NC State University Insect Museum

This story made the blog rounds already, but I just can't help but post something about it here. Check out this video of flies being used as hosts for advertisements (the peoples' reactions are fairly amusing, I must admit):

That's right, small advertisements were glued to flies (Diptera: Muscomorpha), so that these insects could then bring clients' messages to patrons at a book convention. The Boston Herald Business and Boston Herald Blogs sections responded to this new breed of advertising with some interesting (if a bit insectophobic and punny for my taste) commentaries:

It’s a delicate balance. Eichborn wanted to convey an image of a cutesy cartoon, an anthropomorphic airplane with bulging eyes. But real houseflies spread disease and tend to congregate around animal corpses, rotten food and doggie doo-doo.

It’s the rare situation where killing the messenger makes a lot of sense.
[...snip...]
For the record, cockroaches also don’t make for an ideal advertising medium. According to Berezin, their skin is very resilient with paint. The solution, the artist suggests, may lie in using only nice and pretty insects in future publicity campaigns.

'Maybe they can start genetically breeding logos into butterfly wings,' she says.

¡Ay, caramba! Check out Emily Berezin's referenced gallery of satirical insect-derived ads. At least the dictyopterans can maintain their dignity...for now.

p.s. Bonus points for anyone who correctly identifies the fly they used:

Hint: it's not a housefly (sic!) Not that the correct determination would necessarily improve their opinions of Diptera...

I came across an awesome series of photos by renown photographer Brian Valentine that show an Aphanogmus wasp (Hymenoptera: Ceraphronidae) approaching a potential host (maybe a cecidomyiid larva?), antennating it (mmmmmm...smells good!), and then ovipositing before walking away. Here's one of the images:

István Mikó and I have slowly built up a complete reference list for the superfamily Ceraphronoidea, and the most descriptive statements about Aphanogmus oviposition behavior (in fact, the only statements about Aphanogmus oviposition behavior) we can find are from Jaramillo and Vega (2009):

During the dissection of berries we observed that Aphanogmus sp. spends most of its time inside the coffee berries within the coffee berry borer galleries. Before parasitising P. nasuta [a bethylid wasp, which parasitizes the coffee berry boror], [Aphanogmus] probes with its antennae the older host larvae or pupae just before construction of the cocoons... [Aphanogmus] usually oviposits on the abdomen of P. nasuta, and up to three Aphanogmus sp. larvae or pupae were found inside the...cocoons.

Aphanogmus has been reared from several orders of insect host, and Jaramillo and Vega (2009) describe a species that parasitizes Bethylidae. I made an animated GIF from the Flickr images so that I could estimate the behaviors for the species captured by Velentine, but alas he was way ahead of me and stitched one together himself! Check it out: Aphanogmus oviposition behavior.

What other treasures will emerge from Flickr's parade of naturalists...? Thanks for sharing your wonderful photos!

Dave Wagner has an interesting piece in the most recent issue of American Entomologist - Ode to Alabama: the meteoric fall of a once extraordinarily abundant moth - that documents the recent history of a once formidable but now largely absent (in North America, anyway) pest. Here's the gist: Alabama argillacea (Hübner) (Noctuidae: Catocalinae, as it's classified in our collection), the cotton leafworm, develops as a specialist on native cotton plants, especially Gossypium hirsutum (Malvaceae). As this species of plant became a commercial success, and its cultivation spread throughout the Americas, the moth's range and population(s) grew prodigiously, often achieving passenger pigeon-like numbers (becoming perhaps the most important pest of cotton at the time). Waves of moths would darken the skies (in my version of the story, anyway) in the fall as they migrated north from the cotton-saturated south. Then, as cultural and pest management practices evolved, the moth's numbers declined. The last specimen seen in North America (at least north of Mexico) was collected in Louisiana in 1998.

These kinds of stories intrigue me, especially when data from insect collections (see Table 1 in the paper) are used as supporting evidence. I just had to check our research collection, of course, to see how our data could help solve this mysterious decline. When was this species last sighted in NC? Table 1 has a record from J. B. Sullivan in Beaufort (one of our honorary curators!) from October, 1973. Our research collection holds a specimen from 1972 (images above), collected in a cotton field in Clayton, but most of the other specimens are from 1905-1950s.

I've queued up these 46 specimens to be barcoded and databased. Their collecting event data will be fed to GBIF soon thereafter, which clearly needs more records for this species. In the meantime here are our specimens for your enjoyment!

p.s. Just what is the etymology of Catocalinae? Could it possibly be what I think it is!?

I just read this...(clears throat)...highly informative news item - Dangerous Insect Found in Flower Shipment at Miami Airport!!! (emphasis mine) - and thought to myself, so this is what the world would be like without taxonomists. Here's the entire article, verbatim (in case it disappears from that link...as it should, in my opinion):

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they have intercepted a rare and dangerous insect found in a shipment of flowers at a Miami airport that could cause significant damage.

Officials said Saturday they were examining a box of flowers last week at Miami International airport when they found Hemiptera. Hemiptera's are typically aphids, cicadas, and leaf hoppers and comprise about 80,000 different species. They feed on the seed heads of grasses and sedges. The insect is found in South America.

Officials believe it is the first time the insect has been found in the U.S.

Are you serious? Don't journalists take writing classes anymore?

Hemiptera, of course, does include an extraordinarily diverse array of species that feed on xylem, phloem, seeds, other insects, vertebrates, blood, fungi, MANY of other food sources, and, alas, the seed heads of grasses and sedges through piercing/sucking mouthparts comprised of four stylets (the mandibles and maxillae). I don't know off hand how many species are pestiferous, but my (admittedly wild) guess is multiple hundreds - e.g., kissing bug (definitely dangerous with respect to Chagas disease transmission), bed bugs, tarnished plant bug, squash bug, cottony cushion scale, woolly adelgid, and the sorghum aphid are just a few. That means <1% of the 80,000 (and growing) species classified as Hemiptera's (sic!) are pestiferous. Even fewer (waaaay fewer) than that are what I would call dangerous. Also, it's important to note that hemipterans have already been found in North America, Australia, Europe, Asia, and Africa - not just South America. I'm sure you already knew that, though (wink).


UPDATE: A much more informative article of that event has been found. This reporter even includes a species name (Uttaris pallidipennis Stål) and an image of the little rascal! And, to top it off, the insect is from South Africa.

This article about Abington United's new uniforms (team link) is interesting. Apparently one of their strikers, Anaclet Odhiambo, was stung by a wasp (a vespid, perhaps?) after the offending insect trapped herself under his new, bright yellow home jersey. The striker's hypothesis is that the wasp was attracted to the color of his shirt: "It's a little bit too yellow." (emphasis mine)

There's a reasonably long history of papers (here's my lazy Google Scholar search), student projects, and even current research (I'm looking at you, USDA SEL Hymenoptera team) aimed at exploring the effectiveness of various yellows (and other colors) at attracting Hymenoptera. I've even mentioned the sheer awesomeness of yellow pan trapping for my tiny hymenopteran taxa here before. Given my experience, I have to respectfully disagree with the statement that "...there is no evidence that wasps would be attracted to that." - unless "wasps" in this case refers to Vespidae, which I don't seem to collect them very often in my traps (and which are perfectly capable of getting under your shirt by accident and stinging you).

So Odhiambo's hypothesis actually isn't too wacky after all. My educated guess about what really happened, though, is more in line with this other quote: "...it was just the time of year when wasps are flying around." I.e., it was an accident, and there is no need to get the insecticide out!