This tiny backyard bug does the fastest backflips on earth

Move over, Sonic. There's a new spin-jumping champion in town -- the globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta). This diminutive hexapod backflips into the air, spinning to over 60 times its body height in the blink of an eye, and a new study features the first in-depth look at its jumping prowess.

Globular springtails are tiny, usually only a couple millimeters in body length. They don't fly, bite or sting. But they can jump. In fact, jumping is their go-to (and only) plan for avoiding predators. And they excel at it -- to the naked eye it seems as though they vanish entirely when they take off.

"When globular springtails jump, they don't just leap up and down, they flip through the air -- it's the closest you can get to a Sonic the Hedgehog jump in real life," says Adrian Smith, research assistant professor of biology at North Carolina State University and head of the evolutionary biology and behavior research lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. "So naturally I wanted to see how they do it."

Finding the globular springtails was easy enough -- they're all around us. The ones in this study are usually out from December through March. Smith "recruited" his research subjects by sifting through leaf litter from his own backyard. But the next part proved to be the most challenging.

"Globular springtails jump so fast that you can't see it in real time," Smith says. "If you try to film the jump with a regular camera, the springtail will appear in one frame, then vanish. When you look at the picture closely, you can see faint vapor trail curlicues left behind where it flipped through the one frame."

Smith solved that problem by using cameras that shoot 40,000 frames per second. He urged the springtails to jump by shining a light on them or lightly prodding them with an artist's paintbrush. Then he looked at how they took off, how fast and far they went, and how they landed.

Globular springtails don't use their legs to jump. Instead, they have an appendage called a furca that folds up underneath their abdomen and has a tiny, forked structure at its tip. When the springtails jump, the furca flips down and the forked tip pushes against the ground, launching them into a series of insanely fast backflips.

What do we mean by insanely fast?

"It only takes a globular springtail one thousandth of a second to backflip off the ground and they can reach a peak rate of 368 rotations per second," Smith says. "They accelerate their bodies into a jump at about the same rate as a flea, but on top of that they spin. No other animal on earth does a backflip faster than a globular springtail."

The springtails were also able to launch themselves over 60 millimeters into the air -- more than 60 times their own height. And in most cases, they went backward.

"They can lean into a jump and go slightly sideways, but when launching from a flat surface, they mostly travel up and backward, never forward," says Jacob Harrison, a postdoctoral researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and paper co-author. "Their inability to jump forward was an indication to us that jumping is primarily a means to escape danger, rather than a form of general locomotion."

Landing was found in two styles: uncontrolled and anchored. Globular springtails do have a sticky forked tube they can evert -- or push out of their bodies -- to grapple a surface or halt their momentum, but Smith observed that bouncing and tumbling to a stop was just as common as anchored landings.

Read more at Science Daily

Fruit, nectar, bugs and blood: How bat teeth and jaws evolved for a diverse dinnertime

They don't know it, but Darwin's finches changed the world. These closely related species -- native to the Galapagos Islands -- each sport a uniquely shaped beak that matches their preferred diet. Studying these birds helped Charles Darwin develop the theory of evolution by natural selection.

A group of bats has a similar -- and more expansive -- evolutionary story to tell. There are more than 200 species of noctilionoid bats, mostly in the American tropics. And despite being close relatives, their jaws evolved in wildly divergent shapes and sizes to exploit different food sources. A paper published Aug. 22 in Nature Communications shows those adaptations include dramatic, but also consistent, modifications to tooth number, size, shape and position. For example, bats with short snouts lack certain teeth, presumably due to a lack of space. Species with longer jaws have room for more teeth -- and, like humans, their total tooth complement is closer to what the ancestor of placental mammals had.

According to the research team behind this study, comparing noctilionoid species can reveal a lot about how mammalian faces evolved and developed, particularly jaws and teeth. And as a bonus, they can also answer some outstanding questions about how our own pearly whites form and grow.

"Bats have all four types of teeth -- incisors, canines, premolars and molars -- just like we do," said co-author Sharlene Santana, a University of Washington professor of biology and curator of mammals at the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture. "And noctilionoid bats evolved a huge diversity of diets in as little as 25 million years, which is a very short amount of time for these adaptations to occur."

"There are noctilionoid species that have short faces like bulldogs with powerful jaws that can bite the tough exterior of the fruits that they eat. Other species have long snouts to help them drink nectar from flowers. How did this diversity evolve so quickly? What had to change in their jaws and teeth to make this possible?" said lead author Alexa Sadier, an incoming faculty member at the Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier in France, who began this project as a postdoctoral researcher at the University California, Los Angeles.

Scientists don't know what triggered this frenzy of dietary adaptation in noctilionoid bats. But today different noctilionoid species feast on insects, fruit, nectar, fish and even blood -- since this group also includes the infamous vampire bats.

The team used CT scans and other methods to analyze the shapes and sizes of jaws, premolars and molars in more than 100 noctilionoid species. The bats included both museum specimens and a limited number of wild bats captured for study purposes. The researchers compared the relative sizes of teeth and other cranial features among species with different types of diets, and used mathematical modeling to determine how those differences are generated during development.

The team found that, in noctilionoid bats, certain "developmental rules" caused them to generate the right assortment of teeth to fit in their diet-formed grins. For example, bats with long jaws -- like nectar-feeders -- or intermediate jaws, like many insect-eaters, tended to have the usual complement of three premolars and three molars on each side of the jaw. But bats with short jaws, including most fruit-eating bats, tended to ditch the middle premolar or the back molar, if not both.

"When you have more space, you can have more teeth," said Sadier. "But for bats with a shorter space, even though they have a more powerful bite, you simply run out of room for all these teeth."

Having a shorter jaw may also explain why many short-faced bats also tended to have wider front molars.

"The first teeth to appear tend to grow bigger since there is not enough space for the next ones to emerge," said Sadier.

"This project is giving us the opportunity to actually test some of the assumptions that have been made about how tooth growth, shape and size are regulated in mammals," said Santana. "We know surprisingly little about how these very important structures develop!"

Many studies about mammalian tooth development were done in mice, which have only molars and heavily modified incisors. Scientists are not entirely sure if the genes and developmental patterns that control tooth development in mice also operate in mammals with more "ancestral" sets of chompers -- like bats and humans.

Sadier, Santana and their colleagues believe their project, which is ongoing, can start to answer these questions in bats -- along with many other outstanding questions about how evolution shapes mammalian features. They're expanding this study to include noctilionoid incisors and canines, and hope to uncover more of the genetic and developmental mechanisms that control tooth development in this diverse group of bats.

"We see such strong selective pressures in these bats: Shapes have to closely match their function," said Santana. "I think there are many more evolutionary secrets hidden in these species."

Read more at Science Daily

Robotic lightning bugs take flight

Fireflies that light up dusky backyards on warm summer evenings use their luminescence for communication -- to attract a mate, ward off predators, or lure prey.

These glimmering bugs also sparked the inspiration of scientists at MIT. Taking a cue from nature, they built electroluminescent soft artificial muscles for flying, insect-scale robots. The tiny artificial muscles that control the robots' wings emit colored light during flight.

This electroluminescence could enable the robots to communicate with each other. If sent on a search-and-rescue mission into a collapsed building, for instance, a robot that finds survivors could use lights to signal others and call for help.

The ability to emit light also brings these microscale robots, which weigh barely more than a paper clip, one step closer to flying on their own outside the lab. These robots are so lightweight that they can't carry sensors, so researchers must track them using bulky infrared cameras that don't work well outdoors. Now, they've shown that they can track the robots precisely using the light they emit and just three smartphone cameras.

"If you think of large-scale robots, they can communicate using a lot of different tools -- Bluetooth, wireless, all those sorts of things. But for a tiny, power-constrained robot, we are forced to think about new modes of communication. This is a major step toward flying these robots in outdoor environments where we don't have a well-tuned, state-of-the-art motion tracking system," says Kevin Chen, who is the D. Reid Weedon, Jr. Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), the head of the Soft and Micro Robotics Laboratory in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and the senior author of the paper.

He and his collaborators accomplished this by embedding miniscule electroluminescent particles into the artificial muscles. The process adds just 2.5 percent more weight without impacting the flight performance of the robot.

Joining Chen on the paper are EECS graduate students Suhan Kim, the lead author, and Yi-Hsuan Hsiao; Yu Fan Chen SM '14, PhD '17; and Jie Mao, an associate professor at Ningxia University. The research was published this month in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

A light-up actuator

These researchers previously demonstrated a new fabrication technique to build soft actuators, or artificial muscles, that flap the wings of the robot. These durable actuators are made by alternating ultrathin layers of elastomer and carbon nanotube electrode in a stack and then rolling it into a squishy cylinder. When a voltage is applied to that cylinder, the electrodes squeeze the elastomer, and the mechanical strain flaps the wing.

To fabricate a glowing actuator, the team incorporated electroluminescent zinc sulphate particles into the elastomer but had to overcome several challenges along the way.

First, the researchers had to create an electrode that would not block light. They built it using highly transparent carbon nanotubes, which are only a few nanometers thick and enable light to pass through.

However, the zinc particles only light up in the presence of a very strong and high-frequency electric field. This electric field excites the electrons in the zinc particles, which then emit subatomic particles of light known as photons. The researchers use high voltage to create a strong electric field in the soft actuator, and then drive the robot at a high frequency, which enables the particles to light up brightly.

"Traditionally, electroluminescent materials are very energetically costly, but in a sense, we get that electroluminescence for free because we just use the electric field at the frequency we need for flying. We don't need new actuation, new wires, or anything. It only takes about 3 percent more energy to shine out light," Kevin Chen says.

As they prototyped the actuator, they found that adding zinc particles reduced its quality, causing it to break down more easily. To get around this, Kim mixed zinc particles into the top elastomer layer only. He made that layer a few micrometers thicker to accommodate for any reduction in output power.

While this made the actuator 2.5 percent heavier, it emitted light without impacting flight performance.

"We put a lot of care into maintaining the quality of the elastomer layers between the electrodes. Adding these particles was almost like adding dust to our elastomer layer. It took many different approaches and a lot of testing, but we came up with a way to ensure the quality of the actuator," Kim says.

Adjusting the chemical combination of the zinc particles changes the light color. The researchers made green, orange, and blue particles for the actuators they built; each actuator shines one solid color.

They also tweaked the fabrication process so the actuators could emit multicolored and patterned light. The researchers placed a tiny mask over the top layer, added zinc particles, then cured the actuator. They repeated this process three times with different masks and colored particles to create a light pattern that spelled M-I-T.

Following the fireflies

Once they had finetuned the fabrication process, they tested the mechanical properties of the actuators and used a luminescence meter to measure the intensity of the light.

From there, they ran flight tests using a specially designed motion-tracking system. Each electroluminescent actuator served as an active marker that could be tracked using iPhone cameras. The cameras detect each light color, and a computer program they developed tracks the position and attitude of the robots to within 2 millimeters of state-of-the-art infrared motion capture systems.

"We are very proud of how good the tracking result is, compared to the state-of-the-art. We were using cheap hardware, compared to the tens of thousands of dollars these large motion-tracking systems cost, and the tracking results were very close," Kevin Chen says.

Read more at Science Daily

50 million-year-old fossil assassin bug has unusually well-preserved genitalia

 The fossilized insect is tiny and its genital capsule, called a pygophore, is roughly the length of a grain of rice. It is remarkable, scientists say, because the bug's physical characteristics -- from the bold banding pattern on its legs to the internal features of its genitalia -- are clearly visible and well-preserved. Recovered from the Green River Formation in present-day Colorado, the fossil represents a new genus and species of predatory insects known as assassin bugs.

The find is reported in the journal Papers in Palaeontology.

Discovered in 2006 by breaking open a slab of rock, the fossilized bug split almost perfectly from head to abdomen. The fracture also cracked the pygophore in two. A fossil dealer later sold each half to a different collector, and the researchers tracked them down and reunited them for this study.

Being able to see a bug's genitalia is very helpful when trying to determine a fossil insect's place in its family tree, said Sam Heads , a paleontologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey and self-described fossil insect-genitalia expert who led the research with Daniel Swanson, a graduate student in entomology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Species are often defined by their ability to successfully mate with one another, and small differences in genitalia can lead to sexual incompatibilities that, over time, may result in the rise of new species, Swanson said. This makes the genitalia a good place to focus to determine an insect species.

But such structures are often obscured in compression fossils like those from the Green River Formation.

"To see these fine structures in the internal genitalia is a rare treat," Swanson said. "Normally, we only get this level of detail in species that are living today."

The structures visible within the pygophore include the basal plate, a hardened, stirrup-shaped structure that supports the phallus, he said. The fossil also preserved the contours of the phallotheca, a pouch into which the phallus can be withdrawn.

The find suggests that the banded assassin bugs, a group to which the new specimen is thought to belong, are about 25 million years older than previously thought, Swanson said.

"There are about 7,000 species of assassin bug described, but only about 50 fossils of these bugs are known," he said. "This just speaks to the improbability of even having a fossil, let alone one of this age, that offers this much information."

This is not the oldest fossil bug genitalia ever discovered, however.

"The oldest known arthropod genitalia are from a type of bug known as a harvestman that is 400-412 million years old, from the Rhynie Chert of Scotland," Heads said. "And there are also numerous fossil insects in amber as old as the Cretaceous Period with genitalia preserved.

"However, it is almost unheard of for internal male genitalia to be preserved in carbonaceous compressions like ours," he said.

Read more at Science Daily

Bedbugs evolved more than 100 million years ago

Bedbug.

Bedbugs -- some of the most unwanted human bed-mates -- have been parasitic companions with other species aside from humans for more than 100 million years, walking the earth at the same time as dinosaurs.

Work by an international team of scientists, including the University of Sheffield, compared the DNA of dozens of bedbug species in order to understand the evolutionary relationships within the group as well as their relationship with humans.

The team discovered that bedbugs are older than bats -- a mammal that people had previously believed to be their first host 50-60 million years ago. Bedbugs in fact evolved around 50 million years earlier.

Bedbugs rank high among the list of most unwanted human bedfellows but until now, little was known about when they first originated.

Experts have now discovered that the evolutionary history of bed bugs is far more complex than previously thought and the critters were actually in existence during the time of dinosaurs. More research is needed to find out what their host was at that time, although current understanding suggests it's unlikely they fed on the blood of dinosaurs. This is because bed bugs and all their relatives feed on animals that have a "home" -- such as a bird's nest, an owl's burrow, a bat's roost or a human's bed -- a mode of life that dinosaurs don't seem to have adopted.

The team spent 15 years collecting samples from wild sites and museums around the world, dodging bats and buffaloes in African caves infected with Ebola and climbing cliffs to collect from bird nests in South East Asia.

Professor Mike Siva-Jothy from the University of Sheffield's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, who was part of the team, said: "To think that the pests that live in our beds today evolved more than 100 million years ago and were walking the earth side by side with dinosaurs, was a revelation. It shows that the evolutionary history of bed bugs is far more complex than we previously thought."

Dr Steffen Roth from the University Museum Bergen in Norway, who led the study, added: "The first big surprise we found was that bedbugs are much older than bats, which everyone assumed to be their first host. It was also unexpected to see that evolutionary older bedbugs were already specialised on a single host type, even though we don't know what the host was at the time when T. rex walked the earth."

The study also reveals that a new species of bedbug conquers humans about every half a million years: moreover that when bedbugs changed hosts, they didn't always become specialised on that new host and maintained the ability to jump back to their original host. This demonstrates that while some bedbugs become specialised, some remain generalists, jumping from host to host.

Professor Klaus Reinhardt, a bedbug researcher from Dresden University in Germany, who co-led the study, said: "These species are the ones we can reasonably expect to be the next ones drinking our blood, and it may not even take half a million years, given that many more humans, livestock and pets that live on earth now provide lots more opportunities."

The team also found that the two major bedbug pests of humans -- the common and the tropical bedbug -- are much older than humans. This contrasts with other evidence that the evolution of ancient humans caused the split of other human parasites into new species.

Professor Mike Siva-Jothy from the University of Sheffield, added: "These findings will help us better understand how bedbugs evolved the traits that make them effective pests -- that will also help us find new ways of controlling them."

Read more at Science Daily

Bacteria found in ancient Irish soil halts growth of superbugs: New hope for tackling antibiotic resistance

Growth of the newly discovered Streptomyces sp. myrophorea, so named because it produces a distinctive fragrance similar to that of oil of wintergreen. Although superficially resembling fungi, Streptomyces are true bacteria and are the source of two-thirds of the various frontline antibiotics used in medicine.

Researchers analysing soil from Ireland long thought to have medicinal properties have discovered that it contains a previously unknown strain of bacteria which is effective against four of the top six superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics, including MRSA.

Antibiotic resistant superbugs could kill up to 1.3 million people in Europe by 2050, according to recent research.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) describes the problem as "one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today."

The new strain of bacteria was discovered by a team based in Swansea University Medical School, made up of researchers from Wales, Brazil, Iraq and Northern Ireland.

They have named the new strain Streptomyces sp. myrophorea.

The soil they analysed originated from an area of Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, which is known as the Boho Highlands. It is an area of alkaline grassland and the soil is reputed to have healing properties.

The search for replacement antibiotics to combat multi-resistance has prompted researchers to explore new sources, including folk medicines: a field of study known as ethnopharmacology. They are also focusing on environments where well-known antibiotic producers like Streptomyces can be found.

One of the research team, Dr Gerry Quinn, a previous resident of Boho, County Fermanagh, had been aware of the healing traditions of the area for many years.

Traditionally a small amount of soil was wrapped up in cotton cloth and used to heal many ailments including toothache, throat and neck infections. Interestingly, this area was previously occupied by the Druids, around 1500 years ago, and Neolithic people 4000 years ago.

Read more at Science Daily

Bugs in Greenland Mud Yield Clues to Future Warming

The Northwestern team hikes in northwest Greenland near the country's vast ice sheet.

Flying bugs trapped deep in the frozen mud covering Greenland have pointed researchers to new clues about the country’s climate, suggesting the now-icebound island was once warmer than previously believed. 

In the centuries that followed the last ice age and in the millenia between the last two, Greenland could have seen summer highs between 10 and 15 degrees warmer than today, according to a new study led by researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois.

Core samples taken from the mud of a lake bed in northwestern Greenland, just beyond the edge of the ice sheet and largely undisturbed by its historical ebb and flow, revealed large numbers of preserved insects known as phantom midges and a fly species known as chironomids. Those species today usually live well south of Greenland, but the numbers found in the sediment cores taken by the Northwestern team were comparable to populations seen in the Canadian Atlantic provinces.

As far as the team could tell, the phantom midge hasn’t been seen in Greenland before now.

“We think this is the first time anyone has reported it in ancient sediments or modern lakes there," Yarrow Axford, the study's senior author, said in a statement accompanying the findings. "We were really surprised to see how far north it migrated."

The findings suggest temperatures in Greenland’s summer might have ranged into the 50s Fahrenheit, or in the low teens Celsius — well above today’s averages of around 40°F.

The Northwestern team pulls a core of sediment from the bed of Wax Lips Lake.

With the Arctic warming today at twice the rate of the rest of the globe, Greenland is under intense scientific scrutiny. About four-fifths of the island is covered by a sheet of ice more than a mile thick. That’s enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by about six meters (20 feet) if it melted — which it is, at a slow but accelerating rate.

Figuring out what Greenland’s climate was like in the past can help scientists figure out what may happen to it in the future as planet-warming carbon dioxide and other gases build up in Earth’s atmosphere. That data collected by studies like the Northwestern study can be fed into computer models to help fine-tune those estimates.

“These findings may portend large future warming in this high-latitude region,” the authors conclude.

Read more at Seeker

Heat shock system helps bug come back to life after drying up

The larva of the sleeping chironomid, Polypedilum vanderplanki -- a mosquito-like insect that inhabits semi-arid areas of Africa -- is well known for being able to come back to life after being nearly completely desiccated, losing up to 97 percent of its body's water content. However, the genetic mechanisms the insects use to achieve this feat, and, especially is the identity of the master gene that induces desiccation tolerance have remained largely elusive. Now, researchers from an international collaboration including Oleg Gusev of the RIKEN Innovation Center and collaborators from NARO, Kazan Federal University (Russia) and Skoltech University (Russia) have discovered that a gene called heat shock factor -- which is present in some form in nearly all living organisms on earth -- has been coopted by the species to survive desiccation.

Heat shock factor -- which exists in a single form in invertebrates but multiple forms in vertebrates -- is an essential part of the ability of living cells to survive stressful conditions such as heat, cold, radiation, and, it turns out, desiccation. In desert insects, the researchers found, the gene is able in certain conditions to upregulate itself, and this upregulation leads to a number of downstream processes, including the synthesis of heat shock proteins that are able to protect proteins in the cell from misfolding.

To perform the research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers compared data on RNA expression in the sleeping chironomid with a closely related species, Polypedilum nubifer, which is not capable of surviving desiccation. They found that in the sleeping chironomid, hundreds of genes, including genes known to be involved in forming a "molecular shield" against damage due to dehydration, were already expressed during the early stages of desiccation. They discovered that a certain DNA motif, TCTAGAA, which is the binding site for HSF, was strongly enriched around the transcription start site of the genes activated by desiccation in the sleeping chironomid, but not the other species. Intriguingly, they found that in the desiccation-tolerant species, but not the other, genes responsible for the synthesis of trehalose -- a sugar that can stabilize cells in a dry state -- contained the TCTAGAA motif.

To shed further light on the role of trehalose, they treated a cultured cell line from the sleeping chironomid with the sugar, and found that many of the genes activated by desiccation were also activated, and further, that the trehalose treatment led to the activation of the HSF gene. This effect of trehalose was prevented by knocking down the HSF gene, showing the HSF was clearly involved in the response.

According to Oleg Gusev, who led the group, "The discovery that heat shock factor is an important regulator of gene expression in response to desiccation was very interesting for us. It seems that these extremophilic insects in the process of evolution have coopted a very conservative transcription factor and its action for their own needs to survive without water by evolving a special gene structure and "adjusting" their genome sequence for these "needs." Our data suggests the following story: HSF is activated during dehydration, and then HSF actually self-activates by binding to the upstream region of its own gene. This leads to the activation of the downstream genes that allow the insects to survive desiccation. What was very surprising to us was the finding that trehalose itself can activate HSF."

Read more at Science Daily

Ancient Insect Found in Amber Is Literally One of a Kind

There's a new entry in the ancient bug-stuck-in-amber category: a 100-million-year-old, bulbous-eyed, alien-looking insect with an "E.T." head and a wide field of vision.

Found in Myanmar by George Poinar Jr., Oregon State University entomology professor emeritus, the bug – a wingless female – is such a bizarre, unique find that it has become a new insect order unto itself.

For the taxonomically inclined, that's a big deal. The roughly 1 million insect species known today are classified in just 31 orders (wasps, bees, and ants, for example live in the order Hymenoptera).

Now, though, make that 32 insect orders.

What wins the insect its new order are its unique features. It's a bug unlike any other, starting with its triangular head, which is reminiscent of the stereotypical space alien seen often in science fiction.

The way the "right triangle" head rests at the base of the creature's neck is unlike any insect ever known, according to Poinar.

"While insects with triangular-shaped heads are common today," Poinar and co-author Alex Brown wrote in a study just published in the journal Cretaceous Research, "the hypotenuse [the longest side] of the triangle is always located at the base of the head and attached to the neck, with the vertex at the apex of the head."

This bug turned that situation on its, well, head: The vertex was at the base of the neck. The head, then, along with its large lateral eyes, would have given the insect nearly 180-degree vision when it turned sideways, offering the ability to keep an eye out for things happening behind it, watching its own back, as it were.

As if that weren't enough, the insect secreted a chemical from its neck glands that, Poinar thinks, probably served to repel predators.

"Take me to your leader?" New insect Aethiocarenus burmanicus looked like an alien.

Poinar discovered the new bug in Myanmar's Hukawng Valley. Now it has a name, Aethiocarenus burmanicus, and the only seat in its new order Aethiocarenodea.

Long, thin legs propelled Aethiocarenus burmanicus' slender, flat body through its life among the dinosaurs. It likely lived in cracks within tree bark - an omnivore that dined on fare such as worms, mites and fungi. Despite features that probably helped it survive day to day, such as the see-behind-it vision, the amber-entombed insect went extinct, for reasons yet to be uncovered. Poinar and Brown think it may have disappeared due to the loss of its preferred habitat.

Read more at Discovery News

Dinosaur Era Insects Found Disguised in Amber

Myrmeleontoid larvae from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber.

Dinosaur Era insects went to great lengths to disguise themselves, reveals a rare assemblage of camouflaged bugs frozen in amber.

The insect fossils, which date to 100 million years ago, provide the oldest direct evidence of camouflage behavior utilizing debris, according to a study on the finds that is published in the journal Science Advances.

"Some animals actively seek to hide by decorating themselves with materials, such as sand, vegetal debris or arthropod remains (like insect and crustacean bits) from their environment, to conceal the features of their bodies and to match their backgrounds," wrote lead author Bo Wang and colleagues, describing the camouflage behavior.

In this case, the creatures in disguise were green lacewing larvae, split-footed lacewings, owlflies and assassin bugs. All were found fossilized in Burmese, French and Lebanese ambers that the researchers analyzed.

Wang, from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues discovered the insects used a variety of debris to cover themselves. The materials included remains of other insects, grains of sand, soil dust, bits of leaves, wood fibers and other plant matter.

Animals that might have lived alongside these insects in disguise could have included everything from dinosaurs to the world's earliest bees.

While the camouflage obviously did not save the insects from their amber entombment, it does show that they were pretty smart, the scientists suggest.

Reconstruction of green lacewing larva based on the fossil finds.

Wang and his team explained that "debris-carrying, a behavior of actively harvesting and carrying exogenous materials, is among the most fascinating and complex behaviors" because it requires "an ability to recognize, collect and carry materials," along with other skills and evolved adaptations.

The scientists demonstrated their own cleverness by performing detective work that sheds light on what might have happened just before the insects died.

Most of the Burmese amber lacewing larvae were preserved with hair-like tiny growths produced by particular ferns known as gleicheniacean ferns. Two green lacewing larvae were preserved carrying these plant objects, suggesting that the larvae were closely associated with the ferns' habitats.

Read more at Discovery News

Wasp Species Seen for First Time in a Century

A wasp no one has documented since World War I has been spotted again.

What's more, underscoring nature's penchant for pin action, this wasp story is really a combined wasp, beetle and tree story.

First, the wasp.

Researchers from University of California, Riverside (UCR) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) say they have rediscovered Oobius depressus, a wasp last studied from specimens found in Morristown, Ill. in 1914, samples that lacked key identifying features such as heads and antennae.

To find the mysteriously absent critter, the scientists set an insect trap in the canopy of a black locust tree in Michigan, and within a couple of months it produced a female specimen of the wasp.

Which brings us to the beetle.

Presence of the wasp is never good news for the wood-boring beetle Megacyllene robiniae. The wasp "parasitizes" the beetle's eggs, using them as depositories for its own eggs.

Indeed, the black wasp found by the researchers had a body "flat" enough to snoop around beneath tree bark in search of beetle eggs.

Meanwhile, the beetle, no angel itself, is a rampant pest of the black locust tree (Robinia pseudoacacia): Its larvae bore holes in the tree's bark that are big enough to invite wind-blown fungus spores that cause rot in the trunk and branches of the tree from its center.

Fewer beetles, then, would be good news for the tree. Black locust trees, though native to the southeastern United States, are planted widely across the globe in temperate areas. In the eastern United States, it's a key honey source. The tree grows fast and its wood is tough and durable and makes great lumber, but the beetle's damage can depress that use of the tree.

The Big However in all of this is that it's not yet clear how many of the lost wasp are out there. The researchers' chief goal was to re-establish the wasp and update its picture in the taxonomic photo album -- upgrading it to one with, for example, a head.

"We did it solely to redescribe the species taxonomically and make it recognizable, because the type specimens are incomplete and the original description was very poor and without illustrations," UCR entomologist and study co-author Serguei Triapitsyn told Discovery News in an email.

Read more at Discovery News

China Bug Declared World's Longest Insect

A bug over half a meter (1.6 feet) long discovered in southern China has been declared the world’s longest insect, state media said Thursday.

A stick insect measuring 62.4 centimeters (24.6 inches) found two years ago in the southern province of Guangxi has broken the record for length among the world’s 807,625 known insects, the official Xinhua agency said, citing the Insect Museum of West China.

The previous record-holder was a Malaysian 56.7-centimeter-long (22.3 inches) stick insect discovered in 2008 and now on display in London’s Natural History Museum.

Tipped off by locals about a huge beast half a meter long but as thick as a human index finger, scientist Zhao Li had been on the hunt for the bug for six years before he finally glimpsed and captured one.

“I was collecting insects on a 1,200-meter-tall (3,397-foot) mountain in Guangxi’s Liuzhou City on the night of Aug. 16, 2014, when a dark shadow appeared in the distance, which looked like a tree twig,” Zhao said, according to Xinhua.

“As I went near, I was shocked to find the huge insect’s legs were as long as its body,” he added.

The bug has been dubbed Phryganistria chinensis Zhao in his honour, and a paper about it will soon be published.

More than 3,000 varieties of stick insects have been discovered so far, Xinhua said.

From Discovery News

Insects Have Consciousness, Self-Awareness and Egos

Insects are conscious, egocentric beings, according to a new paper that also helps to explain why and likely when consciousness first evolved.

Recent neuroimaging suggests insects are fully hardwired for both consciousness and egocentric behavior, providing strong evidence that organisms from flies to fleas exhibit both.

Consciousness comes in many levels, and researchers say that insects have the capacity for at least one basic form: subjective experience.

“When you and I are hungry, we don't just move towards food; our hunger also has a particular feeling associated with it,” Colin Klein, who co-authored the new paper, told Discovery News. "An organism has subjective experience if its mental states feel like something when they happen.”

Klein, a researcher at Macquarie University, and colleague Andrew Barron studied detailed neuroimaging reports concerning insect brains. They then compared the structure of such brains with those of humans and other animals. The resulting information is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Their work focused on the midbrain, a set of evolutionarily ancient structures that are surrounded by the gray folds of the cortex. The arrangement, they say, looks a bit like the flesh of a peach surrounding the pit.

“In humans and other vertebrates (animals with a backbone and/or spinal column) there is good evidence that the midbrain is responsible for the basic capacity for subjective experience,” Klein said. “The cortex determines much about what we are aware of, but the midbrain is what makes us capable of being aware in the first place. It does so, very crudely, by forming a single integrated picture of the world from a single point of view.”

Portions of insect brains work in a similar way to the midbrain in humans, performing the same sort of modeling of the world, the authors believe.

As for being egocentric, Barron explained that there is now compelling evidence that insects display selective attention to their processing of the world.

“They don’t pay attention to all sensory input equally," Barron explained. "The insect selectively pays attention to what is most relevant to it at the moment, hence (it is) egocentric.”

The term “insect” is a broad one, generally referring to any small animal that has six legs, a body formed of three parts, and may have wings. Since diverse species under this umbrella term have widely varying sensory systems and ways of life, the authors expect that to be reflected in their conscious lives.

Not all living things are thought to have consciousness, though. Plants, for example, do not have the necessary structures for it. Jellyfish and nematodes (certain unsegmented worms, such as roundworms) do not have such hardwiring either.

Barron and Klein believe the origins of consciousness date to the Cambrian or even to the Precambrian Periods (more than 600 years ago).

“When organisms began to move freely in their environment, they faced many new challenges,” Klein explained. “They had to decide where to go next. They had to prioritize their needs. They had to interpret sensory information that changed as a consequence of their motion. That required a new kind of integrated modeling, and that's where we think consciousness arose.

Bruno van Swinderen is an associate professor at the University of Queensland and is a leader in the field of insect neurobiology.

Van Swinderen told Discovery News that one of the most important points of the new paper is the realization that understanding the evolution of consciousness will not come from looking for intelligent behavior in other animals, but rather from understanding the fundamental mechanisms that support subjective awareness and selective attention, which he said “we now know insects have.”

Read more at Discovery News

Love Bug Wears Its Heart on Its Leg

Valentine’s Day is every day for a newly discovered group of beetles whose members sport a prominent “heart” on their legs.

The heart is actually a trochanter, a joint or leg segment that helps connect the upper leg to the abdomen. Humans also have a part called the “greater trochanter,” only not in such a fancy shape.

The beetles, described in a new study in the journal Acta Entomologica, have another connection to Valentine’s Day. They only seem to think about one thing: mating.

“All of the specimens so far have been male. We have yet to see a female,” lead author Max Barclay said in a press release. “Its closest relatives are parasites developing inside other insects. We don’t yet know what its heart-shaped joint is used for, but we do know that the males don’t even have a functional mouth to eat, so their only purpose is to search for mates. They certainly have a one-track mind.”

Barclay is the beetle collections manager at London's National History Museum, which houses specimens representing more than half of the known beetle species on Earth, making it the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind in the world. Barclay is, therefore, arguably the planet’s foremost beetle expert.

While examining a batch of several thousand mixed insects collected during a field trip to Central America, Barclay spotted the unusual beetles. He knew they were extraordinary when he spotted the prominent heart-shaped joints.

More research determined that the beetles represent a new genus, named Ivierhipidius, whose members live in a Belize rainforest.

“There are more than 400,000 known beetle species. They are the largest group of organisms on the planet, playing a critical role in ecosystems,” Barclay said.

“One in five of living creatures is a beetle," Barclay added, "and we are still uncovering new species today, even some with new modifications of body parts that disclose more about their evolution and way of life.”

From Discovery News

Smallest Free-Living Insect Confirmed: Meet the Beetle

It's a small world, after all. A featherwing beetle named Scydosella musawasensis has just been confirmed, with new measurements, as the world-record title holder for the smallest recorded free-living insect.

That's according to Lomonosov Moscow State University scientist Alexey Polilov, who took new measurements of the tiny bug. Polilov writes in the journal Zookeys that S. musawasensis measured just 325 micrometers (0.325 millimeters, 0.0127 inches).

S. musawasensis is yellowish-brown, with a stretched oval body and 10-segmented antennae, and it's been down the measurement road before.

It was first described in 1999, when a specimen measured at 300 micrometers (0.30 millimeters, 0.0118 inches) took the "smallest" crown. But those readings, Polilov writes, were of insects embedded in preparations for microscopy study, making precise measurements difficult.

New measurements, then, were needed to accurately confirm S. musawasensis's state of extreme tininess. Polilov collected 85 new samples of the insect from Colombia and then took new measurements of his own, using a scanning electron microscope and specialized software.

When all of the measurements were in, "the smallest beetle and the smallest known free-living insect has a body length of 325 µm," Polilov wrote.

The "free-living" part of the beetle's title differentiates it from parasitic insects, the smallest of which, the male Dicopomorpha eschmepterigis , is understood to be the smallest parasitoid, at 139 micrometers.

From Discovery News

Class Field Trip Finds New Pillbug Species in L.A.

It’s not every day that a new species is found in a major metropolis — by a class on a field trip.

But that’s what happened on a recent outing of Loyola Marymount University students at the very southernmost tip of the city of Los Angeles — less than a mile from the busiest port in America. The invertebrate zoology lab class was canvassing a rocky beach scanning for critters when they spotted an unusual pillbug clinging to a common sea star.

“As soon as we saw this bumpy little guy, we knew it was something special that the researchers at NHM had to see, but my class and I had no idea we were looking at a new species,” said Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County  Dean Pentcheff in a press release.

The new marine pillbug (known as isopod to biologists) belongs to the family of pillbugs that are commonly found in the dirt in backyards across the country. Despite their name, these creatures aren’t actually insects — but crustaceans adapted for land.

Pentcheff handed off their pillbug to experts at NHM for an identification. That’s when they learned the class had found a new species altogether. It was named Exosphaeroma pentcheffi — after the instructor who, with his class, found the new pillbug.

“It is amazing to think that you can discover a new species in one of the most urban places in the world like the Port of Los Angeles,” said Adam Wall, Assistant Collections Manager for Crustacea at NHM. Wall identified the new pillbug with colleague Regina Wetzer, associate curator and director of the Marine Biodiversity Center at NHM.

“What is even better is that it wasn’t an older guy wearing a white lab coat or a marine biologist in SCUBA gear that discovered it. It was a group of college students and their teacher in a regular college class — true citizen scientists.”

Wall was lead author of the scientific paper describing the new discovery in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Read more at Discovery News

Prehistoric Cockroach is Stuff of Nightmares

This new, prehistoric cockroach from 100 million years ago is the stuff of science-fiction nightmares. You know, if you ask me.

The insect, perfectly preserved in a piece of amber from Myanmar, or Burma, was closely related to praying mantises, according to the study reported in Geologica Carpathica.

The roach wasn’t all that huge for a dino-era bug — not even an inch long — but it was a fearsome nocturnal hunter nonetheless, reported Peter Vršanský from the Geological Institute in Bratislava, Slovakia, and Günter Bechly from the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany.

“The unique adaptations such as strongly elongated extremities and freely movable head on a long neck suggest that these animals were pursuit predators,” they said in their paper.

NatureWorldNews.com reports that the insects lived in the early Cretaceous period, when several predatory cockroach-like lineages came into existence.

All of the roaches in those lineages are now extinct, except for one: the praying mantis, close cousins to cockroaches.

From Discovery News

Putting bedbugs to bed forever

The world owes a debt of gratitude to Simon Fraser University biologist Regine Gries. Her arms have provided a blood meal for more than a thousand bedbugs each week for five years while she and her husband, biology professor Gerhard Gries, searched for a way to conquer the global bedbug epidemic.

Working with SFU chemist Robert Britton and a team of students, they have finally found the solution--a set of chemical attractants, or pheromones, that lure the bedbugs into traps, and keep them there.

This month, after a series of successful trials in bedbug-infested apartments in Metro Vancouver, they have published their research, "Bedbug aggregation pheromone finally identified," in Angewandte Chemie, a general chemistry journal.

They're working with Victoria-based Contech Enterprises Inc. to develop the first effective and affordable bait and trap for detecting and monitoring bedbug infestations. They expect it to be commercially available next year.

"The biggest challenge in dealing with bedbugs is to detect the infestation at an early stage," says Gerhard, who holds an NSERC-Industrial Research Chair in Multimodal Animal Communication Ecology.

"This trap will help landlords, tenants, and pest-control professionals determine whether premises have a bedbug problem, so that they can treat it quickly. It will also be useful for monitoring the treatment's effectiveness."

It's a solution the world has been waiting for.

Over the last two decades the common bedbug (Cimex lectularius), once thought eradicated in industrialized countries, has reappeared as a global scourge. These nasty insects are infesting not just low-income housing but also expensive hotels and apartments, and public venues such as stores, movie theatres, libraries and even public transit.

And while these blood-sucking pests were previously not considered a carrier of disease, scientists have recently discovered they can transmit the pathogen that causes Chagas disease, which is prevalent in Central and South America. Yet until now, tools for detecting and monitoring these pests have been expensive and technically challenging to use.

The research was funded with a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada industry grant in partnership with Contech Enterprises Inc.

Backgrounder: The research story--180,000 bedbug bites later

The Gries' began their research eight years ago when Gerhard, who is internationally renowned for his pioneering work in chemical and bioacoustic communication between insects, began searching for pheromones that could lure and trap bedbugs.

Regine worked with him, running all of the lab and field experiments and, just as importantly, enduring 180,000 bedbug bites in order to feed the large bedbug colony required for their research. She became the unintentional "host" because, unlike Gerhard, she is immune to the bites, suffering only a slight rash instead of the ferocious itching and swelling most people suffer.

The Gries' and their students initially found a pheromone blend that attracted bedbugs in lab experiments, but not in bedbug-infested apartments. "We realized that a highly unusual component must be missing--one that we couldn't find using our regular gas chromatographic and mass spectrometric tools," says Gerhard.

That's when they teamed up with Britton, an expert in isolating and solving the structure of natural products, and then synthesizing them in the lab. He used SFU's state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers to study the infinitesimal amounts of chemicals Regine had isolated from shed bedbug skin, looking for the chemical clues as to why the bedbugs find the presence of skin so appealing in a shelter.

It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

After two years of frustrating false leads, Britton, his students and the Gries duo finally discovered that histamine, a molecule with unusual properties that eluded identification through traditional methods, signals "safe shelter" to bedbugs. Importantly, once in contact with the histamine, the bedbugs stay put whether or not they have recently fed on a human host.

Read more at Science Daily

Speed Limits Could Save Rarest Dragonfly

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Slow down, drivers. You could save America's rarest dragonfly.

The Hine's emerald dragonfly is the only dragonfly on the federal endangered species list. The insect's largest remaining population lives in Door County, Wisconsin, where sandy beaches and cherry and apple orchards draw tourists from Green Bay and beyond.

A 2003 study found these summer drivers kill about 3,300 Hine's emerald dragonflies each year, said Amber Furness, a University of South Dakota graduate student. No one knows exactly how many Hine's emerald dragonflies are left, but there are at least 10,000 in Door County and up to 3,000 in the Chicago region.

Door County has posted two dragonfly warning-signs on roads near critical habitat areas. But can drivers really safely avoid a dragonfly at highway speeds, or even spot one from inside a car?

Searching for a better solution, the South Dakota researchers decided to see if dragonfly death rates were linked with speed.

Furness, a conservation biologist working with USD professor Daniel Soluk, mounted GoPro cameras on a pickup truck and drove the Door County roads in 2012 and 2013, varying her speed from 15 mph (24 km/h) to 55 mph (88 km/h) in increments of 10 mph (16 km/h). The cameras picked up each dragonfly's position before impact. Every time Furness hit a dragonfly, she tried to collect the carcass and verify the kill (a screen kept the insects out of the truck grill.)

At speeds below 35 mph (56 km/h), Hine's emerald dragonflies — and other kinds of dragonflies — survive their tumble over the hood, and fly away to live another day, Furness found. Faster speeds kill, according to Furness' research, presented here Thursday (Aug. 14) at the Ecological Society of America's annual meeting. The dragonflies are either killed on impact or they suffer severe shock and fall to the ground, and are run over by a second vehicle.

Furness plans to publish the results of her research in a scientific journal, so it can serve as a reference for road planners. Her work was partially funded by the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, which has already altered a bridge to protect the Hine's emerald dragonfly, raising a bridge span on Interstate 355 so the dragonflies can avoid collisions with cars.

"Insects are important too, and there are safer speeds that we can drive to try not to deplete their populations," Furness told Live Science.

While there is no speed that will guarantee a kill-free roadway, a 30 mph (48 km/h) limit would mean a much lower probability of deadly collisions, Furness said.

Read more at Discovery News