Archive for June 2010
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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!
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Listen Inside the Bug!
I’m David Rothenberg, always interested in the music we can find in the far reaches of the natural world. I wrote Why Birds Sing about jamming with laughing thrushes and lyrebirds, and Thousand Mile Song about playing along with humpback and beluga whales. My latest CD One Dark Night I Left My Silent House just came out in the UK, and I’m now working on a book about insect music which should emerge in 2013 about the time thousands of seventeen year cicadas descend on the forests of New York.
So I couldn’t resist telling you about the strange sounds I heard on the radio just the other day.
Igor Sokolov, a biophysicist at Clarkson University in far upstate New York, has figured how to record faint oscillations inside the bodies of living insects. These vibrations are so faint they are barely the size of a single atom! Why would anyone want to listen to something so far at the limits of human perception?
Sokolov told Robert Siegel on NPR that one day such careful listening might lead to audio templates of the correct resonance of human organs, so the stethoscope might be replaced by a sophisticated nano-listening device. He even suggested one might go to the chemists’ and have the pharmacist just listen to your body, and know exactly what to prescribe.
Siegel thought this sounded like science fiction, and I’m with him there. What’s more interesting is just how cool these bugs sound!
Here is a beetle:
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Is it relevant that this tiniest of audible sounds could easily be an alien message from a distant galaxy?
Here is a mosquito:
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The remix possibilities are endless!
Sokolov and his team compared the sound of the atoms of a dead bug to the sounds of a live one, thus revealing the very microscopic sounds of life itself, the tones and rhythms of the soul, the mysterious noises that separate the animate from the inanimate.
Once again insects take the lead in helping us to figure out how to tell whether we’re dead or alive, sick or well.
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Tonight: Bridget Nicholls on Radio 3 Night Waves
Pestival Director Bridget Nicholls is one of the expert guests on BBC Radio 3′s Night Waves tonight at 9.15pm. This Landmarks episode discusses Jacques Cousteau’s revolutionary documentary The Silent World, one of the first ever films to use underwater cinematography. Tune in tonight or listen to it later!
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The bee and the dandelion – evolution and art
I’m Matthew Cobb, a scientist working at the University of Manchester, who was involved in the second Pestival, in 2009. I study insect behaviour, in particular how the sense of smell functions in insects.
I focus my work on maggots because they are extremely simple (they have 21 smell cells; you and I have about 4 million), yet the “wiring diagram” of how the nose and the brain are wired together is basically the same in all animals. At Pestival I ran the maggot painting workshop, where we got maggots to paint pictures by plonking them in paint and watching them wriggle, leaving a trail behind them.
I’ll be blogging occasionally on the Pestival website. I also have a weekly (ish) electronic newsletter about all things zoological (anyone can sign up!), which also has a website, z-letter.com. And I sometimes act as guest blogger at Jerry Coyne’s WhyEvolutionIsTrue.com. When I write here, I’ll try and keep it simple and amusing, and link it to aspects of insects and art – the whole point of Pestival, after all.
Today, a word or two about how flowers have evolved, and what role insects have played. Flowering plants, or angiosperms, appeared around 140 million years ago. Prior to the evolution of flowers, the dominant plants were gymnosperms (plants like conifers and ginkos). The insects appeared around 400 million years ago, and really took off at around the same time as the gymnosperms – munching their way through the seeds of these new plants. Last year, an amazing 170 million year-old fossil was described in Science. The scientists suggested that the ancestors of today’s scorpion flies may have sucked nectar seeping out from gymnosperms, and were probably involved in pollination, as shown in this drawing:
But the development of flowers allowed for the rapid evolution of both plants and insects. As the flowering plants became increasingly varied, so too did the insects that were both feeding from them and pollinating them. In particular, the period when the flowers appeared coincided with the evolution of the butterflies, which remain a key pollinator for many flowering plants today.
One of the fascinating things about how flowers and insects have co-evolved is that the senses of insects – their perception and their choices – have literally shaped flowers. Insect colour perception is not like ours – they can see colours into the ultra-violet part of the spectrum, which are invisible to us. UV-patterns on flowers can provide insects with extra visible guides to where the nectar – and the pollen – can be found. Even the common dandelion conceals a hidden message, as shown in this photo from Bjorn Rosslett’s site:
Darwin was fascinated by the links between animal and human behaviour. He recognised that, because humans are animals, we should be able to see precursors of our behaviours in animals. He suggested that our aesthetic and artistic senses have their origin in animal perception of “good” characters in food and mates. In other words, our appreciation of art has its roots in the way that animals are attracted to their prey, or a potential partner. Our appreciation of the beauty of a flower may not be so far away from the responses of a bee faced with a dandelion.
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Mosquitoes Inspire New Acoustic Sensors
Following on from mimicking bats’ echolocation to invent new ultrasonic imaging systems, a team from the University of Strathclyde is now studying male mosquito sensors in detecting the flapping wings of their lover. In the future, the ability to harness this behaviour means science would be able change bandwidths and change sensitivity ‘on the wing’ so to speak and develop new types of acoustic sensors.
This means when you swallow capsules that have drugs inside, they could burst using this new ultrasound. Creating a multipurpose transducer that could do imaging and deliver drugs at the same time. Cool or what!
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Butterfly Wings Mimicked to Combat Bank Note Forgery
British scientists have found a way of mimicking the iridescent colours on the wings of butterflies.
They studied the intricate green and blue wings on the Indonesian Peacock, or Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio blumei), whose surface structure resembles the inside of an egg carton. It’s the light bouncing off these microscopic structures which produces these unique and striking colours, rather than simple pigments. Using nanofabrication techniques, they created a structure identical to the scales of the wings, which can be used in the encryption of bank notes and credit cards, making them harder to forge (and more beautiful!).
The research is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
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Table Design Inspired by Praying Mantis
Young designers are realising more and more they can find their inspiration in nature’s highly evolved design.
In mimicking the small and delicate legs of a praying mantis, which are uniquely angled to support the insect’s disproportionately long and heavy body, you too can have a cool looking table to dine on!
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Fly and Spider Mardi Gras Costume Designs
Some lovely 19th Century Mardi Gras costume designs over at BibliOdyssey, among them Fly and Spider! (Other favourites are Sea Nettle and Bat, and Snail and Leech!)
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Artificial Butterfly Filmed in Flight
Japanese researchers Hiroto Tanaka and Isao Shimoyama have created a working replica of a swallowtail butterfly to study flight mechanics. Made from balsa wood, a rubber band, a wire crank, and with thin polymer wings, the model is the same size and weight as a real swallowtail butterfly, and flies just like one too.
Filmed in high speed, the flapping wing motion can be analysed:
