Here’s a food web study I never imagined:
Research Highlights
Nature 453, 960-961 (19 June 2008) | doi:10.1038/453960f; Published online 18 June 2008
Ecology: Dotty diets
Nature Nanotech. doi:10.1038/nnano.2008.110 (2008)
Those who worry about nanotechnology do so partly because of its potential environmental impact. So David Holbrook and a team from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, have tested whether quantum dots (tiny blobs of semiconducting material) accumulate in a simple invertebrate food web.
Over a series of experiments, they put bacteria (Escherichia coli), rotifers (Brachionus calyciflorus) and ciliates (Tetrahymena pyriformis) in flasks with carboxylated and biotinylated quantum dots, which may find a use in computing and solar cells.
The nanomaterials could only stick to clumps of bacterial cells — aggregates too large for ciliates to gobble. However, ciliates took up quantum dots directly from the media, retaining the biotinylated dots for more than twice as long as the carboxylated ones. Rotifers, which eat ciliates, thus consumed quantum dots, but emptied the dots from their guts fast enough to avoid accumulating them.
Last weekend we saw this handsome night-heron while kayaking. Not a bird I often see, as I don’t get out birding much. A friend of mine in University Park reported two in her suburban yard the same weekend — so now it is officially a trend.
Last post I pointed out that tagging was going to be most useful for helping novices with identification. The message for today is that it might not be worth logging every individual observation, but if someone notices an unusual trend maybe THAT should be flagged, and we can use blog sentiment analysis to detect it and let scientists know.
I’m reasonably sure this is some kind of beetle larvae, and might even venture to say it is in the family Lycidae. But the only evidence I have of that is this ultracool set of larval images from Russia.
I wish Ztema had specimen data, such as LatLongs, habitat, etc. And it would be helpful if he or she allowed others to add tags. I’m becoming convinced that sifting through tagged images is going to be the most effective way for novices to identify organisms like this. I want to get a gallery of images that match my terms (e.g. white, grub, brown, soft, plump) and keep refreshing until something similar pops up.
This fellow (lady, probably) was sitting, lonely, on my driveway the other day. Looks very much like the Magicicada species that came out in 2004 (Brood X). My guess is that this one missed the cue and didn’t emerge with the rest. “Where’d everybody go?”
Alternatively, this could be a member of Brood XIV, as we are one of those “less well-established areas”, as shown on the map at the Periodical Cicadas page maintained by my friends John Cooley and Dave Marshall. I’ll see if they have a comment.
