Blogs / Discoblog

Spacesuits are designed to protect astronauts from the cold, oxygen-less, radiation-filled vacuum of outer space. So what happens when you don’t have a space suit? Naked, dried-up bugs were put to the test last September. Scientists in Sweden sent 3,000 tiny bugs, known as tardigrades, on a spaceship to see if they’d survive.

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The news this week is all about financial trouble, and even science can’t escape.

Often when a species is in trouble, their plight tugs only at the heartstrings of people who want to save them; polar bears are of little practical use to us. But colony collapse disorder, which has been wrecking bee populations around the world, goes right to our wallets. In a new study, French and German scientists calculated that pollinators are worth about $217 billion to the world economy, which would be lost if bees and other pollinators keep disappearing.

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It’s a hard choice, deciding whether ants or bees are Discoblog’s favorite kind of wickedly intelligent insect. But if anything could sway the proceedings one way or the other, it’s this: Bees know how to do the wave.

A study published today in PLoS One suggests that giant honeybees have a kind of collective intelligence that allows them to fend off attacking hornets—a valuable skill, because the bees live in open nests. A team led by Gerald Kastberger of the University of Graz in Austria watched video of 450 examples of “shimmering”—a group of bees flipping their abdomens up and down to create a dazzling visual effect, something like fans doing the wave at a stadium. The bees use this technique at other times, like when one is leaving the nest, but the researchers say they mobilize shimmering en masse when they see a hornet.

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We knew parasitic wasps were menacing; DISCOVER covered some of them in our gallery of zombie animals controlled by parasites, including a caterpillar that becomes the bodyguard of wasp larvae after they take over its mind. But we didn’t know just how many kinds of these treacherous insects exist.

Now, after completing a decades-long study with other researchers, James Whitfield of the University of Illinois says that there are almost twice as many species of these wasps as researchers had previously believed.

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It’s not the first time someone has discovered a new species on eBay, but this is the first time a scientist has found a new insect species on the Internet.

In this case, a man in Lithuania recently sold his 40- to 50-million-year-old fossil of an insect on eBay for $37 to a scientist. The buyer let his curiosity get the best of him, so he sent the insect to an expert in Denmark who confirmed that it was indeed a completely new species. The expert then named the insect Mindarus harringtoni, after the scientist, Richard Harrington.

“It’s rather nice to have something named after you, even if it is an old fossil,” says Harrington, an entomologist at Rothamstead Research Centre. He donated the insect to the Natural History Museum.

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Many ants are known to be slave masters—their raiding parties steal the young from colonies of rival ants and raise the foreigners as workers in their own nest. However, Susanne Foitzik of Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich may be the first researcher to study an ant slave rebellion.

The rebels are Temnothorax, tiny ants only about the size of the comma in this sentence. Their captors are called Protomognathus americanus, and despite being only a little larger, these bullies enslave the smaller insects. Inside the larger ants’ nest, which is built inside an acorn, the smaller ants are put to work caring for their masters’ young. But sometimes, Temnothorax slaves revolt against their servile existence and slaughter the Protomognathus larvae they’re supposed to be babysitting, as well as some of the enemy workers.

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Hoping to fight off “colony collapse disorder,” the mysterious affliction that has devastated honeybee colonies, some British scientists want to get bees to start washing their feet—but with the intention of getting them dirty, not clean.

A team of University of Warwick researchers led by Dave Chandler believes that parasitic Varroa mites might be behind the honeybee’s decline; the mites can feed on young or old bees, and their presence usually spells doom for the entire colony. Varroas develop resistance to chemical pesticides, too, so the scientists turned to a more natural threat—fungi.

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Earlier this month we wrote about a study of adaptable ants that changed their leaf-gathering strategies to bypass a roadblock thrown in their way. These clever insects solve traffic jams much more easily than big-brained humans do, and now scientists want to borrow their secrets to ease our highway woes.

Ants leave a trail of pheromones to show others the best way back to the nest; when others follow, they leave their own pheromones and the trail is reinforced. They all work together through what biologists call “distributed intelligence.” You can see this skill demonstrated in a Slate video here.

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Scientists have been rushing to find new ways to kill mosquitoes, hoping to stem the tide of infectious diseases that the pesky insects carry. But Yoshiro Nagao of Japan’s Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine thinks having fewer mosquitoes around might cause an unexpected kind of harm.

Southeast Asia is riddled with dengue fever and its deadlier relative, called DHF. While studying towns in Thailand, Nagao found that in neighborhoods where fewer houses showed traces of Aedes mosquitoes, the incidence of DHF actually went up.

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California residents need no longer worry that anti-moth pesticides will rain down from the sky onto their houses. But they should still be on the lookout for thousands and thousands more moths.

The light brown apple moth, native to Australia, invaded northern California in March 2007 and state agricultural officials say it is a major threat to many different crops proceeded to chow down on crops. Initially, the state planned to spray moth-infested areas, including residential ones, with a chemical that acts as a phony pheromone, mimicking the female scent and throwing the males off course so they don’t mate. According to The New York Times, there were “numerous complaints” of respiratory problems after the chemical was sprayed last November. And after an outcry from Northern Californians who didn’t want it in their town, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger relented and changed course.

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