Helen FieldsScience Writer

This sweet little woolly bear caterpillar was walking along the curb one evening last October:

Unfortunately, my point-and-shoot camera was more interested in the car than the caterpillar, but you get the idea: fuzzy and cute. It’s the larva of some kind of tiger moth. If it were daytime and in focus, it’s possible that a person who knew their caterpillars could tell you which of the tiger moths, but as none of those conditions are fulfilled, you will just have to live with it being a woolly bear of indeterminate species.

I know this is entirely routine biological fact, but I still find it totally unbelievably amazing that a fuzzy fat caterpillar can seal itself up in a cocoon, break itself down, and rebuild itself into something with stick-like legs and scaly wings.

Thanks to the Iowa State University Department of Entomology, I have just learned of the existence of The Woollybear Festival (The Largest One Day Festival In Ohio). It’s in September. There’s a parade and everything. Ooh, and Vermilion, Ohio, is the home of the Inland Seas Maritime Museum! Now I definitely want to go.

As we look forward to a possible real live snowfall this afternoon in D.C., I think it’s a fine time to look at some pictures I took a few months back. It was a lovely warm day in September; my cousin and his wife had just renewed their vows in a church in Lanham, Md., and we wandered outside to get in the cars and drive to the reception site. Standing around chatting with relatives was fun, but I was distracted by the plants next to the church door: pink, cheerful, and so full of bugs!

Fun fact: “dumbledore” is a dialect word for bumblebee. I learned this in the footnotes of the 1872 Thomas Hardy novel Under the Greenwood Tree. At the time of the story, organs were just starting to be introduced to churches, replacing the church bands that had provided music for generations. A member of the church band refers to organs as “miserable dumbledores.” (Thus the footnote.) Just think, that fun word might have been lost to history if it hadn’t been for J.K. Rowling.

That looks like a honey bee to me. Like I can tell a honey bee from any other kind of bee. Honestly, I don’t even know how to tell a bee from a wasp – you probably think a bee is fuzzy and a wasp is black and shiny (and scary), but in fact there are metallic green bees and fuzzy brown wasps and lots of other combinations, too.

As categories, bees and wasps are a little like butterflies and moths – I wrote before that a butterfly is a particular kind of Lepidopteran, but moth is kind of a catchall term. Bees are a particular kind of Hymenopteran (my favorite order of insects) but wasps are just most of the other stuff in the Hymenoptera that isn’t an ant or bee. The “wasp” category includes a lot of really cool animals, like the parasitic wasps that lay their eggs on other insects and the fig wasps that pollinate figs. And also yellowjackets and hornets and such.

North America doesn’t have any native honey bees – the ones we have were imported by settlers. So none of the New World plants we know and love evolved to require pollination by honeybees. Potatoes use other insects; cacao trees use flies.

Speaking of the Lepidopterans…

…and another picture, which could be the same butterfly or could be a different one. (I’m going with “butterfly” here because it’s active in the day, but again…what do I know?)

Well, actually, this is nature immediately outside my kitchen. It’s finally raining around here these days, and I saw this through my kitchen window the other day:

Hey – I assumed this was a moth, because I think of them as being brown, but I just went and looked up the difference, and learned that it’s a butterfly. You can tell because its antennae are club-shaped, while most moth antennae aren’t. (The picture is a little confusing – of the two long things that appear to be sticking out from its head, only the one on the left is an antenna. The one on the right is a leg. The second antenna is out of focus in the background.)

Also, it’s out during the day and it’s holding its wings together, which aren’t definite indicators, but they usually mean butterfly.

Actually, the whole butterfly-moth thing isn’t very precise, scientifically. Butterflies and moths are all members of the order Lepidoptera. Butterflies are one group of Lepidopterans; skippers are another that are usually lumped as “butterflies” by people like you and me who don’t know any better; the other 20-odd groups of Lepidopterans are what we call “moths.”

So, while saying something is a “butterfly” is reasonably specific, saying something is a “moth” is just lumping together a whole bunch of not-very-closely-related bugs. This helpful FAQ from The Lepidopterists’ Society says “Butterflies can be thought of as being basically a group of moths specialized to fly during the day.” (But some moths are active during the day, too.)

Update, 10/4: Commenter “Ranger Steve” dropped by to tell us that this is a Common Buckeye. Cool! Learn more about the species here.

photo: me

Plants are amazing. I said this to a friend yesterday and he corrected me: “Everything is amazing.” Which is true. Kidneys? Amazing. Meteorites? Amazing. DNA? Amazing.

But, for now, let’s talk about plants. They’re amazing. They can communicate by releasing chemicals. Messages like, “Come eat the tasty caterpillars!”

For ScienceNOW last week, I wrote about a study on tobacco plants that, when they’re being chomped by caterpillars, send out a chemical message that calls the caterpillars’ predators. Amazing, huh? Read about it here.

photo: Matthey Film

Last week, I wrote for ScienceNOW about a way of estimating how many species of arthropods there are in the tropics. Arthropods are bugs, basically – insects, spiders, and other crunchy things. Entomologists throw around numbers for this – sometimes as high as 30 or 100 million, usually more in the a-few-million range. The paper I wrote about tries to come up with a better estimate, using a method called uncertainty modeling that you can read about in my story.

Entomologists base all of these numbers on beetles. Basically, they’re coming up with some kind of number – don’t ask me about units – that describes to what extent beetles specialize on a tree species. Like, do beetles generally eat the leaves (buds, pollen, whatever) of only one species, or can they eat stuff from a lot of different kind of trees? You do a bunch of field work, come up with a number for that, then wrangle it through an equation that corrects for things like the fact that not all beetles are herbivores or live in trees and not all arthropods are beetles.

This meant a lot of math. This is some of what I had to puzzle out so I could write the story:

Hello, universe? I quit ecology. I am a journalist now. I understood there would be no further math. (Ok, this was actually kind of fun.)

Art: I scanned a little section of my written-on copy of the paper.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York: Way too much museum to fit in one blog post. Here’s my first post about the visit.

Next topic: Butterflies. This is a trend at natural history museums these days, apparently, or at least the two big natural history museums I’m familiar with. They set up a shed in an unpopular gallery (poor unpopular galleries) and fit it out for butterflies. It costs extra on top of museum admission, and it’s one of the things I got into free because the communications office set me up with an admission voucher.

You go in through double doors and discover: people. And also butterflies. They do timed entries so it can’t get too crowded. I was nervous the whole time about stepping on a butterfly. I mean, what’s to stop them from landing in the path? You also see heat and humidity, or you would if they were visible. This place is set up for tropical bugs.

My favorite was the blue morpho, a butterfly I saw in Costa Rica many years ago. I took a picture but it doesn’t really do it justice – they’re these enormous insects, the size of your hand when the wings are open. The undersides of the wings are brown, but when they fly, they flash a beautiful shiny iridescent blue. It’s a wonderful sight when a blue morpho flits by in the rainforest.

Butterfly exhibits cost extra because they’re a lot of work to maintain. Butterflies don’t live long, so the museum has to keep getting new pupae. These are raised from eggs at butterfly farms in Florida, Costa Rica, and other tropical places. As soon as the caterpillars hit the pupal stage, the farmers pack them up and ship them off.

Insect development is the most amazing thing. That little white butterfly there used to be a caterpillar. It made a chrysalis, then it sat inside, broke itself down, and grew its adult body. It made *wings* for goodness’ sake. And little spindly legs. Think how different that is from a caterpillar. That is wild.

Look, you can see the butterflies’ mouthparts sucking the juice out of the orange:

The mouthpiece is the second long skinny thing from the left on the front butterfly. When a butterfly isn’t using its mouth, it keeps it rolled up in a neat spiral.

I think this is a monarch butterfly. I like how it’s posing against the background of a classic museum floor.

This sign by the exit made me paranoid:

I mean, I didn’t have anyone with me who could check the back of my head. It turned out they had a big mirror and a butterfly net between the two sets of exit doors, so I could determine that I didn’t have any hitchhikers.

I’m not sure the butterfly exhibit would be worth the extra cost of admission. It’s just a bunch of bugs flying around. And I say that as a person who loves bugs. Once I got in there and established that there were butterflies, there wasn’t really much to do other than go around trying to take pictures of them, and the fluorescent lighting made the pictures come out with strange colors. Kids seemed to be pretty excited about the exhibit, though.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Skip over to ScienceNOW to see an amusing piece I wrote about caterpillars talking with their butts. The species I wrote about has a modified hair-like structure, called an anal oar, that it drags across a leaf to make sounds and vibrations that warn off intruders. You can see this in the video that accompanies my story.

The idea is that caterpillars may have evolved this ritualized form of communication out of fighting. The researchers had a neat way of figuring this out – they made a family tree of a few dozen caterpillars. Then, for a few species, they looked at the anatomy of their hind ends and also watched how they defend their territory. Some, the ones that are more like the ancestors, have a leg back there and fight. The anal-scraping ones have no leg on their last segment and never fight. Fighting is dangerous for caterpillars – one bite and they’ll bleed to death. So the territorial displays may have evolved in part to avoid that deadly outcome.

Here’s the paper. It’s open access, so you don’t have to pay to read it, and it’s a pretty good read – much easier to follow than most journal articles I encounter.

Photo: Jayne Yack (video still)

I just remembered to go looking for my last batch of quizzes, and they were there! Wahoo! Here are three to entertain you for now, and I’ll post the last three later. Tell your friends.

A mosquito researcher once told me that the best way to feed mosquitoes in the lab is to stick your arm in the cage.

I learned some cool facts about electric vehicles while writing this quiz, but they’re all in the quiz, so I’m not telling you what they are.

Climate change is a very large topic to write a quiz about. Take the quiz and see how I did!

To see all my quizzes, click here.

Yesterday for ScienceNOW I wrote about tobacco plants that open their flowers at a different time of day if they’re getting eaten by caterpillars. (My story.)

It’s kind of ingenious, if these scientists are right about it. Hawkmoths are good for the tobacco plants, because they pollinate them. Plants want pollination. But female hawkmoths also lay their eggs on the tobacco leaves. Eggs hatch into caterpillars that eat everything in sight.

So if there are caterpillars around, this study shows, these plants shift their flowering from night – when moths are out – to morning, when hummingbirds are awake.

Plants have a ton of ways of dealing with predators. They can produce toxins to hurt the predators. They can stop making new leaves, send new sugars to their roots, and wait until the predators go away. My favorite: They can send out “heelllp meee” chemical signals to attract their predators’ predators, like a parasitic wasp that lays its own eggs in the caterpillar.

One of the guys I talked to for this story told me (when I interviewed him for another story) that he used to be able to tell what species of caterpillar was eating a plant in his lab by the smell of the chemicals the plant was giving off. They’re that specific.

Plants are awesome.

photo: Danny Kessler

Why do mosquitoes buzz in people’s ears? I actually can’t remember the conclusion of that children’s book, but I can now tell you a bunch more about mosquitoes buzzing in general. It’s in this ScienceNOW story. Enjoy.

For the study, the researchers recorded the sound mosquitoes’ wings make. They needed the mosquitoes to fly in place. The paper just said the mosquitoes were tethered, so of course I had to ask how.

So, in case you ever need to know how to put a mosquito on a leash, here’s an excerpt from my interview notes with Gabriella Gibson, who’s been studying mosquitoes for 30 years:

“You warm up a wire with something like a soldering iron – a very thin wire with a little loop on it. You dip it in some melted beeswax, and you dip it on the back of the mosquito, which you keep cold by slopping it on a block of ice, and then it just sort of melts onto the back of the mosquito. About a minute later, it’s fine and flying away. You can stop it from flying and keep them kind of calm by just putting a piece of tissue paper touching their legs. If their legs let go, they start flapping their wings. We had a little rig so we could lower them down so they could rest a bit. We could give them a little piece of cotton with a piece of sugar water – they stick their feeding parts into it.”

Then she told me she once used a fine piece of silk thread instead of a wire and took a mosquito for a walk. (It flew, she walked.) I’m not sure if there was a scientific reason for that or if it was recreational. Anyway: this is someone who knows how to handle a mosquito.