Category: Natural World

A Wasp and its Prey

A mason wasp (Monobia quadridens) catches a caterpillar.

Maggie E. has a wonderful eye for spotting small fauna. She found this mason wasp (Monobia quadridens) while we were weeding the Heifer Ranch’s herb garden. It had caught this caterpillar and was trying to take off with it. It was a difficult job – the caterpillar probably weighed as much as the wasp – but it finally managed to take it away.

The wasp found the caterpillar difficult to move.

According to the Atlas of Vespidae, these wasps prey on small moth caterpillars. Which is probably why they are usually found in open habitats with flowers; hence the herb garden.

They also use caterpillars to feed their larvae (Wikipedia, 2011). They’ll lay an egg in a cell of their nest and stick a paralyzed beetle larvae, spider or caterpillar in with the egg to feed the wasp larvae when it hatches.

References

The wasp finally managed to drag the caterpillar to the edge of the wooden bench before it could take off.

Identifying these wasps was not too hard. The first image in the google search for “wasp caterpillar” looked just like the bug we found, carrying almost the same type of caterpillar.

The image was from the wonderful “What is that bug?” where you can send in bug pictures and the author (Daniel Marlos) will try to identify them.

What’s That Bug referenced the BugGuide which gives the full taxonomic classification and a lot of information about habitat, food and life cycle that’s in an easily readable form.

The BugGuide, in turn, cites some of the more serious resources – books and such. But it turns out that an excellent reference for the wasps (Vespidae) of northern and eastern North America is available online. It’s the Identification Atlas of the Vespidae (Hymenoptera, Aculeata) of the northeastern Nearctic region (Buck et al., 2008).

The Atlas is hosted on another excellent resource, the Canadian Journal of Arthropod Identification, which is a web-based journal dedicated to documenting Canadian arthropods.

In flight. If you squint properly you can see a black blur, which is the wasp, carrying a yellowish blur, which is the caterpillar.

Crystals, Non-Crystals and Quasicrystals

Quasicrystalline ordering of a aluminum-palladium-manganese alloy. Image by J.W.Evans via Wikipedia.
Regular ordering of a halite crystal. The atoms that make up salt crystals are arranged in a cubic shape. The smaller grey atoms are sodium (Na), and the larger green ones are chlorine (Cl).

Daniel Shechtman was just awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2011). He discovered that matter can exist not only as crystals, which have a regular geometric arrangement of atoms, and amorphous non-crystals that do not, but also as quasicrystals which have a different type of atomic ordering.

The Guardian has an interesting article on Schechtman, whose discovery was roundly disbelieved by other scientists and he was ridiculed for years.

In an interview this year with the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, Shechtman said: “People just laughed at me.” He recalled how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and a double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening “crusade” against him. After telling Shechtman to go back and read a crystallography textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for “bringing disgrace” on the team. “I felt rejected,” Shachtman said.

— Sample (2011): Nobel Prize in Chemistry for dogged work on ‘impossible’ quasicrystals in The Guardian

Hat tip to M. Eisenberg for this link.

Butterflies in the Herb Garden

A spicebush swallowtail butterfly (Papilio troilus) in the herb garden.

At the Heifer International ranch. Time spent weeding the herb garden. Not much weeding done (by me at least), but much photography. Pretty. A word designed for butterflies.

A variegated fritillary butterfly (Euptoieta claudia) in the herb garden.
An eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus; officially documented by Linnaeus in 1758).
A skipper (family Hesperiidae) extracts nectar from a flower in the herb garden.

Butterflies are classified as:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Lepidoptera

References

Maggie Eisenberger, personal communication.

Opler, Paul A., Kelly Lotts, and Thomas Naberhaus, coordinators. 2011. Butterflies and Moths of North America. Bozeman, MT: Big Sky Institute. http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/ (Version 10/08/2011).

Flynn, J., 2007. Georgia Butterflies, Bibb Co. GA. http://www.shrike.net/butterflies/0-regions/bibb.htm (Accessed 10/08/2011).

Faster than Light

Physicists at CERN believe they’ve measured neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. Since most of modern physics is based on the speed of light being the upper speed limit for practically everything, (remember, in E=mc2, c is the speed of light) this is somewhat of a big deal. NPR has an article:

Notes

1. Neutrinos themselves are quite fascinating and elusive particles. Sciencemadefun has a nice video explaining what is a neutrino.

2. Victor Stenger provides an interesting perspective on these results. He points out that the theoretical particles, tachyons, move faster than light, but they can’t move slower than light, so, seen from the point of view of a tachyon, time would move backward. Only photons move at the speed of light.

Superfund Sites in Your Area – And Other Environmental Cleanups in Your Community

EPA's Cleanups in My Community map for St. Louis and its western suburbs.

Want to find your nearest superfund site? The EPA has an interactive page called, Clean Up My Community, that maps brownfields, hazardous waste, and superfund sites anywhere in the U.S.

Note:

  • Brownfields are places, usually in cities, that can’t be easily re-developed because there’s some existing pollution on the site.
  • Superfund sites are places where there is hazardous pollution that the government is cleaning up because the companies that caused the pollution have gone out of business, or because the government caused the pollution in the first place. The military is probably the biggest source of government pollution, particularly from fuel leaks and radioactive waste.

3d Molecule of the Month

Cyclohexane, from the interactive model on 3Dchem.com.

Molecular models tend to fascinate. As a introduction to the chemistry of elements, students seem to like putting them together, and they tend to enjoy finding out what their molecules are called.

You can’t beat fitting together molecules by hand as a learning experience, but 3Dchem has a nice collection of interactive, three-dimensional molecules, including molecules of the month.

Periodic spiral of the elements (from 3Dchem.com).

They also have three-dimensional periodic tables showing the sizes of the atoms in the traditional tabular form as well as a spiral.

Periodic Table showing the elements by size.