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?

SEX

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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.

Saturday Insexology 201

Somewhere in Guizhou… check out the composite seed–there’s a trans-kingdom sex joke in there somewhere, but i’m too tired.

Time’s Spiral in Arrow Canyon

On an autumn afternoon, Earl Wadsworth climbed up to the top of a ledge in a remote slot canyon in Nevada.  With a knife or a nail or some other tool Earl scratched a large cursive “E” into the limestone wall.  After some consideration the graffiti-artist gave up on the formal script and printed his full name across the rock.

Just below he added the date: “November, 14th 1920.”

Eighty-six years later, to the day, I found myself on the same ledge admiring Wadsworth’s handiwork. 

Dust. Wind. Dude. Or, the comparative social phenology of Girls Gone Wild and Socrates

If you have ever taken an introductory ecology course, you will no doubt remember C.S. Elton’s classic study of the periodic fluctations of lynx and hares.  In a textbook* case of Lotka-Volterra predator/prey interaction, Elton found that lynx and hare populations in northern Canada followed an astonishingly regular 9-10 year cycle.  Several years of steady increases in both lynx and hare numbers culminate in a dramatic crash and a brief lull, before the pattern repeats.

You may have forgotten however, where the original data came from.  Elton did not sit out in the Canadian Arctic with a notebook and a bottle of brandy counting animals.  Instead, he reviewed several decades worth of trapping records from the Hudson’s Bay Company (which happened to be his employer at the time) and noticed the pronounced periodicity in the number of lynx furs reported in the company’s annual inventory.

I noticed a striking periodicity in a very different sort of proxy record a few weeks ago when Alex Wild of Myrmecos fame posted a comparison of Google Trends data for the search terms “ants” and “flies”.  It appears that web search activity for “ants” hits a consistent annual peak around May and a consistent annual trough around Christmas, at least for the past four years.

When I commented on this on his blog, Alex pointed out that search records for many insects show a similar pattern, with search popularity seeming to peak sometime during the northern hemisphere summer.  Naturally I spent the rest of the night searching for biologically significant patterns in Google Trends.  Sure enough, interest in certain insect groups appears to show some interesting seasonal trends:

Phenology, the observation of regular seasonal patterns in nature, especially among animals and plants, lies squarely at the roots of natural history.  Humans have undoubtedly been tracking these patterns as long as we have relied on the seasonal availabilty of forage and game (and later crops and livestock) to survive.  That is to say, forever as far as our species is concerned. 

Google Trends allows users to explore a sort of “social phenolgy”–tracking rhythmic fluctations in public interest which, in the case of web searches for natural phenomenon presumably have at least some connection to the natural rhythms themselves.

Needless to say, I am now obsessed with exploring these patterns, searching for interesting patterns in the interest in birds, flowers and vegetables:

There are some other funny correlations out there:

I could do this all day!

* Of course as with any “textbook” example the truth is likely a bit more complex, and a debate about the nature of and mechanisms behind this pattern continues almost a century later.  Sunspots, disease, weather, fire, petroleum futures and the popularity of the name “Madison”, have all been proposed as important factors (see Stenseth et al. 1997 and Zhang et al. 2007[open access .pdf] for recent analyses).