Early this morning, before the full heat of the day, I mowed the lawn. Having left it to grow for two weeks, I had to stop more frequently to empty the bag onto our compost heap in the back yard. Like many times before, I noticed that some flying insects were attracted to the new piles of grass clippings. They hovered around like the hymenoptera in a recent post, but on a much smaller scale. So, after finished my duties, I decided to observe for awhile and learn a little bit. Here is what happened…
This is what this swarming looked like…
Then I witnessed this…
In this video you will see a mating pair just above the center of the screen. After moving around a bit you will notice another individual pester the couple. Not long after the couple parts. What I believe to be the male, flies off, while the female can be seen wandering through the grass clippings. In one instance you may be able to make out that her abdomen in curled. I hypothesize that she was laying eggs amongst the grass.
Here is another, longer, mating video. If you watch long enough, after the female is mounted and released a second time, it appears that the male might be guarding her from other males. It makes me want to research an easy method of capturing, marking, and releasing these insects to be more certain about what is going on.
In this final image it appears we may possiblly have a sneaker male. Interestingly enough, this additional male appears to be smaller than the male that is mounted upon the female. Look at the cicrumferance of the eyes (although I know that the perspective is not the same).
There you have it. I imagine that this could be quite an easy observation to reproduce, all you need is a pile of grass clippings, and some of these insects in the vicinity. In fact, students could most likely complete such an observation from home on their own. I did notice that these flies were amongst the grass clippings the whole day and were even there in smaller numbers the following morning as well.
Furthermore, it was quite easy to figure out what insect species these are using Insects in Kansas Field Guide published by the Kansas Department of Agriculture.
So, what is the Order, Family, and species of insect imaged in this post?
Two days ago, while driving my eldest daughter and a friend to morning swim practice, we ran across, but not over, a rather large snapping turtle crossing the road. This happened just east of Mission Road on 71st Street in Shawnee Misson, Kansas (it appears that he may have grown up in Indian Hills County Club). Although the turtle appears to have lived quite a productive live to that moment, we figured that we might increase its life span by moving him somewhere a little bit less populated.
Yesterday, my two younger children and I, released our find in a wetland area adjacent to the Blue River in southern Johnson County. While there, I treated my kids to one of the ponds I frequent with students when I am teaching about amphibians. Here is an interesting observation that we made…
A quick google search this morning suggests that field biologist may not fully understand this behavior, and not for lack of thoughtful consideration and experimentation. I know that school is out and that critical observations and experimentation are dependent on the life cycle of an organism who doesn’t realize that, but I share this observation none-the-less, for its potential…
…and if you want to ID the tadpoles you can do that too…
Where the Mule Deer and the Pronghorn Antelope Play…
Reflections on the KABT Field Trip in Logan County, June 4-6, 2010
I am not sure what KABT’s goal for the field trip were but for me they were two-fold. I wanted to provide an inspirational outdoor experience for four of my senior students, and two of my children, who eagerly participated in the trip, while learning myself about the wonderful short-grass prairie from our very own sage, the Yoda-like natural history master, Stan Roth.
In both regards the trip was a resounding success, even though I failed to continue to follow Noah’s driving lead into better pastures where he was finally able to witness the character of our pursuit, the endangered a recently re-established Black-Footed Ferret (see Noah’s posts).
If you are sad that you missed the trip, continue on since I did my best to record it all for you…
More specifically, follow along to see what I saw, learn what I learned, listen while I contemplate what KABT may have learned, and educate yourself on the prairie dog wars of Logan County, Kansas in hopes of a return trip to this wonderful county…
OK. I have a lot of thoughts that I need to put down about the field trip to Logan Co., KS this last weekend. I will need some time to organize those. But for now, I will post this pic with words describing this amazing experience to soon follow.
In last week’s “Biology Challenge”, I challenged biology teachers to contribute identifications and descriptions of the relationships illustrated in a photo of aphids, ants and milkweeds. Sure enough, within an hour the milkweed was successfully identified as Asclepias syrica and the aphids as Aphis nerii. A number of various Formica species were sent in as tentative identification for the ants in the image. Though, I would not begin to suggest I know much about ants I am pretty sure you’ll find that these ants belong to the genus Crematogaster–the acrobat ants. Mark DuBois produced a Checklist of Kansas Ants in the Kansas School Naturalist that includes possible candidates. There are any number of resources on the web that might lead us to an identification if I collected some of the ants.
But what I really want to get to is the nature of the interactions taking place on the tip of the milkweed leaf. Several people noted that the ants were tending the aphids in a classic ant/aphid mutualistic relationship. There’s several items that complicate this however and I think this image can serve as an open door to an incredible landscape of accessible student study. For starters, while ants do tend aphids on milkweed–the aphids tend to be Aphis asclepias and not A. nerii–that’s what caught my eye. Hmmmm…A. nerii presumably sports the bright yellows and oranges as warning coloration. If ants don’t typically tend A. nerii then perhaps the aphid’s “honeydew” is somehow not as toxic as normal in this instance. Milkweed plants vary in their toxicity–perhaps parts of the individual milkweed vary in toxicity as well.
Check out Herbivory.com, Anurag Agrawal’s web site for a truly in depth introduction to the milkweed ecological community. In particular check out his powerpoints and videos under the Multimedia tab. These will introduce you to the incredible complexity of community level interactions that he and his colleagues are uncovering. Specifically link to his Publications tab–there, you’ll find a very rich resource of pdf’s that will help you to see the milkweed communities in a different light and help you to guide your students inquiry. I have spent hours reading these papers. I think you’ll find that many of them are very accessible. Here’s a Discover blog post that introduces one of the studies: Mooney, K. A. and A. A. Agrawal. Plant genotype shapes ant-aphid interactions: implications for community structure and indirect plant defense. American Naturalist 171: E195–E205. Here’s another relevant paper and a link to it: Smith, R.A., K.A. Mooney and A. A. Agrawal. Coexistence of three specialist aphids on the common milkweed Asclepias syriaca. Ecology 89: 2187–2196.
Once a person starts to focus observations on a relationship like that illustrated in the photo from my original post, then all sorts of questions come to mind. I propose that this is one of our jobs as biology teachers–put students into a situation/an environment that promotes original and accessible student questions. Help them to focus their observations and reconcile them with what they know and don’t know. Questions will follow. What does this take in the classroom? Not much really, start a butterfly garden, participate in the Monarch Watch’s Waystation Program. Participate in Monarch Larval Monitoring project. Here’s a resource on aphid from the MLMP: Monitoring Aphids. Participate in the earthworm project that Eric shared. Participation in projects like these almost invariably leads to students asking all kinds of questions. At first they are very general and non-focused but with only a little help with some guiding questions from their instructor the students natural curiosity can be turned to powerful questions for study.
Years ago, in the process of helping to establish the Monarch Watch with Chip Taylor, I would promote Monarchs in the classroom by reminding folks of Karl Von Frisch’s description of his honeybees:
“The bee’s life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water”.
Really, any natural system is like that once you start to pay attention to detail. Natural systems exude wonder and complexity that begs study. Exploit this with your students—introduce them to doing science by “drawing from the well”….
Looking for a new outdoor ecology investigation to conduct with your students? … something that will require them to get their hands dirty? … and aid in their learning and appreaciation for our native fauna?
Then look no further than the new citizens science project, Earthworms Across Kansas organized by Dr. Bruce Snyder at Kansas State University. As stated on their website and in an introductory letter I recieved a few weeks ago…
Earthworms Across Kansas is a free program that engages middle and high school students throughout the state in answering some basic, yet unanswered questions about Kansas earthworms, such as “Which species are here?” and “What are the ranges of these species?”
The project aims to educate Kansas’ middle and high school students about earthworm biology and invasive species issues by engaging them as citizen scientists. One-third of the approximately 170 species of earthworms known to reside in the United States have arrived here from another continent. We expect that most every earthworm your students collect will be an exotic species.
We are currently recruiting teachers to participate (online registration form), although only until we run out of kits. Once registered, you can prepare for your participation by viewing curricula and lesson plans associated with earthworm biology that will be posted online through May. In July or August your kit will be mailed, and your students can complete their collecting anytime during the 2010-2011 academic year. The data from across the state will be uploaded on their interactive google map, and thus facilitate your students answering the basic questions posed by the project.
If you’d like more information about the program before registering certainly visit their website, and if you have further questions, please email the project at earthworm@k-state.edu.
I haven’t read through the protocols for this project yet but thought you may interested in learning from the active worm collectors and the research associated with their methods. Check out Worm Grunting, Fiddling, and Charming—Humans Unknowingly Mimic a Predator to Harvest Bait published in PLOS. Besides the article there are a number of interesting quicktime video links demonstrating the research.
Here’s a cool but complex ecological interaction directly involving at least three species going on in my backyard. (Olathe, KS)
We’ve had a mostly cool and wet spring to date. The plant involved is about 0.6 m tall at this point and there is a large flower bud within these leaves. For this challenge, let’s start with the names of the species involved (at least to genus) followed by a description of the interactions involved. Turns out there is a great site on the web that has this all documented with photos and scientific papers. Maybe you can find that. Part of the reason I put this challenge here is to hopefully inspire biology teachers into thinking just what they and their students might be able to investigate with just a small butterfly garden. Another image:
btw, I’m putting this challenge up on the NABT BioBlog at the same time—I want to see who figures this out first–the KABTer’s or the NABTer’s……challenge on.
A few months ago, I spent quite a bit of time searching for science related apps that could potentially be useful for my life as a biology teacher. I have downloaded a number and have had the opportunity to discover those that I have found most useful (or potentially useful) in that role.
The main post contains a list of 16 iPhone apps. Each app icon is followed by a brief description and links that may be helpful for you in making a decision on acquiring the app. For those that I have found especially useful, I discuss specific manner(s) it has been used. Furthermore, if you don’t have an iPhone some of the producers of these apps have websites that may be useful as well.
For those unfamiliar with iPhones, these apps must be acquired through the apps store in iTunes so in many cases there are not internet links to pages with further information on these apps. To learn more, download iTunes, and search the app names in the iTunes store, or google search and read what you can find.
You’ll notice that things look a bit different around here. I’ve added a lot of new capabilities to the KABT BioBlog website while keeping all of the previous work. Over the last few months WordPress (the software that runs our blog) has introduced some new social networking tools. With these tools this website/blog can now become somewhat like facebook—a place for people of like mind–a community that can more effectively collaborate and share ideas. The new tool is called Buddypress. You can find out a little here but the best way to find out is to use it.
As it says in the title–this is an experiment. I’ll be tweaking things like appearance and options over the next few weeks. I may add a wiki and other options as well. If folks find that the new capabilities get in the way then we’ll just remove them and put up the old site. Let me know what you think. For now, I’ll leave it up (barring major problems) until the fall KABT meeting to give folks a chance to try it out.
If you’re an educator, looking for a reason to get up to speed on Twitter, take a look at Edchat.  This is a live event that happens each Tuesday at  two times – 12pm EST/ 5pm GMT and 7pm EST/ 12pm GM - on Twitter.  Educators from all over the world chime in with their answers […]
I just found a really sweet web 2.0 application that could be useful in the classroom. Â It’s called Type With Me and it’s basically a real time, live text collaboration tool. Â Very simple and easy to use – no sign-up required and it’s free. Â You just go to the Type with Me web site, start […]
“The Thinker” on the Washington University Campus In the middle of one of the Washington University quads is this wonderfully whimsical re-imagining of August Rodin’sThe Thinker – a lanky looking rabbit, assuming the well-known, contemplative pose. Â I just returned from a quick trip to St. Louis and, while there, the sculpture caught […]
In last week’s “Biology Challenge”, I challenged biology teachers to contribute identifications and descriptions of the relationships illustrated in a photo of aphids, ants and milkweeds. Sure enough, within an hour the milkweed was successfully identified as Asclepias syrica and the aphids as Aphis nerii. A number of various Formica […]
Here’s a cool but complex ecological interaction directly involving at least three species going on in my backyard. (Olathe, KS) We’ve had a mostly cool and wet spring to date. The plant involved is about 0.6 m tall at this point and there is a large flower bud within these leaves. For this challenge, let’s […]
