Connected on 2013-09-27 08:50:00
from Greater Sudbury Division, Ontario, Canada
- 7:59 am
- Bugscope Teamtoday's sample is pumping down..
- 8:08 am
- 8:13 am
- 8:19 am
- Bugscope Teammaking presets now
- Bugscope Teamgood morning, MsC!
- 8:26 am
- TeacherGood Morning Scot, had a bit of a struggle with our internet but I think we are good now!
- Bugscope Teamsuper cool
- 8:31 am
- Bugscope Teamwe're still finding presets for you, so if you can hold off on driving for a bit we'll finish up
- 8:37 am
- Bugscope Teamjust about ready!
- Bugscope TeamCate's checking a few more places on the stub.
- Bugscope Teamalright we are done!
- 8:43 am
- Bugscope Teamplease feel free to drive around the sample, and let us know whenever you have questions
- 8:52 am
- Bugscope Teamthis is the face of the housefly
- Bugscope Teamthe fine striations we see interfere with light and give us structural colors -- colors that are not pigment bases
- Bugscope Teambased
- Bugscope Teamsometimes we also see pigment granules
- 8:57 am
- Bugscope Teamthis is a centipede
- Bugscope Teamyou can see one of its compound eyes, or you could a second ago, to the upper left
- Teacherwow
- Bugscope Teamit's covered with spider web
- Teacherthis is fantastic - the students are really loving this
Bugscope Teamsuper cool
- Bugscope Teamthis is the grasshopper compound eye, I guess as it says
- Bugscope Teamthe individual facets are called ommatidia
- Bugscope Teamsome large wasps or hornets will have as many as 30,000 ommatidia per compound eye
- Bugscope Teamflying insects also often have three simple eyes, called ocelli, on the top of the head
- Bugscope Teamthe ocelli help them navigate with respect to the sun
- Bugscope Teamommatidia - the individual facets we're looking at - are like individual lenses of the eye
- 9:02 am
- Bugscope Teamhaving compound eyes is advantageous in that the insect has better peripheral vision, and also -- compound eyes are very sensitive to changes in the visual field. so insects can see very quickly when something is moving toward them, for example
- Bugscope Teamthis is the underside of a beetle's head
- Bugscope Teamyou can see mandibles, at least two sets of palps, and the antennae
- Bugscope Teampalps are mandibular and maxillary (lower and upper jaw in humans, but insect jaws open side to side)
- Bugscope Teampalps are accessory mouthparts that help the insect both taste and manipulate its food
- Bugscope Teamwe see, also, that insects and comparable arthropods are covered with hairs, called setae
- Bugscope Teamthe setae serve a number of purposes, mostly sensory
- 9:08 am
- Bugscope TeamI think these are fire ants. Cate brought them back from New Mexico.
- Bugscope Teamyes i they are
- Bugscope Teamthe dark areas we see are some kind of oily fluid on the stinger
- Bugscope Teamthe stinger on ants and bees is actually a modified ovipositor
- Bugscope Teamit reminds us that most ants we see are female
- Bugscope Teamhaha
- Bugscope Teamone of the pollen grains here looks pretty good; the other one is obviously collapsed
- Teacherwhat are the little strands?
- Bugscope Teamthere are little bits of web silk from spider webs on it
- Bugscope Teamthe larger strand appears to be fungal
- Bugscope Teami think someone got this centipede from a window well or something
- 9:13 am
- Bugscope Teamfungal hyphae. eventually fungus will get into everything, in competition with bacteria, and make it decay
- Bugscope Teamlet us know if you are having any trouble driving. sometime certiain presets do not work, for some reason.
- Bugscope Teamcranefly
- Bugscope Teamthey have super fine setae -- microsetae -- covering most of the cuticle
- 9:18 am
- Bugscope Teamthe tiny hairs (setae) help with sensing the environment
- Bugscope Teamcraneflies kind of look like giant mosquitos
- Bugscope Teamthey can sense movements in the air, and some of the are used by the insects to get a sense of self
- Bugscope Teamsince they have a hard exoskeleton, the insect relies on these hairs to inform them of where their different appendages and parts are
- Bugscope Teamfruitflies have sponging mouthparts, but on that one the spongy portion was missing
- Bugscope Teamthis is called proprioception
- Teacherwhat are the black things in the ant stinger
- Bugscope Teamthey look like cracks but when we get closer we see that they appear to be little spots of fluid, like a fine oil
- Bugscope Teammany stingers have at least two components that slide, side by side, to cut into you when they sting
- Bugscope Teamhere is a big grasshopper
- 9:24 am
- Bugscope Teamthe microscope cannot image below about 40x, so we cannot see the whole head
- Bugscope Teamwing scales from a butterfly
- Bugscope Teameven though we have coated them with gold-palladium to make them conductive, so we can image them in the SEM, the lattice structure creates colors that change when we change the angle of the wing
- Bugscope Teamscales are also considered to be modified setae
- Teacherwhy do the butterflys scales have holes in them
Bugscope Teamthe holes give some structural color by bending the light. It also makes the scales lighter. The holes also sometimes have pigment granules in them
- Bugscope Teamone function they have is similar to how feathers work for birds
- Bugscope Teamthis is the face of a roly poly, or pillbug
- Bugscope Teamroly polies have I think 13 pairs of legs, and they are crustaceans, like crabs
- Bugscope Teamthey're the arthropods in the garden that sort of roll up into a ball when you touch them
- 9:29 am
- Bugscope Teamthis is cool
- Bugscope Teamwhoa
- Teacherwhat is a roly poly
Bugscope Teama roly poly is sometimes known as a woodlouse or sowbug
- Bugscope Teamthis is the opening at the end of one of the grasshopper palps
- Bugscope Teamthe tiny bumps we see are analogous to tastebuds on your tongue
- Bugscope Teamthis is crazy looking
- Bugscope Teamit's like a super tiny sarlaac pit
- Bugscope Teamladybugs have something like this that looks like a vacuum cleaner nozzle
- Bugscope Teamthe hairs have multiple sensory purposes, from proprioception, as Joseph said, to chemical sensing/smelling, to mechanoreception, to thermoreception
- Teacherwhat is a palp and what are the hairs for
Bugscope Teampalps are used to manipulate and taste food
Bugscope Teamthe longer hairs are most likely to help the grasshopper sense where the food is
Bugscope Teamand the shorter ones probably have something to do with tastng the food
- 9:34 am
- Teacherwhy are there hairs on the antenna?
Bugscope Teamsome are certainly mechanosensory, like rat or cat whiskers
- Bugscope Teamwe can see some spider web here
- Bugscope Teamsorry the resolution is not so good here
- Bugscope Teamwhen we use the microscope for Bugscope, we have the sample fairly far away from the polepiece, from the electron source, and the resolution is thus not as good
- Bugscope Teamthis is what the inside of the chamber looks like
- 9:39 am
- Bugscope Teamthis is the view using a CCD camera with infrared optics
- Teacherwhat is the black lines by the pollen
- Bugscope Teamthose are cracks in the doublestick carbon tape the samples are mounted on
- Bugscope Team(the black lines)
- Bugscope Teamthat is the carbon tape, with little craters in it
- Teacherwhat is the back ground by the centipede head
Bugscope Teamwe stick carbon tape onto an aluminum stage. Then to help the insects stick better, we add a little dab of silver paint. This all helps to ground any excess electron charge
- Bugscope Teamall of the specimens we are imaging are dry and also coated with about 20 nm of gold-palladium
- Bugscope Teamthey're in a vacuum chamber
- 9:46 am
- Bugscope Teamusing high-energy electrons raster constantly across the specimens we see, like now, and those high-energy electrons knock what are called secondary electrons, in the very thin coat on the surfaces of the specimens, out of their atomic shells
- Bugscope Teamwe collect the secondary electrons as signal, so what we are seeing now is black and white (greyscale) signal from the specimen
- Teacherawesome
- Bugscope Teamwhen we are imaging at a low magnification, the electrons are scanning across a larger area; when we image at high magnification, the electrons are rastering across a small area
- Bugscope Teamsometimes the electrons, when they are concentrated in a small area, escpecially, will affect the sample
- Bugscope Teamto the left we see the broken-off base of the sponging mouthparts
- Bugscope Teaminsects are very fragile, especially after they die and start to dry out
- Bugscope Teamthese are microsetae on the fruitfly's face
- 9:51 am
- Bugscope Teamto the right I think we're looking at part of the one of the antennae
- Bugscope Teambig head ant
- Bugscope Teamoften, when we see an ant with a large head, it's not because it is especially smart; more likely it is because there are large muscles inside the head to operate the mandibles
- Bugscope Teamsee the compound eye?
- Bugscope Teamthe antennae originate on the front of the head, actually about where we think we might normally find eyes
- Bugscope Teamants get most of the information they use from their antennae, and the information comes in chemical mode
- Bugscope Teamthey are super sensitive to very minimal (to us) chemical trails and scents
- 9:56 am
- Bugscope Teamif you rub the smell of a dead ant on a live ant, the ants whose job is cleaning up the colony will take the live ant away even if it is clearly alive and struggling
- Bugscope Teamsometimes ant colonies, or large numbers of ants, will get caught in circles of chemicals that they follow until they die
- Bugscope Teamit's a circle of death for the ants, or an ant vortex; there are some you can watch on youtube
- Bugscope Teamlike an endless feedback loop
- Bugscope Teamflies and some other insects have these special hairs that help them walk on vertical surfaces
- Bugscope Teamthese are some of those special hairs, called tenent setae
- 10:01 am
- Bugscope Teamthey're found on a structure called a pulvillus
- Bugscope Teamladybugs have a few of them on their tarsi -- their distalmost leg segments
- Bugscope Teamsee the supertiny spheres?
- Bugscope Teamthey look like little whiffleballs
- Bugscope Teamthey're submicron particles, so they're actual nanoparticles
- Bugscope Team250 to 400 nm in diameter, smaller than visible light wavelengths
- Bugscope TeamI guess it
- Bugscope Teamis time for us to shut down...
- Teacherthank you so much!! we really enjoyed the session
- 10:07 am
- Teacherwe had a couple classes stop in to see what we were doing!!
- Teacherthank you!! I will complete the survey ASAP
- Bugscope Teamsee you next year!
- Bugscope Teami hope everyone had fun
- Bugscope Teamyou can see two bacteria there, as well...
- Bugscope Teamthe rod-shaped things
- Bugscope TeamBye!
