Little Brother finished his bug project for school today. Can you tell which insect this is?
Like all insects, it has a segmented body (3 styrofoam balls), six legs (3 McDonald's straws, rinsed and cut in half), two antennae (black pipe cleaners), and two compound eyes (pink foam circles with a checkerboard pattern drawn on them). This particular insect also has two wooden chopsticks holding its body together.
Little Brother painted it red because it's a red ant. Did you guess correctly?
Not to be outdone by big brother Kerm's butterfly sculpture last year, Little Brother is taking his recent assignment seriously. He has to create a three-dimensional insect for a kindergarten class project. I told him to write up a "bug plan" with a shopping list for us to take to Michael's craft store.
Here's his list:
In case you have trouble reading the printing of a 5-year-old, let me translate:
The Hexapod Haiku Challenge runs through March 20. The contest judges are looking for short poems that celebrate insect life:
"We would love to have haiku, senryū, haiga, and pseudohaiku that feature any familiar arthropod associated with the field of entomology ..."
Visit the contest website for more details. There's a special category for poets under the age of 13. I especially enjoyed looking at this poem about a bee from an eight-year-old runner-up in last year's contest.
I received a rather unusual email today from Steve Clark which read, in part:
"I wanted to notify you about an educational resource developed by my company Orkin Pest Control. It is a fully interactive virtual cockroach designed to be an instructional tool about insect anatomy."
I visited the website and found it to be rather detailed, including micrographs of every imaginable slice of cockroach. I have to say, it was more than I ever wanted to know about cockroach innards!
And it never before occurred to me that the cockroach might make a useful tool for the study of insects because, as the Orkin Virtual Roach page points out, the cockroach is both a familiar insect and readily available. Think of how cheaply students could acquire supplies for lab class. Folks might even be willing to pay students to collect their roaches. Now that's a win-win solution!
I like the idea of taking this "useless" pest and finding a purpose for it. Good luck, Orkin! I hope that your virtual cockroach has a long and happy life.
Be sure to drop by Arizona State University's Ask A Biologist page sometime before December 15, 2009 to vote for this year's ugliest bug. Of the ten contestants, my bet's on the cockroach. How can it possibly be losing to the snakefly?
Last year's ugly bug contest winner was the tick, the blood-sucking frequent disease carrier, who won by a wide margin. You can learn more about the other six contestants from 2008, including the stink bug and weevil, here.
Get into the spirit with these bug-themed coloring pages, which include sheets on bat wing bones, a human skeleton, and the terrestrial ecosystem, in addition to ugly bugs. You can also download your very own ugly bug contest poster (this is a .pdf file).
There are butterflies in space! Painted Lady larvae and three Monarch caterpillars are currently orbiting above us, after recently traveling to outer space aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis. The "butterflynauts" boarded the International Space Station yesterday.
You can track the progress of the Painted Lady butterflies via Twitter (@ButterflySpace). Teachers can download a free teacher's guide and register for email updates about the mission. There's also a specific thread for teachers on the BioEd Online web board devoted to this experiment.
"On November 16, 2009, Painted Lady butterflies [flew] aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station (ISS). The butterflies will spend several months in space as part of an exciting experiment to observe their life cycles and behaviors in microgravity. We invite your class to participate! The butterflies will live in a special habitat, which provides a safe environment, food and water. Photos and video will be transmitted back to Earth and made available here ..."
But Painted Lady butterflies aren't the only insect space travelers this time. Monarchs are up there, too! Through Monarchs in Space, Monarch Watch is documenting the progress of the monarch larvae. You can download some wonderful instructional data from this site along with links to other fun stuff like these recent pictures of the monarch caterpillars in space.
This current set of butterfly experiments builds upon previous work by BioServe Space Technologies, which has designed experiments in space since the early 1990s (including space flights for spiders, ants, and silkworms).
This video describes some of the challenges that the butterflies may face in their new habitat:
