Latest blog posts
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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)
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The Art of Bees
A special guest post from Pestival team member abroad Ariane Koek:
What can bees tell us about modernist aesthetics? That’s one of the key questions posed this month at Dallas Contemporary’s latest exhibition Seedlings. Nine contemporary artists investigate the ways in which natural systems have informed human industry and art making, and investigate new possibilities of collaborations with nature. Amongst them is Pennsylvanian artist Hilary Berseth, who like Rodin and Warhol, has outsourced the making of his art. Unlike them, he has outsourced it to possibly the most industrious workers of them all – bees.
He makes frames out of wire and wax, then lets the bees loose into a closed box in the spring to do the rest of the work, creating great spiral honeycombs and all the other shapes he imagines, all with the help of a maths graduate turned beekeeper friend, Jim Bobb.
(image: Hilary Berseth’s ‘Programmed Hive’ sculpture. Photos © Hannah Whitaker / New York Magazine)But is this art? And isn’t he just enslaving insects to make his work for him, whilst destroying a natural aesthetic? Make up your own mind, but Hilary Berseth says not. He says he was amazed how you can manipulate the bees’ instincts about proportion and form.
“You can plan out a certain amount of what’s going to happen, and then that design will sort of ripple through, and then they’ll begin to draw out combs and riff off that design.”
Berseth works with the bees, manipulating their movements, leading them into the shapes that he wants to create. But he is not the first person to work with bees in this way. Take the work of the sculptor Garnett Puett. He too engages with thousands of honeybees, tireless builders in wax, who are the incredible movers and shapers of a delicate architecture they have known how to construct for millions of years. He calls them ‘apisculptures` but unlike Beseth, makes safety-glass boxes containing sculptures of wood, metal and beeswax which actually are abandoned apiaries, where bees have deposited lacy networks of honeycomb on the armatures Puett offered them, making sculptures like Basal Wax Mirror and Apis Loom which were sold in contemporary arts sales in New York.
(image: Garnett Puett’s ‘Apis Loom’)
(image: Garnett Puett’s ‘Basal Wax Mirror’)So what can bees tell us about modernist aesthetics? Certainly what both these artists are showing is a fascination with bees and a wish to control their creativity and making. What do you think?
Seedlings curated by Regine Basha is at Dallas Contemporary until August 8th 2010.
Garnett Puett -
Video: Pestival Awarded Observer Ethical Award in Conservation
Here’s a video of the judges talking about why they awarded the conservation prize to Pestival.
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The Aesthetics of Deceptive Caterpillar Mimicry
You are a 12-gram, insectivorous, tropical rainforest bird, foraging in shady, tangled, dappled, rustling foliage where edible caterpillars and other insects are likely to shelter. You want to live 10–20 years. You are peering under leaves, poking into rolled ones, searching around stems, exploring bark crevices and other insect hiding places. Abruptly an eye appears, 1–5 centimeters from your bill. The eye or a portion of it is half seen, obstructed, shadowed, partly out of focus, more or less round, multicolored, and perhaps moving. If you pause a millisecond to ask whether that eye belongs to acceptable prey or to a predator, you are likely to be—and it takes only once—someone’s breakfast. Your innate reaction to the eye must be instant flight, that is, a “startle” coupled with distancing. The bird that must learn to avoid what appears to be a predator’s eye is not long for this world. Now, a safe few meters away, are you going to go back to see whether that was food? No.
A tropical horde of counterfeit predator eyes
Daniel H. Janzena, Winnie Hallwachsa, and John M. BurnsDepartment of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6018; and Department of Entomology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20013-7012
P-E-R-E-S-P-E-C-T
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Pestival featured in the Observer
If you didn’t get a chance to see Pestival featured in the free Ethical Awards supplement with the Observer today, here’s the article online!
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We Won!
Pestival has just won the Observer Ethical Award in the Conservation category!
This is the first time a left field festival has won a mainstream Conservation Award. The insects shall inherit the earth! Oh wait they’ve been custodians all along… : )
Thanks one and all for your amazing efforts and support – we did it!
Lucy Siegle (Observer), Chris Murray (Director, UK Transmission, National Grid),
Bridget Nicholls (Director, Pestival), Colin Firth (actor)
Colin Firth, Bridget Nicholls, Chris Murray -
Bob and Roberta Smith Presents the Art Colony
Bob and Roberta Smith introduces the Art Colony in front of the new Insect Arts Club / Pestival HQ.
The Art Colony is inviting different people from science, philosophy, art, technology, design, architecture, music, dance, film and more to come and collaborate with them and the conservation scientists at ZSL London Zoo, along the north bank of the Camden Canal. The first artist to contribute to the Colony is Bob and Roberta Smith, one of the founding Art Colony members. When Bob was talking here, the painting of the hut wasn’t complete. Afterward, Bob added the insects to complete the new Pestival HQ. We’ll be putting up pictures soon of the finished hut, so you can see it in all its bug art glory!
Racine Art Museum, 441 Main Street, Racine, Wisconsin 18/04/10 
Palm House, Kew Gardens, London 29/05/10 
