Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath

Pepsis wasp in the Eastern Sierra – 4.0 on the Schmidt Pain Index.

Dude. Seriously?

Phoebis sennae metamorphosis video produced by timelapse videographer extraordinaire JCMegabyte.

In a dream last night, I sprinkled water on a dried out, old mantis ootheca which I had given up as spent or dead.  Miraculously, nymphs began rapelling miniature but almost fully-formed from the papery husk.

Nabokov's annotated first page of Kafka's Metamorphosis.

The butterfly expert V. Nabokov surmised that the monstrous unclean animal of Kafka’s imagination was most probably a very large beetle, and certainly not a cockroach as commonly assumed.  I am inclined to agree with him not only on the morphological grounds from which he argues but also for the fact that that cockroaches like mantids (which are essentially toned, insecticidal roaches) and bugs and grasshoppers and sucking lice are hemimetabolous.  They do not metamorphose.  Or as the convential parlance has it their metamorphosis is “incomplete.”

Though form does change from instar to instar to imago in the hemimetabolous orders, these changes are more or less subtle – an increase in body size a subtle change in shape or color the growth of wings.  Dragonflies are hemimetabolous desipite their dramatic transformation from killer submarine to muderous biplane – the shadow of the naiad can be seen in imago with some imagination.

True (“complete”) metamorphosis is a trick reserved for the endopterygotes – butterflies and bees and beetles, flies and fleas and ants and ant lions &c.  Each of these groups begins life as a wormy larva hardens into a mummylike pupa in which the body tissues literally digest themselves and build an entirely new, wonderful thing not at all like the melted maggot or caterpillar from which it precipitated.

It is much, much easier to imagine the maggoty Gregor metamorphosing into a beetle than a cockroach.

All of which is a wholly unnecessary preamble to THE MOST, most bizarre scientific papers I have read all year: weirder than hermit eurypterid hand puppets, stranger than penguin poop from space, more fantastic than plastic barnacle penes, and more incredible, even, than psychic protists.

I’m speaking of course of Donald Williamson’s mind-bending new paper in PNAS: ” Caterpillars evolved from onychophorans by hybridogenesis. ” (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0908357106).

Without, it seems, a single piece of empirical data to support his claim, Williamson posits that the larval stages of holometabolous insects (and other animals which undergo dramatic post-larval transformations) evolved via “Larval Transfer” when insects mated with velvet worms! Butterflies (and beetles, and flies &c.) are, in this view sort of sequential transphyletic chimera. This is something like, well a human mating with a cockroach which then gives birth to a human that then eventually metamorphoses into a cockroach.  Or something.

While this is an, ahem, iconoclastic proposition to say the least, and it is fairly astonishing that it appears in one of the most prestigious general science journals, Williamson at least proposes a “research program” to test his hypothesis.  Here is one experiment he proposes:

As an initial trial, it should be possible to attach an onychophoran spermatophore to the genital pore of a female cockroach and see if fertilized eggs are laid (page 4 from Williamson 2009)

This is like some awesome Dr. Moreau style shite.  The entire paper is sort of like a Lynch film: wonderful and horrifying and you’re not sure if it’s some kind of put on or there is some kind of insane genius at work.

The back story; and some choice quotes expressing the astonishment with which this paper has been received by the uh, “mainstream” scientific community is covered in this Scientific American article.

But. Dude.  Seriously?

Research Publication Figure of the Week (1 week late)

Figure 3. from Hagadorn and Seilacher 2009

What an interrogative week, huh?  National Geographic mused, koanically, “First Tool Users Were Sea Scorpions?” Discover’s online news mashup engine 80 Beats pondered, prosaically, “Did ‘Hermit’ Sea Creature Hide Under Borrowed Shells in First Forays Onto Land?“  Neither of which really even approach the telegraphic glory of Hagadorn and Seilacher’s rhetorical paper title “Hermit Arthropods 500 million years ago?” which appears in this month’s issue of Geology.

All of which would seem to beg the same answer, because the only thing more badass than a sea scorpion is a sea scorpion with a van!

Ref.
Hagadorn, JW and A Seilacher 2009. “Hermit arthropods 500 millon years ago?” Geology 37(4):295-298

Research Publication Title Of the Week

Barnacle (Chthamalus?) colony on Purple Shore Crab (Hemigrapsus nudus)

ADAPTIVE PLASTICITY OF THE PENIS IN A SIMULTANEOUS HERMAPHRODITE – J. Matthew Hoch, Evolution 2009

DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00668.x

Abstract: Acorn barnacles are important model organisms for the study of sex allocation. They are sessile, nonselfing hermaphrodites that copulate with penises that have been suggested to be phenotypically plastic. On wave-exposed shores, Semibalanus balanoides develop penises with relatively greater diameter whereas in wave-protected sites they are thinner. A reciprocal transplant experiment between wave-exposed and protected sites tested whether these exposure-specific morphologies have adaptive value. Mating success was compared over a range of distances to compare the ability of barnacles to reach mates. Barnacles that grew in the wave-protected site and mated in the wave-protected site fertilized more broods at increasing distances than those transplanted to the wave-exposed site. For barnacles that developed in the wave-exposed site, there was no difference in the ability to fertilize neighbors between sites of differing exposure. This study demonstrates the adaptive value of plasticity in penis morphology. The results suggest a trade-off between development of a penis adapted to wave exposure and the ability to fertilize distant mates. Barnacles in different physical environments are limited by different factors, which may limit numbers of potential mates, constrain optimal sex allocation strategies and alter reproductive behavior.

Darwin would be doubly proud I think!

POSTSCRIPTO:

Sadly, I  just noticed that Hoch buried the lead: a simultaneous hermaphrodite with a plastic penis that’s non-selfing!?  What, do barnacles not have the internet or something?

And they said Descriptive Biology was dead….

Definitely my favorite paper title of the week:

The insect nephrocyte is a podocyte-like cell with a filtration slit diaphragm

(Weavers et al. 2009 Nature 457: 322-326).

It’s like I’ve always said…we’ve still got a lot to learn about arthropod excretion.

Auspices

Art Shapiro came strolling through the garden today while I was working up a bed for lettuce and mustard greens.  “Good day to do the work,” he said, matter-of-factly, “and we should have rain by the weekend.”

“That’s a’good news for the plants,” I stammered, sweat-soaked, apparently pretending to be Italian.

A few moments later an enormous red-tail—well a low-flying one at least—appeared overhead.  She wheeled once, and continued south, ruddering with her ruddy rectrices.  I thought of Epidexipteryx, but only for a moment.  A buckeye danced about the garden.  Following or fleeing Art? I couldn’t tell.

On the way back I saw a flicker on a telephone pole, a seasonal first for me, I think.  Later, I found this weevil on my arm.  Hypera postica I guess?  Canadians already celebrated their National Weevil Day, but ours doesn’t come until the 27th of November, which seems kind of late, but you know: Puritans…go figure.

Later still, I gave myself a haircut and an unintentional rat-tail which Jessica mended when she returned from Point Reyes.

Blogging is awesome.  I’m going to bed.

Hiding in Plain Sight

we return, or rather linger, at Snow Jade Cave with this gorgeous cryptic moth,

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resting just outside the ostentatious entrance:

crazed helictites inside,