Latest blog posts
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Panoramic View of Termite Pavilion
Peter Watts of Panoramic Earth recently stopped by London Zoo (home to Pestival HQ) to take these incredible 360° panoramic photos of the Termite Pavilion, from the inside and outside.
Thanks so much to Peter Watts and Panoramic Earth, for this fantastic virtual tour. For the real life experience, come visit the Termite Pavilion in person at London Zoo!
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Giant Wasp Nest Found in Pub Loft
The largest wasp nest in Britain, measuring 6ft by 5ft and containing half a million wasps, has been discovered in a country pub loft in Southampton. This is the largest ever to be found in Britain, and the largest anywhere in the world in the last 50 years. The BBC reports that “the nest is 15 times bigger than the UK average and nearly as big as a Smart car, which is slightly longer at 8ft 10in by 5ft 1in (2.69m by 1.54m).”
The largest nest ever recorded measured 12ft by 6ft and was found in New Zealand in 1963.
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Video: Time-Lapse of Ant Colony Living Inside Scanner
François Vautier made this time-lapse video of an ant colony inside his scanner, by scanning the nest each week for 5 years!
Via MAKE Magazine
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The Lesser of Two Weevils
For all you insect pun lovers out there!
Via Neatorama, designed by Chris Murphy.
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Electric Butterfly in a Jar
Check out this super realistic looking electric butterfly, made by Japanese toy company Tenyo. The butterfly flies around the jar when you tap on the lid.
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Chris Watson in The Wire
Pestival friend and collaborator Chris Watson is on the cover of The Wire magazine this month, with a feature by Ken Hollings.
Chris Watson refers to himself as a sound recordist, but it feels like an understatement: he has made his instrument, the microphone, a powerful tool for eavesdropping on wildlife and wild places to reveal sounds and environments free of human presence. Since leaving Cabaret Voltaire in 1983, he has travelled from pole to pole (geographically and musically), working with everyone from David Attenborough to z’ev.
Great insect-themed photo shoot with Chris at the Natural History Museum, courtesy of Jake Walters.
Check out Chris Watson’s fantastic sound installation, Whispering in the Leaves, currently at London’s Kew Gardens until 5 September. Alongside the installation, there’s a great programme of performances, workshops, guided tours and talks.
Here’s a short documentary on Whispering in the Leaves:
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Malaria-Resistant Mosquito Engineered
Scientists in Arizona have engineered a genetically modified mosquito which cannot pass malaria to humans. They’ve introduced a gene affecting the mosquito’s gut, which prevents the malaria parasite from developing. The ultimate aim is replacing wild mosquitoes with the lab bred population – although scientists say this would take at least a decade to achieve and many question if it is possible at all.
Image: Lead researcher Michael Riehle holds up the genetically altered mosquitoes. © Riehle Lab, University of Arizona
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Printing insect wings
New Scientist reports on Hod Lipson‘s development of ultra-thin 3D printed wings. I’ve long been a fan of Lipson (his team’s work has inspired some of my own) – and now it seems he’s treading in good old insect territory.
The prototype in the video above can hover untethered for 85 seconds and weighs just 3.89 grams. The 3D printing allows the team to design and build prototypes in a very short time (it takes less than an hour to print), and can achieve film thicknesses of 40-micrometres, and features just 16-micrometres thick. This all means that they can use an experimental, iterative design process to play with concepts and develop an understanding of non-fixed wing motion. In true Cornell style, the team are planning to implement a genetic algorithm so that the wings can undergo a more evolutive process.
To read more on this story, please visit the New Scientist website.
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Cataloguing the World’s Ants
Yesterday, Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz posted the documentary “Ants: The Invisible Majority”, about Californian entomologist Dr. Brian Fisher’s attempt to catalogue the world’s 30,000 species of ants before they’re extinct. Fisher has designed the website AntWeb, which digitises data and photos of different ant species. He calls on all amateur taxonomists to help catalogue ants, saying “We’ve discovered but 10% of the living things on earth. 90% is out there to be found. We need more taxonomists!”
The video also talks about evolutionary biologist Neil Tsutsui’s research into the invasive Argentine ant, which has eliminated almost all native ant species in its path, since it was introduced to the states from South America in the 1890s. Usually, most ants will fight against other colonies of the same species, but these Argentine ants form ‘super-colonies’, and cooperate with each other, leading to their high population densities. Ants can tell other species apart from waxy chemicals on their exoskeletons. Tsutsui found that by changing their external chemical uniform, they can turn friend into foe. He hopes to develop non-toxic insecticides to convince members of the Argentine colony to fight each other, leaving other ant species unharmed.
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Light Stencil Urban Art
Australian artist TigTab illuminates dark and derelict spaces with bright and colourful butterflies, dragonflies and spiders. These images appear to be digitally created, but actually they’re shot live using flashes of light through stencils.
From The Telegraph:
“My photos are predominantly shot using urban backdrops. I find beauty in decay – those abandoned and forgotten places all around us. By bringing light into the darkness of each space, it fills that space for a moment in time, and highlights both their beauty and impermanence”
The stencils are placed on light boxes lined with silver foil. The intricate designs are revealed after a burst from a camera flash lights up the inside of the box very briefly.
TigTab moves around the room, tunnel or drain, repositioning the stencils and firing the flash repeatedly while the shutter of the camera is left open to create complex designs.
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“Yes Bee Can!”
Everyone is jumping on the beekeeping bandwagon, even the White House!
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Mosquitoes Not a Big Fan…
If you find yourself bugged by mosquitoes this summer, why not try a house fan instead of chemicals to keep them at bay? The reasons behind this repellent may surprise you.
From the New York Times:
Studies have found that wind is an effective method against mosquitoes and other airborne pests. The reason seems obvious: it prevents them from circling and landing on you, like a windstorm keeping a plane from its descent. But that is not entirely the case. A fan dilutes and disperses the carbon dioxide you exhale. Carbon dioxide is one of the major chemicals that attract mosquitoes. The wind from a fan also cools you off. Sweat, lactic acid and body heat attract mosquitoes — factors that a fan can help minimize.
For more ideas on how to ward off bloodsuckers the non-toxic way, Lifehacker has some handy tips.
Image: “Am I attractive?” (shown at Pestival 2009), a collaboration between artist Susana Soares and Dr. James Logan’s team from Rothamsted Research, UK, illustrating how certain body chemicals attract mosquitoes. Dr. Logan hopes that his team’s research will help develop safe, naturally-occurring insect repellent as well!
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Hugh Raffles on Urban Beekeeping
Hugh Raffles (author of the excellent Insectopedia) writes an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times praising urban beekeeping.
Please stop whatever you’re doing and buy his great book Insectopedia now!
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Hello!
Hello! As a new Pestival blogger, I thought I might start by introducing myself.
I’m Ollie Palmer, and together with Fiorella Lavado and Seirian Sumner, I’m embarking on a two-year multidisciplinary study into the world of ant communication. The project is called Physical Virus, and includes a series of machines, installations, artworks, performances, and most importantly, scientific research projects.
The first part of the project is called the Godot Machine, which is roughly summarised here:
This is a device designed to hold an ant in one place for as long as possible. It allows for the monitoring of the paths and trails the ant makes, and lays down some of the technology that we’ll be using later on in the project. The video has just finished being exhibited at the Bartlett Summer Show at UCL, and we’ll have a more finalised model in London Zoo later this year.
I’ll tell more about other projects as and when they’re developed – but as a teaser, we’re planning to create an ant ballet, ant telecommunication devices, ant construction/destruction systems and a physical computer virus. I’m looking forward to sharing all of this with the Pestival blog readers – watch this space!
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More Photos from the Observer Ethical Awards Ceremony
We’ve been meaning to post some of our own photos from the Observer Ethical Awards ceremony, held at the V&A a few weeks ago. Although there were many cameras on hand, and tons of photos taken, for some reason most of them came out blurry (which is solid proof of a fun night!).
Here are some that came out well. (Thanks Ariane and Crispin!)
(Holding their breath in anticipation, as Pestival is announced the winner of the Conservation Award)
Above, from left to right: Bridget Nicholls (Pestival Founder and Director), Stephanie Fudge (Operations Director, Pestival 2009), Crispin O’Brien (Chairman of the Pestival Advisory Board) and Kirsty Kinnear (Lead Producer, Pestival 2009)
Above: Bridget Nicholls and Caroline Lucas (Green MP for Brighton Pavilion and first Green Party representative in the House of Commons — winner of Ethical Politician Award)
Above: Bridget Nicholls, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (celebrity chef, “real food” campaigner, and initiator of the Landshare project — winner of Campaigner of the Year Award) and Stephen Watts (Abundance — winners of Grassroots Project Award)
Above: Bridget Nicholls and John Grant (green media man and brains behind Pestival 2009′s Tweehive)
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Insect Week
Perhaps this post would have been better posted a few weeks ago, but I have been rather busy with a number of events related to National Insect Week (21st-27th June 2010).
Everything kicked off on Monday when David Nicholson and I did a Nature Live event called ‘Insects Rule the World‘. The title was sufficiently vague but given that both Dave and myself have an inordinate fondness for cockroaches a theme quickly emerged. It’s hard to make any headway into such a vast topic in 30 minutes, particularly as we covered extinct as well as living species, but it was good fun and people had a fascination with the various living species we bought along. Unfortunately the event was not recorded, but below is a recording of the same event a few weeks before.
Wednesday saw another Nature Live, this time on stick and leaf insects called ‘The Great Pretenders‘. Stick insects were what originally interested me in insects, and I still keep a number of species at home.
On Thursday and Friday the newly opened Angela Marmont Centre at the Natural History Museum played host to a number of entomologists showing off specimens from the collection as well as various living insects. My colleague Andy Polaszek and I spent some time in the morning collecting insects in the Museum’s Wildlife Garden (complete with luminous lime green Insect Week t-shirts). We then spent the afternoon talking to members of the public, Andy mainly about parasitic wasps, myself mainly about, you guessed it, stick and leaf insects.
As well as hordes of excited school children we met a family from Sweden who were very interested in insects, and have since been in e-mail contact with additional questions ( which we are always more than willing to try and answer), and a lady from the USA involved with freshwater insect surveys who seemed to be impressed by the OPAL water survey project.
On Friday we also had a visit from the staff of the Photographer’s Gallery (I gave a talk there a few months ago) who came for a brief behind the scenes tour of our insect and fossil collections, after which we made a brief visit to the local pub to celebrate the end of a busy and successful week, and to play Ladybird Top Trumps (cards courtesy of the BBC’s Breathing Places).
Although for me all was not yet over. Saturday bought my third and fourth Nature Live events of the week, which were all about keeping Insects as Pets. Again this involved lots of live insects to enthuse the crowds, and hopefully we encouraged a few people to keep some insects at home – for many the first step to a career in entomology.
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The Honeybee Magnified
Following from our recent post on insect photomicrography, if you like those then you’ll love photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher.
Her beautiful new book BEE, recently published by Princeton Architectural Press, presents 60 incredible magnified images of the honeybee. These remarkable photographs were shot through a scanning electron microscope at magnifications ranging from 10x to 5000x.
From the publisher:
Rendered in stunning detail, Fisher’s photographs uncover the strange beauty of the honeybee’s pattern, form, and structure. Comprising 6,900 hexagonal lenses, their eyes resemble the structure of a honeycomb. The honeybee’s proboscis—a strawlike appendage used to suck nectar out of flowers, folds resembles a long, slender hairy tongue. Its six-legged exoskeleton is fuzzy with hairs that build up a static charge as the bee flies in order to electrically attract pollen. Wings clasp together with tiny hooks and a double-edged stinger resembles a serrated hypodermic needle. The honeybee’s three pairs of segmented legs are a revelation, with their antennae cleaners, sharp-pointed claws, and baskets to carry pollen to the hive. These visual discoveries, made otherworldly through Fisher’s lens, expand the boundaries of our thinking about the natural world and stimulate our imaginations.
For our readers in New York, you can check out her exhibition BEE – A magnified exploration of the honeybee and its anatomy as art at the Farmani Gallery in Brooklyn, which runs until July 3rd.
(Via Book By Its Cover, photos © Julia Rothman)
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German Airports Use Bees to Monitor Air Quality
Bees have been helping airports in Germany monitor their air quality. The honey is tested regularly for toxins, and after turning up clean, it’s bottled and given away as gifts.
From The New York Times:
Volker Liebig, a chemist for Orga Lab, who analyzes honey samples twice a year for the Düsseldorf and six other German airports, said results showed the absence of substances that the lab tested for, like certain hydrocarbons and heavy metals, and the honey “was comparable to honey produced in areas without any industrial activity.” A much larger data sampling over more time is needed for a definitive conclusion, he said, but preliminary results are promising.
(Image: Walter Klumpp, beekeeper in charge of Düsseldorf airport bees.
© Andreas Wiese/Düsseldorf International Airport) -
Amazing Photos of Insect Eyes Up Close!
Wired Science has a few stunning selections of insect eye photos from Nikon’s Small World photomicrography competition.
(image: Metallic Beetle)
(image: House Fly)
(image: Black Fly) -
Celeb Bug Eating Endorsement
Salma Hayek tells Letterman what all of us knew all along — that eating the right bugs can be good for your health and the planet!
Yes, it is a well known fact that if we harvested bugs rather than cattle, we would not only solve the obesity problem (protein no fat), we would also solve the deforestation problem (due to the growing global need for meat).
(Try here for more information on Entomophagy)
