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.
Fruit flies may all look the same to you. But not to other fruit flies! A new study in the journal PLoS Biology finds that males prefer bigger females. In fact, they harass the big girls so much, those females don’t lay as many eggs as they would if the darn males left them alone.
My story about sexy fruit flies appears today on ScienceNOW. I must warn you that it includes fruit fly porn.
Approximate conversation with editor yesterday afternoon: “I was thinking of taking out the second to last paragraph. I think it’ll flow better.” Me: “I don’t really care, as long as my ‘hitting on the hotties’ joke stays in.” Editor: “Well, at least you’ve got your priorities straight.” Ok, ok, I care how the story flows. I just trust the editor to make the right decisions – he can take out whatever he wants, if he thinks it improves the story. Although he also took out that joke. Ah, well. You win some, you lose some. Important writing lesson: It’s easier for an editor to remove excess personality than to add personality.
I am pleased that a story with the title “I’m Too Sexy For My Species” appeared on my birthday.
photo: Tristan Long
I got excited when I saw these ants running around on the sidewalk at a scenic overlook in Arizona, because I vaguely remembered that the ants I studied in grad school were from Arizona. But I spent a lot of quality time dotting those ants with model airplane paint, and I’m pretty sure they were bigger than this guy. Still, you get a portrait of an ant:
The little guys move fast – kinda hard to focus on them with a point-and-shoot. Little girls, I should say. Basically all the ants you see are female. The males exist to mate with a queen and die. So this is a female worker, out scavenging for treats on the sidewalk. I wonder how that’s working out for her.
We’ve been having the most fascinating weather in the D.C. area this summer. In the spring and early June it rained all the time. The rain stopped just in time for the Folklife Festival, a two-week outdoor Smithsonian event that is always miserably hot and humid. Then something strange happened: It didn’t get hot and humid. It’s just been lovely – in the 70s and 80s with low humidity for weeks now. It gets down into the 60s at night. The fourth of July is supposed to be oppressively muggy, and it was a perfectly pleasant day.
Well, it turns out all that rain earlier in the summer was good for someone: fireflies. There’s a nice article by David Fahrenthold in today’s Washington Post about the local firefly glut. With lots of science! And amusing quotes like this from scientists:
“Some males are better than other males,” Copeland said. “And they advertise something in their flashes that says ‘My name is Joe, and I’ve got . . .’ ” Here, Copeland described part of the male body in a way rarely seen in scientific journals.
I have noticed more fireflies than usual this year – in fact, I even saw some one night in the parking lot of my apartment building, a non-firefly-friendly patch of asphalt wedged between the train lines and some kind of construction company. So, yay for rain!
Art copyright: 2009, FCIT
I learned a ton of awesome things when I was in the Bering Sea this spring. I also learned one important lesson when I got home: Don’t leave your car for six weeks without driving it. I guess since I drive my car so rarely anyway, it didn’t seem like a big deal to just let it sit there for a while. Ok, so, one new battery and one scraping-of-rust-off-brakes later, I’d learned my $500 lesson. Since my mechanic had the car anyway, I had him disconnect the central locking system, which is one of the dumber features of the ‘93 Jetta, and I’ve been much happier ever since.
Until Wednesday night, when I discovered that the central locking system unlocks the little door over the gas cap. Let me tell you, I had a perplexing couple of minutes at the gas station before I figured that out. I called the mechanic today, he told me how to open the gas thing from inside the trunk, and everything’s good. But look what happens when you don’t get gas for three months:
Stinging beasties have babies in your car.
I’m writing a whole batch o’ quizzes for the Science Channel (it’s part of the Discovery empire, which is based just up the road in Silver Spring). Three more went up today! You can test your knowledge on:
Dinosaurs! This one is probably the funniest. And the one with the most questions about Jurassic Park.
Taste! I quoted a They Might Be Giants song in this quiz. An obscure They Might Be Giants song.
Bugs! A month or so ago I heard a talk about insect diversity. The guy said, “To a nearest approximation, all species on earth are insects.” I didn’t get to use that quote in the quiz, so I’m happy to be using it now. Bugs are awesome.
