Space travel isn’t exactly known for its culinary pleasures. But astronauts in the future may have a fresh alternative to freeze dried food: A team of Chinese scientists are proposing that silkworms—the mulberry-leaf-munching larvae of silkmoths—can be easily reared on long-term space flights and provide valuable protein (as in, meals) for astronauts.
On missions that may last several years, astronauts will need a sustainable, renewable source of animal protein. Researchers have considered everything from poultry to fish to sea urchin larvae. Chicken, they decided, would require too much room and food, and would generate too much excrement. Fish are too sensitive to water conditions—H20 being of such limited supply in space that astronauts drink recycled urine and sweat.
Silkworms, on the other hand, require minimal space, food, and water, and produce very little excrement. The critters are packed with protein and rich in amino acids (twice the amount in pork and four times the amount in milk and eggs). Even the silk that the pupae use to spin their cocoons can be chemically processed to become edible.
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Good public sanitation is a mark of advanced civilizations. Humans have dealt with the “bathroom problem” mainly by burying, flushing, or otherwise sequestering our waste products in some far off, out-of-sight, out-of-mind location. In this way, we’re similar to mole rats that build specialized “latrine chambers” in their underground habitats. A new paper in Animal Behavior examines alternative ways to handle the sanitation issue, developed by some of the world’s most sophisticated societies: eusocial insects like ants, bees, and wasps. One strategy involves something known as the “blind gut.”
Colonies of eusocial insects can contain millions of individuals. Because dropping feces at will would cause a serious toxic hazard, many species have developed a way of holding it in for a really long time. The youngsters, or larva, of the order hymenoptera, have a “blind gut,” meaning one that does not connect the mouth with the anus. Essentially, this means their waste products are trapped inside their bodies for weeks to months, or the entire duration of the larval stage. Only when they pupate (when the larva changes into the adult form), does their waste get expelled in one big, stinky pellet known as the meconium. In the honeybee, the meconium is expelled during its first flight out of the nest. (Imagine human teenagers holding it all in until right before they leave home for college…) After the meconium is quickly disposed of, the adult insects develop a normal continuous gut.
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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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