get better
- Bugscope Team so we can turn the beam on
- Guest I see a fly what other bugs are there?
- Bugscope Team we have two leafhoppers, which are super cool, and some moths, and a true bug
- Bugscope Team Cate says the rest is a surprise
- Bugscope Team Vacuum is almost ready
- Guest what is a true bug?
- 10:43am
- Bugscope Team this is the CCD view of the inside of the chamber -- it's an infrared image
- Bugscope Team true bugs used to be called Hemiptera -- I'm not sure that is true now
- Bugscope Team hemi- means 'half' and ptera is wing
- Bugscope Team their wings are kind of half covered by the elytra
- Bugscope Team they all have piercing/sucking mouthparts
- Bugscope Team actually leafhoppers are also true bugs, as are cicadas
- Bugscope Team Cate is running the 'scope and making adjustments, tuning it up, also finding the presets
- Bugscope Team I'm on an adjacent computer talking with you and getting ready to save presets
- 10:48am
- Guest whats that curly thing?
- Bugscope Team the curly thing we bypassed was the proboscis
- Bugscope Team like all coiled up?
- Guest ok
- Bugscope Team they force hemolymph into them to make them extend, like a party favor
- Guest ohhh
- Bugscope Team honeybee eye
- Guest cool
- 10:54am
- Guest whats that?
- Bugscope Team this is a pollen grain
- Guest oh
- Bugscope Team busted open pollen grain
- Bugscope Team don't see a stinger yet
- Bugscope Team bees have branched setae; no other insect is said to have them
- 10:59am
- Guest whats branched setae ?
- Bugscope Team setae are the tiny hairs insects and other arthropods have that help them sense the environment -- they function as touch and wind receptors, thermal sensors, chemoreceptors...
- Bugscope Team they also help hold things
- Guest thats cool
- Bugscope Team the setae that help hold onto things are called tenent setae, and they are often on a pad called a pulvillus that is near the end of the legs
- Bugscope Team this is a mite on the ladybug abdomen
- Bugscope Team another mite
- 11:04am
- Bugscope Team we've never seen mites on a ladybug that I remember
- Bugscope Team awesome
- Guest yea it is
- Guest am i the only one on here?
- Bugscope Team yes you are. until just now
- Bugscope Team Hi Kelly!
- Bugscope Team Welcome to Bugscope!
- Teacher Hi guys!
- Bugscope Team this one is covered with mites
- Bugscope Team wow
- Teacher That's awesome, my students will be over (we're bringing them over to a big conference room) in about 10 minutes
- Bugscope Team we're going to keep control of the 'scope now, until we get all of the presets done
- Bugscope Team super cool Kelly!
- Teacher Can I make this appear full screen on our view?
- Bugscope Team Cate is making the presets and will be on when she's done
- Teacher fantastic, thanks!
- Bugscope Team Kelly you can expand the browseer to full screen but not the viewing box unless you change the screen resolution
- Bugscope Team browser, sp.
- 11:10am
- Teacher it actually looks great, we've got it up on three giant projectors
- Bugscope Team this is some kind of borer but it's mouth is all covered with juju
- Bugscope Team this is a Cerambycid beetle
- Bugscope Team ant biting leg of Cerambycid
- Bugscope Team tiny green true bug
- Bugscope Team caterpillar
- 11:16am
- Bugscope Team so this is actually a small stinkbug
- Guest what are those
- Bugscope Team here are some claws on a beetle
- Bugscope Team the things coming down from the head like golf clubs are antennae
- Guest what were those cube looking things?
Bugscope Team those were salt crystals from wendy's restaurant
- 11:21am
- Bugscope Team kelly we are done with presets if you want to drive around the sample
- Guest lol ok
- Teacher ok, just getting everyone settled in here...
- Bugscope Team normal salt looks like boring cubes
- Bugscope Team we are ready to roll
- Bugscope Team Cate'll be on in an minute.
- Bugscope Team Kelly please try one of the presets to ensure that we gave you control again.
- Teacher Okay...
- Teacher Looks like I do!
- Bugscope Team super cool
- Bugscope Team that'll all we needed
- Bugscope Team duh that's all we needed
- 11:27am
- Bugscope Team Wendy's doesn't use this kind of salt anymore.
- Bugscope Team so what you can do is drive anywhere you want, and ask questions about anything you want
- Bugscope Team you could have students log in as well, if there are other computers, and ask questions
- Teacher Students are all in front of me...I'll be typing their questions
- Teacher Rolando wants to know what kind of salt we're looking at
Bugscope Team this is salt from the fast food restaurant Wendy's. It has an anticaking agent in it that makes it look like it has smaller crystals within it
- Bugscope Team awesome
- Bugscope Team you're driving a $600,000 scanning electron microscope from your school
- Teacher Am I able to select one of the images on the right to explore (Darth Vader)
Bugscope Team yes!
- Bugscope Team you should be able to just click on it, and the 'scope will drive to that place on the stub
- Teacher Thanks
- Teacher Can you tell us what we're looking at...
- Bugscope Team this is a beetle
- 11:32am
- Bugscope Team you can see it has its forelegs crossed
- Bugscope Team you can see its compound eye, one of them
- Bugscope Team its antennae are both pointed down, and they have clubbed ends that are hard to see
- Bugscope Team we can see that it is likely shiny, with those fine setae reflecting the light back to the viewer at the macro level
- Bugscope Team see the ommatidia?
- Teacher Christian is wondering if there is a significance to "Darth Vader"
Bugscope Team I thought it looked kind of recalcitrant, kind of like Darth Vader
- Bugscope Team the compound eye has lots of tiny often hexagonal facets that function as lenses
- Teacher Mac wants to know what is sticking out of the eye
Bugscope Team those are setae that help it sense when something might be touching the eye
- Bugscope Team some bugs also don't see some colors while they see others we can't see- like ultraviolet
- Bugscope Team compound eyes help insects see more of what is around them at one time -- they give them better peripheral vision
- Teacher (Evan) can we tell if its male or female?
Bugscope Team often with beetles it is hard to tell
- 11:37am
- Teacher Does the beetle see clear images with it's compound eyes?
Bugscope Team they don't see things like we do. They see broken up pieces of images that their brain has put back together
Bugscope Team imagine seeing an image with a low pixel count
- Bugscope Team so I don't believe we can tell on this beetle
- Bugscope Team an advantage of compound eyes, besides good peripheral vision, is that they provide very quick updates of the visual field, so insects can see when something is coming toward them
- Bugscope Team insects have six legs, a head, thorax, and abdomen, and two antennae
- Bugscope Team at the tips of the legs are jointed segments called tarsi, and at the end of the tarsi we often find claws, like we do here
- Bugscope Team insects do not have skin, like we do, with nerve endings embedded in it
- Teacher what was the actual size of this beetle
Bugscope Team looks like it is about 10 or 11 mm long
- 11:42am
- Teacher Logan would like to know how big the microscope is
Bugscope Team the microscope is kind of like a large long desk, and at one end there is a column about 5 feet high
- Bugscope Team and they do not have noses
Bugscope Team instead they use their antennae for olfactory senses
- Bugscope Team there are usually two spiracles on each segment, on the sides
Bugscope Team these openings on the side lets air into the trachea, a series of tubes that brings oxygen to the rest of the body
- Teacher Joe want to know how long you've had the microscope
Bugscope Team we've had the microscope since the beginning of 1999!
- 11:47am
- Bugscope Team the exoskeleton is kind of like a coat of armor. a shrimp shell is its exoskeleton
- Teacher Mac wants to know what type of beetle
Bugscope Team i'm not sure. it looks kind of like a cucumber beetle
Bugscope Team My guess is a bark beetle of sorts just looking at the head and the clubbed antennae
Bugscope Team this is most likely not a bark beetle, i retract my statement
- Teacher Trying to change to the next insect and not getting a result
Bugscope Team which one? sometimes the presets stop working
- Teacher Was just going to go the next (titles are a little cutoff)
- Bugscope Team I crashed the server...
- Teacher super small true bug
- Teacher There is a round of applause from 100 students for you scot
- Bugscope Team should be back now
- Teacher yes sir
- Guest you said bugs dont have skin.. why
Bugscope Team they have an exoskeleton instead. This protects their bodies.
Bugscope Team this exoseleton both protects them and prevents them from sensing their environments like we do, which is insects have lots of setae (the hairs), different types of hairs help them with different senses
- Bugscope Team this would be a better time for applause
- 11:53am
- Teacher Looks like it's lost some parts!
Bugscope Team yes it's definitely righthanded now
- Bugscope Team the background is carbon tape with a little bit of silver paint on it to help the insects stick to the tape
- Teacher Can you tell us about what we're looking at now?
Bugscope Team this is a small true bug, with piercing/sucking mouthparts adapted for penetrating leaves or stems of plants, or the bodies of fruit
Bugscope Team this piercing sucking mouthpart has also been adapted for other things, bedbugs for example suck on our blood, and assassin bugs use their beak to suck the juices out from other insects
- Guest what is all over the bugs eye
Bugscope Team there's some juju, like unidentified dried fluid, and there are some scales from a moth or butterfly, perhaps, and there may also be some mold spores
- 11:58am
- Bugscope Team the proboscis is a long tube with cutting components on the inside
- Bugscope Team the scales we see on the abdomen are not from the bug itself but from another insect that has scales -- a moth, butterfly, mosquito, or sliverfish, for example
- Bugscope Team we can see one of the spiracles now
- Bugscope Team some of the small hairs, called microsetae, do not have any sensory function
- Teacher Do their hairs function the same as ours...do they have the small muscles to make the hairs stand on end?
Bugscope Team their hairs are somewhat similar. They can have many functions besides temperature regulation. They also provide a sense of touch, or they can be more chemical in purpose by providing a sense of smell or taste
- Bugscope Team this is one of the spiracles
- 12:03pm
- Guest what is that a hole? and why?
Bugscope Team that is a spiracle, what insects breathe through
- Bugscope Team you can see some dried fluid at the entryway
- Bugscope Team see the micron bar to the lower left of the screen?
- Bugscope Team bacteria are generally about 2 microns, or micrometers, long
- Bugscope Team a micrometer is a thousandth of a millimeter and thus a millionth of a meter
- Bugscope Team now you can see that an ant had attached itself to the beetle's leg with its mandibles
- 12:08pm
- Bugscope Team we can see some web as well
- Bugscope Team some fungal hyphae...
- Guest it was biting the bug
Bugscope Team yes it was!
- Bugscope Team Hi Jill! Hi Girl!
- Bugscope Team Kelly are you still there?
- Teacher we are
- Bugscope Team super cool
- Bugscope Team (this is Scot, now in my office)
- Bugscope Team this is a small green true bug
- Bugscope Team we do not see color with the electron microscope because we are using electrons rather than light to collect these images
- Guest *think
- Bugscope Team the specimens are are on a stub in the vacuum chamber, and we are beaming a fine stream of electrons at them
- 12:14pm
- Guest Hi! Kid's are fascinated
- Guest do you the beetle was alive or dead when the ant was biting it
Bugscope Team not sure but I think maybe it was alive; when the beetle died its limbs moved into and dried in that position
- Teacher Are we able to see the mites? Seem to have lost the presets again...
Bugscope Team now we see the mites on the female earwig at low mag
- Bugscope Team here is one of the mites
- Bugscope Team we can see its head, which is very small
- Bugscope Team that is a great analogy
- Bugscope Team we are not sure if they feed on hemolymph that squeezes through the joints on the body, or if they eat food debris or something else
- Bugscope Team there are different kinds of mites, but these we see most often
- Bugscope Team and sometimes they're just simply hitching a ride
- Bugscope Team they hang out in places in which they cannot easily be brushed off
- Teacher Christian would like to know how difficult the SEM is to maintain?
Bugscope Team we have to know when we can fix something and when we have to call for service; we pay $36,000 per year for someone to be on call in case it breaks
- 12:19pm
- Teacher Edwin would like to know how far we can zoom in?
Bugscope Team let's go to the other mite and see how high we can go
- Teacher Jon would like to know how long it takes to prepare the specimens?
Bugscope Team maybe half an hour to pick out the insects and stick them onto the sample disk. Then we coat them with a thin coat of metal to make them conductive
- Bugscope Team oops...
- Teacher Joe would like to know some of the things that can go wrong while viewing a sample?
Bugscope Team some things, even with a metal coating, can be less conductive than other things. This causes imaging problems where we see streaks or bright spots
- Guest cool!
- Bugscope Team that is 65,000 on a mold spore
- Bugscope Team that is 153,000x
- Bugscope Team we're on the nanoscale, on a moth's ommatidium
- Bugscope Team if we were closer to the sample we could do better
- Teacher Alfonso would like to know the largest organism you've viewed
Bugscope Team we can only look at things that are fairly small
- 12:24pm
- Bugscope Team so a cicada is like looking at an aircraft carrier
- Teacher Jasmyn would like to know if the SEM you have is still advanced since you've had it since 1999?
Bugscope Team they are easier to use now but do not have much better resolution (ultimate imaging ability)
- Teacher Maria would like to know the weirdest thing you've seen?
Bugscope Team one thing that is pretty awesome is this really cool kind of pollen that looks totally unreal
- Guest whats that?
Bugscope Team this is a close-up of one of the moth's scales
- Teacher Joe would like to know how often you use to the SEM to view samples?
Bugscope Team it gets used about every day, even on weekends
- Teacher My students are going to be heading back...thank you so much for your time and allowing us access/control of the scope!
- Bugscope Team Kelly Thank You, and Thank You to the Kids!
- Bugscope Team Thanks!
- Bugscope Team Rainy I gave you control.
- Guest thank you
- 12:30pm
- Guest what is this
- Bugscope Team not often that you get to see a flying spaghetti monster baby.
- Bugscope Team we think it is a kind of plant but we are not sure
- Bugscope Team this is the moth's head
- Bugscope Team the coiled part is the proboscis
- Bugscope Team stored for flying
- Bugscope Team it is like a straw, but it cab be opened from the side, as we see in the foreground
- Bugscope Team not really the foreground, but angling
- Guest so the spaghetti monster was on a bee tongue?
Bugscope Team yes it was!
- Bugscope Team the multitude of scales we find on butterflies and moths and silverfish and mosquitoes help protect them from spiderwebs
- 12:35pm
- Bugscope Team scales come off easily and can thus be left behind if the insect flies into a web
- Bugscope Team these are chemoreceptors on the inner portion of a ladybug palp
- Bugscope Team it looks like a vacuum cleaner nozzle
- Guest what does chemoreceptors mean
- Bugscope Team the chemoreceptors are kind of like tastebuds
- Bugscope Team they help the ladybug taste the air, or actually smell the air - sense chemicals in the air
- Bugscope Team you can see why we did not make a preset of the ladybug's head -- it is covered with mold
- Guest why
- Bugscope Team we almost always mount insects upside down
- Bugscope Team the mold would not look so good
- Bugscope Team you can see a mite to the lower right
- Guest why does it have mold
Bugscope Team oh that is what happens eventually to everything -- mold will get on it and it will rot. unless it was kept super dry
- 12:40pm
- Bugscope Team Jill would you like to drive?
- Guest sure!
Bugscope Team okay I just gave you control of the 'scope
- Bugscope Team you can click on any of the presets, to the left, to get the 'scope to drive to that place, or you can do what you're doing now, and drive around the sample, change the mag, etc.
- Bugscope Team we found by looking up close on this true bug that it has a stink defense like the larger stinkbugs
- Bugscope Team that is what th absorbent area was, around the duct where the stink gland is
- Bugscope Team thanks for visiting us today!
- Guest Thank you, this was fun. and I learned alot. I am going to send in my own bug too look at.
Bugscope Team super cool
Bugscope Team Thank you, Rainy!
- 12:45pm
- Guest Is this a "knee"
- Bugscope Team looks like it
- Bugscope Team you can see both setae and microsetae here
- Bugscope Team this is cool
- Bugscope Team the head is the tiny part just below where we are now
- 12:50pm
- Bugscope Team that is the head, mid left
- Bugscope Team not remarkable
- Bugscope Team I'm sitting next to the microscope, so I can tweak the fine focus.
- Guest this with the 2 tentacles?
Bugscope Team yes!
- Bugscope Team we've seen mites with eyes before, but they are on the carapace.
- Bugscope Team like, on plant mites
- Guest Thanks SO much, Scot. Natives getting restless here
- Bugscope Team I think they're all arachnids
- Guest we'll check back again
Bugscope Team Super Cool. Thank you for getting on today!
- Bugscope Team haha g'luck with the little savages
- Bugscope Team Girl are you still here?
- Bugscope Team maybe time to shut down...
- Bugscope Team Thank you!
- Bugscope Team Bye!
