“Go bats in Tucson, AZ. Join us Sat. 9/12/09″

September 11, 2009 at 1:33 am (ancient animals, mammals, working together)
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Tucson’s Annual Bat Night Saturday night September 12, 2009 **

Come see thousands of Mexican Free Tail bats

Fly out from under Campbell Ave Bridge

You and your family can go batty (pun intended) with us. See the largest migratory flying collection of Mexican Free Tail bats in Tucson

Time: 5: 30 PM

Bats Best insect eaters in the southwest

Bats Best insect eaters in the southwest

Location: Campbell avenue bridge in the riverbed near River Road/Campbell.

Park : south of Campbell Avenue and River Road Park on the north side of the river. or in St Philip’s Plaza or at the Trader Joe’s parking lot just south of the bridge.
Please use the ramp located on the southeast side of the bridge for access
So many things to do as part of the festival of the bats

The Batty Fiesta will include presentations by

*The Rillito River Project will fuse art and science for a presentation on the water table that is both informative and entertaining.

*Bat expert, Yar Petryszyn will discuss one of the largest urban bat populations in the Southwest.

Bring a flashlight, drinking water, and a blanket to sit on.

** If it rains Sunday 13, 2009 at 5:30 will be Bat NIght.

Some batty facts

Flying bats

Flying bats

The Mexican Free-tailed Bat (Tadarida brasiliensis) is a medium sized bat. Their bodies are about 9 cm in length, and they weigh about 12.30g with ears that are wide and set apart to help them find prey with echolocation.
The dark brown to gray Mexican Free-tailed Bat is considered a Species of Special Concern due to declining populations and limited distribution in Utah and the southwest.

Mexican Free-tailed Bats live in caves in the western and southern United States, Mexico, Central America, the West Indies, central Chile and Argentina. Their colonies are the largest congregations of mammals in the world except for the world’s largest urban areas. When the baby bats are born, their mothers leave them behind in the cave while they go out to hunt insects. She remembers where she left her “pup” by recognizing its unique “cry” and smell.

The species is very important for the control of pest-insect populations.

Grossly exaggerated media stories about rabies have led to the intentional destruction of large colonies to be destroyed needlessly. bats eat tons of insect pests, which in turn saves farmers billions of dollars annually on pesticide and crop protection costs. Some small insect-eating bats can consume up to 2,000 mosquito-sized insects in one night. They also disperse seeds and pollinate many plants. The Sonoran Desert ecosystem relies on nectar-feeding bats as the main means of pollinating saguaro cacti, biologists have found. In addition, bat waste or guano is a rich fertilizer that can be mined from caves.

Its populations are in an alarming decline because of the pesticide poisoning and the destruction of their roosting caves. The Carlsbad Caverns population, estimated to contain 8.7 million in 1936, had fallen as low as 218,000 by 1973. In addition, the bats lose roosting habitat as old buildings are destroyed. Human disturbance and vandalism of key roosting sites in caves are likely the single most serious causes of decline.

Resources
Excerpts courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Free-tailed_Bat
Excerpts courtesy of http://UANews.org

Excerpts courtesy of http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/bat-rap/Content?oid=1083735

Excerpts courtesy of http://www.rillitoriverproject.org

Tucson bat video courtesy of
http://brookebessesen.com/blog/2009/08/28/ASummerSensationMexicanFreeTailBatVideo.aspx

Images courtesy of http://www.nps.gov/bibe/naturescience/images/MexicanFree-tailedBat.jpg

Images courtesy of http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/states/texas/images/mexican_free_tailed_bats.jpg

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“Star-Nosed Mole Smells its food through bubbles blown in the watery mud”

July 21, 2009 at 7:27 pm (animals, mammals, working together)
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The Star-Nosed mole may not look pretty if you held it in your hand, but under water it is a critter iof beauty and skill.

It blows bubbles then quickly inhales them to detect the odors around him. This helps him detect good food. We sniff and whiff wafting odors to get our taste budding moving and digestion underway.

The star shaped sensory organ on this mole has more than 25000 minute sensory receptors. It can detect and eat its prey faster than any other predator on earth.

dn10834-1_500star-nose

If the twenty two fleshy pink tentacles that form the “star” on the nose of this mole, and it remains an odd-looking creature, its tail swells three to four times its normal size in the winter to help it survive the cold winters in the colder areas of North America and Canada.

The mole is covered in dense, blackish brown, water-repellent fur (ideal for its life in moist, mucky soil), has broad, scaly feet with large claws for fast digging, a stout cylindrical body.

Resources

Excerpts courtesy of pbs.org/wnet/nature/animal-guides/animal-guide-star-nosed-mole/466

Image NaturesCrusaders.com

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Using the bee visual recognition system as model artificial intelligence

January 27, 2009 at 10:57 pm (animals, bees/insects, good news, working together)
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So who is smarter than a fifth grader? Maybe a bee.

Using the Pavolvian behavioral rewards system, researchers  trained different groups of free flying bees to choose the “right” answer by rewarding them with sugar water. If they made an incorrect choice, the bees were punished with a bitter tasting solution. Faces were presented on a vertical screen and bees slowly learned to fly to the correct target faces. Over the course of a day a bee brain learned a complex task, and then when tested in non-rewarded tests (to totally excluded cues like olfaction) only bees that had experience multiple views (e.g. faces at both 0° and 60°) were able to solve a novel rotational angle of 30°.

Dr Dyer said the discovery helps to answer a fundamental question about how brains solve complex image rotational problems by either image averaging or mentally rotating previously learnt views.

“Bee brains clearly use image interpolation to solve the problem. In other words, bees that had learnt what a particular face looked like from two different viewpoints could then recognise a novel view of this target face. However, bees that had only learnt a single view could not recognise novel views,” Dr Dyer said.

The study, performed over two years in Australia and Germany by Dr Dyer with the support of the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), and Dr Quoc Vuong from Newcastle University UK, was published in the science journal PLoS ONE.

“The relationships between different components of the object often dramatically change when viewed from different angles but it is amazing to find the bees’ brains have evolved clever mechanisms for problem solving which may help develop improved models for AI face recognition systems,” Dr Dyer said. This research from Monash University bee researcher Adrian Dyer could lead to improved artificial intelligence systems and computer programs for facial recognition.

Save the bees take care of the environment.


Resources

Excerpts courtesy of  ScienceDaily

New Insight Into How Bees See Could Improve Artificial Intelligence Systems

ScienceDaily January 26, 2009. http://www.sciencedaily.com

Image courtesy of Dr. Adrian Dyer

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From Sci-Fi to mosquito research a repellant odor to make humans disappear to mosquitoes

January 22, 2009 at 5:38 pm (animals/medicine, bees/insects, working together)
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The  female Anopheles gambiae mosquito pictured at the right, shows her weapons researchers are trying to combat in this ancient war of man against mosquito. It is only the female mosquito that bites and can spread disease using these parts of olfactory (smelling) appendages (antennae, maxillary palps and proboscis) as so graphically seen in this electron micrograph image.

Dr. Leslie Vosshall and two colleagues at Rockefeller University published a series of experiments that seemed to settle the 50-year-old question of how the insect repellent DEET kept mosquitoes at bay (Science, 319:1838-42, 2008).

Vosshal explained their findings “It doesn’t smell bad to insects. It masks or inhibits their ability to smell you.”
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded the research to understand how and why DEET works. This is critical to creating the next generation of chemicals, which may head off insect-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.
Related Articles
Laurence Zwiebel of Vanderbilt University (also a Gates’ grantee) and  Ulrich Bernier of the US Department of Agriculture are not sure the findings just didn’t make sense, given everything they knew about this system

In Vosshall experiment,  the response of the mosquito’s olfactory neurons to two separate, attractive odors in human breath. Then, she combined each odorant with DEET in a single odor cartridge and noticed a smaller neural response. Vosshall believes DEET was blocking the mosquito’s olfactory co-receptor.
Another teams experiment another interpretation

Using gas chromatography, Leal confirmed his suspicions this year. When he repeated Vosshall’s experiment using separate odor cartridges that blended DEET and each attractive odor only at their tips, the mosquito’s neural response was no longer diminished. Then, Leal identified a 19-1DEET-sensitive odor receptor neuron and showed that mosquitoes avoid passing through a “curtain” of DEET vapors.
Leal’s paper surprised Vosshall, but is unconvinced by Leal’s results, and has been trying to reproduce the effect in her own lab. “Competition in science is good,” she says, “It can be difficult when it’s a small field, and this is a very small field.”

Genomic studies in 2005 have since shown that this co-receptor is found in insects ranging from mosquitoes to moths,  making humans invisible to insects. Using tissue cultures, she uses targeted drug discovery to screen 91,520 compounds from a chemical library, short-listing about 150 that she believes have the potential to be insect “confusants.”

Even Vosshall’s skeptics admit the confusant strategy is fundamentally sound. Zwiebel says his unpublished molecular work confirms the existence of confusants, but when it comes to DEET, he and Vosshall aren’t willing to budge. “We have agreed to disagree on the DEET story,” he says.

Resources

Smells funny? – Brendan Borrell  The Scientist.com Volume 23 | Issue 1 | Page 19.

http://www.the-scientist.com/2009/01/1/19/1/

Mosquitoes smell and avoid the insect repellent DEET – Leal and Zainulabeuddin Syed,  PNAS 105:13598-603, 2008 September 2008.


Image courtesy of LJ Zwiebel, colorization by Dominic Doyle / Vanderbilt University

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Pine Beetle uses infrared to find next meal

November 23, 2008 at 8:25 pm (bees/insects, working together)
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Scientists discovered that the White pine cone beetle dines on pine cone seeds,  It uses a special ability to find its next meal. It senses the pine cones temperature. As part of being alive, all living things give off heat and infrared light energy. While this wave length of light cannot be seen by humans, scientists have found that the white pine cone seed-eating beetle is able to detect infrared energy.

Image one (at the right) shows two pine cones, the large one is healthy and normal size, but look at the smaller one. That one has become dinner for this beetle.cone-beetle-damage

Scientists decided to find out how they found the cone amongst the needles and why the beetle chose one cone over the other to eat.

They observed the beetles in the wild on the trees and in the lab and measured the heat given off by the needles and the cones to see if there were any differences in temperature. The researchers decided to use a special camera that can make infrared light visible. On the camera screen, heat given off by living things showed up in shades of yellow and orange. It can make infrared light, this heat  visible.

When the scientists looked at the western white pine tree with this thermographic camera, the beetles’ food, the pine cones lit up like holiday lights. The trees looked as if they were covered in candles. The camera’s lens showed that the pine cones actually are hotter than the needles. The cones run 15 degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding needles all year around.  So was this insect prefering a hot meal?

How did the beetles sense this heat difference from the needles to cones?

Back in the lab the scientists wanted to find out how these beetles sense heat. The scientists tested this theory by painting over the external body sensors with silica paint. This kind of paint blocked the pine beetles’ sensors from detecting the heat. The painted beetles no longer could find the heated cones. On the beetle’s’ body, researchers found sensors that seemed to be used to find the warm cones.a1790_22061

Inside the insects’ nervous system, which responds to input from the senses. The researchers found a clear pathway from the sensors to the brain. This connection might be used to tell the beetle’s brain that hot food is directly ahead or, maybe, a little to the right.

Why do scientists care how this beetle finds its food?display_hotcomesahotcommodityforseedbugs

This beetle is eating young pine cone seed so they cannot become trees. Inside the pine seed when the beetle finishes eating it looks like wet sawdust. It is quite troublesome. The Western White Pine (Pinus monticola) on which the beetles dine is endangered. It occurs almost exclusively in the Northern Rockies Eco-region. Until about 50 years ago, it was the most abundant forest type in that region. 
Replacement fires occurred at a given location every 150 to 250 years on the average. Mixed severity fires that killed only part of the stand occurred at about 60 to 85 year intervals.

Today, the number of western white pine is 93 percent less than 40 years ago.

Scientists are trying to find out how to protect these trees from a combination of blister rust, mountain pine beetle and harvesting has nearly eliminated mature western white pine stands.  The trees are dehydrated from warming temperatures and this lowers the plant’s resistance to pests and diseases,

Excerpts from    Hungry bug seeks hot meal Science News November 19, 2008

http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20081119/Note3.asp

Image (1)  http://www.forestryimages.org/browse/detail.cfm?imgnum=1241703

Image (2) The cones heat.Photograph Hannah Bottomley; Thermography: Stephen Takács

NFRARED TREE Seed-eating bugs armed with infrared detectors zero in on the glow of cones. Photography Lisak Andreller; Thermography: Stephen Takács

Heat detecting camera using Thermography show the cones’ heat. Photography: Hannah Bottomley; Thermography: Stephen Takács

image (3)  http://www.the-peak.ca/article/5798

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