An absolute 1961 classic from director Ishirô Honda, with jets on strings, toy tanks, and your required mayhem in Tokyo, the original Mothra also features a marvelously goofy performance by Frankie Sakai, a beloved Japanese comic actor. And the monster herself is an iconic character right up there with nemesis Gojira.
Hatching from what appears to be a giant chicken egg, the caterpillar swims through the ocean—taking out a ship in a storm, of course. Mothra invades Tokyo to rescue the diminutive fairy twins kidnapped from their island. Don’t miss the bump-and-grind invocation dance of the native islanders. On reaching the Tokyo radio tower, she spins a cocoon (Technically, I should tag this post under the category “Invasive Species,” shouldn’t I?). The nuclear heat rays only hasten the metamorphosis, and Mothra emerges, flying sedately for a moth, sending model cars and tanks tumbling down the city streets. Size matters.
Spoiler alert. The bad guy gets gunned down by the police, the foot-high girls are rescued from the telepathy-proof box, and the good guys put out an island rune in an airstrip that Mothra recognizes. The twins are saved and all say sayanara to Mothra, who flies peaceably home.
Mothra (モスラ Mosura) stars in up to 17 films, usually with Godzilla. The extensive Wikipedia entry rightly notes she best resembles an Inachis io, or a European Peacock Butterfly.
I my estimation, Mothra is among the most famous insects ever. And certainly the largest.
Probably ten times the size of your dog’s fleas, flea-like animals have been identified by well-preserved fossils that reach back to the Jurassic.
Flea-like insect. (Credit: Image courtesy of Oregon State University)
These bugs were adapted to plague dinosaurs. Chinese scientists report the discovery in the journal Current Biology. Found in Inner Mongolia, Pseudopulex jurassicus and Pseudopulex magnus had bodies that were more flat, like a bedbug or tick, and long claws that could reach over scales on the skin of dinosaurs so they could hold onto them tightly while sucking blood.
“These were insects much larger than modern fleas and from the size of their proboscis we can tell they would have been mean,” said George Poinar, Jr., a professor emeritus of zoology at Oregon State University, according to Science Daily. “We can be thankful our modern fleas are not nearly this big.”
I’ll say. Six-legged hypodermic needles. What do you want to bet they were vectors for dinosaur-decimating bacterial diseases, too?
But how cool, to uncover such well-preserved fossils. These are the oldest flea-like creatures ever discovered.
Being enthused about both insects and rare books sends me down interesting roads. Besides Mr. Darwin, the name that comes up most often when commingling antiquarian books and entomology is Jean-Henri Fabre, the so-called Insect Poet. His ten-volume Souvenirs Entomologiques must really be something to see. Fabre was nominated for the 1911 Nobel Prize – for literature. There is much to be learned about Fabre and his time (he died in 1915 at age ninety-two); his writing—and apparently the mystique around his solitary research pursuit— were wildly popular.
I bring it up now because I found a 1935 copy of Fabre’s Book of Insects, in English with color plates, on the open stacks at my public library. It is handsomely yellowed and beat up, but right there for anyone to check out. It is a work “retold from Alexander Teixeira de Mattos’ translation of Fabre’s Souvenirs Entomologiques by Mrs. Rodolph Stawell and illustrated by E.J. Detmold. Well, that is plenty of fodder for a book collector to explore: Did Teixeira de Mattos translate the whole ten volumes? Who is Mrs. Stawell and how/why did she boil it down to one volume? Is Detmold an important illustrator? I’m just starting to explore.
Then there is the pedigree of this book to investigate before hunting for a good copy for myself. The library book is from Tudor Publishing Company, NY, in 1935, a new edition from one by Dodd, Mead and Company, copyright 1921. There is a 1937 edition of this title bound in green leather on sale on eBay for $225. And that’s with one print missing. I know nothing about these publishers yet, either. And who cares, you ask? Sorry, the sleuthing is a big part of collecting—isn’t that true for books, stamps, salt shakers, or insects?
Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, called Fabre “the insects’ Virgil.” Yet, because his theories did not align with the scientific tsunami of Darwin’s natural selection, his work is almost forgotten in France and the English speaking world. Apparently, Fabre is still well known in Japan, however. That’s another story, well told by Hugh Raffles in Insectopedia (Pantheon Books, NY).
There is yet a kinship with Fabre to today’s amateur bug collectors. He built his knowledge on the table and in his garden. Fabre wrote, “My scalpels are tiny daggers which I made myself out of fine needles; my marble slab is the bottom of a saucer; my prisoners are lodged by the dozen in old match-boxes; maxime miranda in minimis.“
Harvard University Press announced the publication of “Entomology: A World of Insects,” a compendium of excerpts from some of the most well-known entomology books ever published by the Press.
Professor Naomi Pierce, Curator of Lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, moderated a book-release event hosted by the Harvard Museum of Natural History. “What you find here are not just landmark stories describing animal behavior[...]what is clearly evident in this book is a rich collection of natural history, something not taught as much at Harvard in this genomic age,” Pierce said.
To paraphrase Uncle Walt Whitman, “A peacock spider is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.”
Flamboyant Australian jumping spiders on video for the first time. With droll narration adding to an extraordinary feat of nature videography. I just had to get this video up on SixLegsNews.
As a once and future Oregonian, I can’t help paying special attention to invasive species reports out of Corvallis and Portland. At the beginning of the month, The Oregonian reported on an invasion of Nebria brevicollis, known as gazelle beetles, a fast, voracious ground beetle displacing native species in a wide range of habitats.
First identified in Oregon in 2008, the European beetle has spread at least across ten counties and into southwest Washington state. Most troubling, it shows up not just in disturbed urban areas but also in old-growth fir and hemlock near the top of Marys Peak west of Corvallis, the highest point in Oregon’s Coast Range.
“It was appalling to find this exotic species not only present, but very abundant in a habitat that’s normally pretty secure from exotic species,” said James LaBonte, entomologist with Oregon’s Department of Agriculture.
This beetle’s adaptability shouldn’t come as a surprise; it is a familiar ground dweller from Iceland to Spain.
The Oregonian reports:
The invasive beetles could directly threaten endangered butterfly species in Oregon. The beetles have reached Mount Hebo, one of the few remaining habitats of the threatened Oregon silverspot butterfly. The beetle thrives in similar environments as does the endangered Fender’s blue butterfly in the Willamette Valley. No one has documented the beetles eating silverspot or Fender’s blue butterfly eggs, caterpillars or cocoons, but LaBonte says the beetles would have no trouble finding them. Gazelle beetles climb shrubs and grasses, unlike their more earth-bound relatives.
Insects have no notion of being aliens, of course. They seize opportunities and open habitats, responding only to competition and environmental conditions. But these beetles look to be living up to their name, sprinting into new territory. Likely, future reports will chronicle a cascade of native species decline. Sigh.
Nothing gets closer to extinction than this—then has a chance for a comeback.
Image Source: Rod Morris (left); Patrick Honan/Nick Carlile (right)
Don’t you love a “not quite extinct” story? Especially a story about enormous and charismatic bugs? Dryococelus australis is native to Lord Howe Island, a rock midway between Australia and New Zealand (reported modern human population: 341). At 12 centimeters long, they are the heaviest flightless stick insect in the world. Local fishermen used to put them on fishing hooks and use them as bait.
Another mammalian species arrived, due to a ship that ran aground, in 1918. But these survivors—European black rats—were very fond of the tree lobsters. Within two years, D. australis was believed extinct.
But in 2001 a pair of Australian scientists, David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile, and two assistants scaled a sea stack 13 miles away. They found two dozen nocturnal tree lobsters in a nook 225 feet above sea level. Can you imagine?
One of the discovers, Dean Hiscox, said, “It’s hard to describe the emotion because it wasn’t really something that we expected. It was really on a whim, a bit of a hunch and we thought we’d just go up at night-time to have a look around, and to actually come out onto the ledge and find Phasmid’s on the Melaleuca bush was really almost overwhelming.”
After an extremely thin-margin breeding effort at the Melbourne Zoo, they have a viable population. The islanders are being lobbied to allow the imposing natives back onto Lord Howe Island.
In a world first, zookeeper Rohan Cleave captured the amazing hatching process of a critically endangered Lord Howe Island Stick Insect at Melbourne Zoo. The eggs incubate for over 6 months and until now the hatching process has never been witnessed. Find out more at http://www.zoo.org.au/lord-howe-island-stick-insect
Based on an exceptionally well-preserved fossil, scientists have figured out what the chirp of a Jurassic cricket may have sounded like.
News reports smirk that it “may be the oldest love song ever heard by human ears.”
The study was conducted by Fernando Montealegre-Zapata and Professor Daniel Robert, both experts in the biomechanics of singing and hearing in insects, in Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences. Last year, paleontologists in China who had unearthed the fossil of a 165-million-year-old katydid brought them an unusual request.
“They asked me if I would be able to estimate how this animal used to make sounds – which frequencies this animal was using,” Montealegre-Zapata said.
He and his colleagues reconstructed the sound based on the well-defined teeth on the fossil wings. According to a Bristol University report, the specimen had such well-preserved wing features that the details of its stridulating organs were clearly visible under an optical microscope. Such information has never been obtained before from insect fossils. It was identified as a new fossil species and named Archaboilus musicus. They examined the anatomical construction of the fossil’s song apparatus, and compared it to 59 living bushcricket species. They concluded that this animal must have produced musical songs, broadcasting pure, single frequencies.
“This discovery indicates that pure tone communication was already exploited by animals in the middle Jurassic, some 165 million years ago,” said Robert. “For Archaboilus, as for living bushcricket species, singing constitutes a key component of mate attraction. Singing loud and clear advertises the presence, location and quality of the singer, a message that females choose to respond to – or not. Using a single tone, the male’s call carries further and better, and therefore is likely to serenade more females. However, it also makes the male more conspicuous to predators if they have also evolved ears to eavesdrop on these mating calls.”
A. musicus sang a tone pitched at 6.4kHz and that every bout of singing lasted 16 milliseconds. This turned out to be enough information to acoustically reconstruct the song itself, possibly the most ancient known musical song documented to date.
Good for attracting mates—and insect-eating dinosaurs. Actually, Montealegre-Zapata supposes, Jurassic insectivorous mammals like Morganucodon and Dryolestes also listened to the calls of Archaboilus and preyed on them.
Paper
‘Wing stridulation in a jurassic katydid (insecta, orthoptera) produced low-pitched musical calls to attract females’ by Gu, J. J., Montealegre-Z, F., Robert, D., Engel, M. S., Qiao, G. X. and Ren, D. in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA DOI:10.1073/pnas.111837210
The report results will come as no surprise to beekeepers anywhere, no doubt: A new study shows that over the past 130 years, ten North American bee species have emerged earlier to keep pace with shifts in host-plant flowering due to climate change. Most of this advance has taken place since 1970, paralleling global temperature increases.
The researchers present an analysis of climate-associated shifts in the phenology of wild bees, and compare these shifts to published studies of bee-pollinated plants over the same time period. (Phenology is the branch of science concerned with the relations between climate and periodic biological phenomena.) In the big picture, the wild pollinators are clocking in for work about ten days earlier than they did in the 1800s.
There is good reason to be concerned about whether plant communities can march north or south quickly enough to keep pace if climate factors, especially temperature changes, increase in velocity. (I mean, let’s keep our priorities here: entire wine appellations are moving!) The pollinators, of course, will have to shift their schedules, too. I wonder if other wild pollinator species are keeping up with the robust and resourceful Apidae.
Climate-associated phenological advances in bee pollinators and bee-pollinated plants
Here’s an excellent new resource: the LSU AgCenter entomology department has launched The First Detector Entomology Training Project, covering insects and arthropods, insect collecting, insect photography, and more. The project is hosted online and ties into the BugwoodWiki.
LSU AgCenter entomology specialist Natalie Hummel and extension associate Michael Ferro are working with colleagues at the University of Florida, the University of Georgia, North Carolina State University and the University of Tennessee to build the website to help Master Gardeners and homeowners identify insects, especially potential invasive species.
“I tried to develop the website in such a way that you could come to the site with little or no knowledge of insects and walk away with something,” Ferro said.
“Also we didn’t want people having to attend a workshop or sign up for a class since things are now more global and mobile,” Hummel said.
Course chapters include wiki pages on how to collect and preserve insects, basic insect biology, how to photograph insects, and a brief introduction to the major orders of insects. Some major orders get their own wiki pages, with basic information well organized, illustrated, and documented. There’s a lot of room for content growth here.
The site developers are working on training course fact sheets for first detector educators, which include county extension agents and Master Gardeners, along with first detectors, such as border inspectors and homeowners.
The BugwoodWiki, a program at the University of Georgia, hosts the content for the program. There you’ll find a wealth of information on IPM, invasive species, and plant diseases. It also links to Invasipedia, a frightening and useful database that “houses information on invasive plants, animals, and pathogens, and especially how to best manage them,” started by the Nature Conservancy.
Funding for the Detector Entomology Training Project was provided through USDA, National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA), in conjunction with the USDA-APHIS-PPQ and Sec 10201 of the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008.
Content is available for non-profit, educational use under their Copyright Agreement. It was developed by the Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health at the University of Georgia.
Hatching from what appears to be a giant chicken egg, the caterpillar swims through the ocean—taking out a ship in a storm, of course. Mothra invades Tokyo to rescue the diminutive fairy twins kidnapped from their island. Don’t miss the bump-and-grind invocation dance of the native islanders. On reaching the Tokyo radio tower, she spins a cocoon (Technically, I should tag this post under the category “Invasive Species,” shouldn’t I?). The nuclear heat rays only hasten the metamorphosis, and Mothra emerges, flying sedately for a moth, sending model cars and tanks tumbling down the city streets. Size matters.
