Class on Monday January 13, 2014

Today we covered many important and intersting topics ranging from chapters 4-9 in the book, "Life on a Little Known Planet"by Evans. Some of the things I learned are stated and explained below.

A myth that Dr. Van Zandt was told as a child was that dragonflies can sew your mouth shut. We, as a class, agreed that this was pretty terrifying and we were all very glad it was only a myth. We also concluded that dragonflies have eyes characteristics like that of predators and prey. We thought about some common predators like, owls and tigers and how they have eyes looking straight on. On the other hand, prey like, rabbits and mice have eyes on the side of their head. Dragonflies have eyes that are big and round and can see in all directions. There was a interesting experiment that we talked about in some detail involving the color of dragonflies. It was tested and shown that dragonflies which were painted black could not flash the natural white abdomen, which signals strength and confidence, and are more often killed and attacked by dragonflies that do have white on their abdomen to flash to a competitor. Another popular topic, was the act of propelling through water as a result of water leaving the anus in a jet like motion. The fact I found most terrifying was the dragonflies that once roamed the earth in the dinosaur age had a three footlong wingspan and the larvae was a a foot long. A link of a cool video of a dragonfly larvae eating a mosquito larvae is shown below. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MyL0a1JpvQ

The most interesting fact to me about crickets was the fact that species are temperature sensitive. At different temperatures, different spcies sing their mating song. Another topic of the class, was the fact that some female crickets chew on the front wings of males while mating, which disables the effectiveness of the male's chirp.  My favorite part of the class was when Bethany reminded me about the scene in Mulan with the cricket. The whole time I was reading the chapter I had the image of a cricket in a small cage and I couldn't remember where I had pulled that memory from. This is the link to the scene. I really want to watch this movie now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjvHcXjAPxI

The fireflies chapter was a favorite of mine and after class I looked up some more information. Sadly, I couldn't find any pictures showing the light tour in New Zealand but I did find some information on the fireflies on Smoky Mountain. "Synchronous fireflies (Photinus carolinus) are one of at least 19 species of fireflies that live in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They are the only species in America whose individuals can synchronize their flashing light patterns." http://www.nps.gov/grsm/naturescience/fireflies.htm
Here is a video of what it may look like, except everyone says it is better in person.
The last fact we learned was fireflies are not flies they are beetles.

The only thing I found interesting in the butterfly chapter was the mimicry and I already knew about this.

I did my "interesting insect blog post" on bedbugs so that only leaves flies to talk about. The fastest insects are flies. Flies unlike bedbugs can carry diseases. An interesting fact Dr. Van Zandt told us about mosquitos is they can tell how old their partner is by observing their wing sound. Dr. Van Zandt also kindly (not) introduced us to Botflies. They are many nasty pictures of these, but the way they are placed into human is interesting. These flies catch mosquitos in mid air and lay they eggs on them. The mosquitos then bite the human and these eggs are transferred into the humans skin. If one takes a shower soon after the bite, usually the human gets off with no harm. However, if not the end result is not pretty.