Bugs and their bites

I cleaned out lots of weeds growing in a corner of the yard five days ago, but now I'm paying the price. I've got lots of chigger bites on one of my arms, and do the EVER itch! While looking up recommended treatments--there's not much you can do other than wait and use hydrocortisone cream--I decided to find a photo of a chigger. I found a terrific photo, and much more. If you want to see some excellent photos showing what the most common and most dangerous bugs look like, along with photos of what their bites look like, visit this slideshow by WebMD. You'll see chiggers, mosquitos, brown recluse spiders, black widows, scabies, red ants and much more. It's called the "Bad Bugs Slideshow," which stirs in an unnecessary moral dimension to the topic! But, again, the photos are really well done. You might be interested even if you aren't currently covered with bug bites.

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Orange Fish at Shedd

My daughters and I just returned from a long weekend in Chicago, where we visited the Shedd Aquarium. Flash photography is not allowed, so it's always a challenge to get good existing light photos. For this photo, I couldn't get a sharp image of the moving fish, even with a high ISO setting. Therefore, I tried to pan the camera slowly with the moving fish, guaranteeing a blurred background.The fish is not in perfect focus but the image intrigues me; it's almost like the fish is floating in air. I call this image "floating orange fish" because I forgot to read the sign to actually know what this species is. Click for larger version. Image by Erich Vieth Here's another shot from the Shedd, from a delightful display of jelly fish, and below that a variety of other stunning images from Shedd: Image by Erich Vieth For a gallery of a dozen more photos, click on the title to this post.

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Fly

This is another in the series of "backyard bug" photographs several of us are publishing from time to time at DI. I use a consumer grade cameras (Canon's SD1100SI), and I simply try to have fun finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. This fly photo turned out especially nicely (I think it enjoyed the attention), thanks to a perfectly diffuse batch of sun pouring through a modest layer of clouds outdoors. For this shot, the lens was about 1 inch from the fly. Here's two more thoughts. This little animal is on the same phylogenetic tree as human animals. This fly is my cousin. Hello, cousin! It puts this fly in such a different light to remember that. Second, how in the hell can a fly fly? I'm reminded of the conclusion reached in 1934 by French entomologist August Magnan, who calculated [albeit thinking of bees] that their flight was aerodynamically impossible. But they somehow can fly (and eat, poop, compete for mates and--oh my--mate). Utterly fantastic. OK, this is an aside: scientists have found that fruit flies compete by "displacement and incapacitation of a previous male’s sperm." Highly sophisticated stuff. Image by Erich Vieth

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How to build a raft and save the Queen when you have a tiny brain

What if the waters are rising and you've got to save the Queen, but you and your buddies have no cell phones, you don't have anything resembling human spoken language, and your brain is really tiny? How tiny? Less than 300,000 neurons (for comparison, a mouse's brain is 50 times bigger--it has 16 million neurons). So how do you save the Queen with your incredibly tiny brain? You work elegantly as a collective, like the ants you are. Check out this incredible footage. I felt chills when I saw the workers helping their Amazonian Queen off the raft near the end. Un-be-liev-able, except you can see it with your own eyes.

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What’s in a Type?

One of my peeves against anti-evolutionists is those moderates who fully accept gene drift and mutations for short term changes (breeds, "micro-evolution") but not longer term changes (species, types, "macro-evolution"). Try to pin one of those people down on a definition of species and type, and one can always show them an observed example of something that crossed the line, or else multiple species that are obviously different but on the same side of their line. But this post is broader than that. For example, Pluto was a planet. Everyone knew that. Recently it was demoted to dwarf-planet. There are groups still dedicated to its reinstatement as a planet, like the Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet. My presumption is, because that's what they were taught in their youth, therefore it's "As God Intended". Nothing changed in the sky, nor in our understanding of how things work. But a category changed and our world shook. Well, at least the world of those of us who noticed. What of moons? An excellent article is here: Meet our Second Moon! We now have two moons? And in my lifetime, the origin of our main moon changed from an unlikely captured or even less likely co-congealed object to a reasonable and most probably ejected one. I remember being disturbed when the moon count around Jupiter went from 12 (the 19th century standard) to 63 (care of Voyager etc). The count varies depending on how you define "moon". One has to be broadly accepting of both size and ballistic classification to accept 3753 Cruithne as a moon of the Earth, but it is there. Speaking of the moon, here is an incredible new way to see our moon up close (with pan and zoom) taken from ground based cameras. Things change. As I have mentioned many times on this blog, most people are hung up on the misconception that words accurately define things. The thinking that, if you have a name for it, then you understand the thing. You get the collector's fallacy: The confusion of the joy of matching names to things with the understanding of the things themselves. Knowing the names of thousands of birds (or bugs or species or stamps or diseases) and accurately matching them to the subjects is useful. But it is not complete in terms of understanding the similarities and differences. That is what is meant by the quote "Biology without evolution is but stamp collecting". One cannot understand things without also understanding the relationship between things (species, astronomical objects, populations, etc) and knowing the latest (most complete, so far) underlying set of theories (scientific definition, not vernacular). Humans are better than most other creatures at recognizing patterns. We regularly see patterns in random observations: Pareidolia. Any set of words will be an incomplete definition of any object. Defining a class of things is even more nebulous. Do species change over time? Certainly, given either enough time or a precise enough definition. How many moons are in the solar system? Good question. Define "moon", and show me the latest ballistic data on the 100,000 largest object so far discovered inside of the Oort Cloud. By the time I have an answer, something will have changed.

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