Insects
Stick Insects Update (1 month)
Follow up to my first post on stick insects. Most of the insects are approximately a month old or so now and have gone through a couple of moults. As can be seen from the photo below they are growing (couldn’t find a 5p coin today, so a 20p was used, diameter 21.4mm) but still a long way to go. Gait patterns still seem to be stuck rigidly to the tripod gait. The jar is now starting to get a bit crowded, and changing the plants has become tricky (they’re fast little buggers when they want to be) so next week I will be upgrading their accommodation next week to one of the excellent BSP Cages from Small Life Supplies, one of which I have been using at home for a while now. This will also give them the necessary room to moult successfully, as well as making it easier to care for them. Photos follow: (more…)
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Stick Insects
We’ve had some stick insects (Carausius morosus) at home for a while, and it’s easy to see why they are the favoured species for laboratory tests on insects (along with the American Cockroach Periplaneta americana) since they are so easy to breed and care for. To plan ahead after eggs at home starting hatching 4-5 months after laying, I brought a jar with 30 or so eggs to my office thinking they would take a similar time, and 1 month later I come into work every day to find another couple of new hatchlings to transfer to the nursery (another jar until they get larger). I guess the conditions are good, and the jars don’t get picked up and shaken by excited children!
This quick post is to start documenting their development, and to comment on observations about their gait patterns as part of my research on insect locomotion. At present the recent hatchlings have only exhibited the classic “tripod gait” (see movie below) where three legs, configured as a tripod, are moved synchronously, followed by the other three half a period later but the adults at home have shown other typical gaits as well as some interesting gaits in an unfortunate 5 legged adult (lost legs can be recovered during moulting at earlier stages of development or “instars”). I guess this is making me an experimental biologist! (more…)
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XBugs
Received one of these as a gift fom a graduating tutee, and thought it was so cool it was worth a blog! These bugs come as a flat disc of aluminium, you twist out the pieces, fold and arrange them and then hold it all in place witha single nut and bolt (allen key provided!). As a bonus it comes with some mini bugs too. It’s a bit fiddly, and a little patience is required (not something I have in abundance) but the final product is pretty neat. You can find them on Amazon, or from the manufacturers website touchofginger.com, although I’ll warn you, they do lots of other cool stuff too (including other bugs) and you’ll spend ages looking through the pages. (more…)
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AntWeb
For someone as obsessed about insects as I seem to be, the AntWeb project (http://www.antweb.org) is a fascinating collection of information and photographs. The idea is to catalogue all 12,000 species of ants around the world, gleaned from museum collections and captured using innovative photography techniques to get the best possible resolutions (the image included here is not the highest resolution). I was first alerted to this site by a piece on it by the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/12880498) which includes a selection of these photographs, but they are so stunning you can’t help but peruse the current collection. The “About” section of the website captures how fascinating these creatures are quite well: (more…)
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