Some cool animal-related blurbs in a recent Science News. First, ornate jumping spiders, Cosmophasis umbratica, apparently use UV-reflecting or fluorescing markings on the palps as cues during courtship. They determined this by setting up a sort of “dating game” situation in little glass cubicles. When exposed to sunlight, the spiders assume their normal courtship poses (I’m sorry for the images you now have in your mind). But if UV wavelengths are blocked from the cubicles, they usually just look bored. The males have reflecting palps while the females have fluorescing palps. This was reported in the Jan 26 issue of Science.
Now, the flies. Female flies of the species Emblemasoma auditrix give each of their young larvae a wonderful gift — a live cicada of their very own (Science news doesn’t say which kind), on which they can munch as they grow. Turns out that it may take a while to find a cicada for each larva, so while they wait, the larvae apparently munch on each other inside their mom. Mmm, tasty.
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Queen Originally uploaded by mik5156
This was originally misidentified as a monarch. The photographer says that the Nature Center staff person told her that’s what it was. Yikes! I did some digging in my James Scott book and determined it was really a Queen Butterfly. No less regal than the Monarch! I love the beautiful polka-dotted body. Wonder what kind of plant it is feeding on. By the way, this photographer has many other excellent nature photos.
Queen Butterfly
mik5156
Florida
200
2007-01-15
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http://flickr.com/photos/mik5156/359026463/in/set-72157594429233008/
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http://farm1.static.flickr.com/144/359026463_d616551a3e.jpg?v=0
Note to self, I don’t like where the captions ended up here. I had to generate the blog post using Flickr, then cut and paste the RDF code we created manually. We’ll work it out so it goes more smoothly and looks good.
We have all sorts of great ideas for implementing the FieldMarking approach to EcoBlogging. We’ll be using this blog as a testbed and so you can expect to see some wild and crazy stuff soon. Well, not as wild and crazy as all that. We are academic biologists and computer scientists after all, with our own quirky brand of imagination. Look for pedantic posts correcting ID’s over at Flickr, or musing over bizarre news stories, or simple observations in our daily lives. Behind it all we’ll be experimenting with various ways to get this info onto the semantic web. Or even the Semantic Web (cue foreboding AI-takes-over-the-world music).