Helen FieldsScience Writer

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.

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