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Sunday Spinelessness – Another Angle David Winter Nov 21

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I don’t claim to be a great photographer, but I do feel a little smug about today’s photo. But it’s not even the photo itself that gives me an misplaced sense of satisfacton.

Let me explain, the photo was taken inside the rain forest exhibit at the Vancouver Aquarium. Than aquarium is a big tourist attraction, and there were tonnes of people moving through the various displays the day I was there. The crowd in the rain forest in particular was moving pretty slowly, as people tried to capture the the photos of the ibises, marmosets, turtles and other charismatic mega fauna. There were also Costa Rican butterflies in the rain forest enclosure, and you won’t be surprised to learn I was more interested in photographing those than anything else (though I did photograph a few vertebrates that day). A few other photographers showed a little interest in the butterflies, mostly getting the standard butterfly portrait, a top down shot of the insect with its wings open:

There’s nothing wrong with the standard butterfly portrait, but I thought the way this guy was set up on his branch can an opportunity for a slightly more interesting shot. So, being far to far from home to feel the least bit embarrassed, I braced by myself by swinging one arm around the butterflies branch, balanced the camera in front of the subject and (with my feet just dangling above the ground) took some photos:

I was quite chuffed with the result, but I was even more pleased when I looked back a few minutes later and saw the photographers who, having foresaken the ibis and the marmoset, had lined up to photograph the same butterfly. Score one for the spineless!

(If you were wondering, I’m pretty sure the butterfly is the Nymphalid Siproeta stelenes)

Sunday Spinelessness – Pollinators of Vancouver 2 David Winter Sep 05

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Another of Vancouver’s pollinators today, and this one’s not a bee:

This is another photo form the UBC botanic gardens, and this time it’s a beetle in amongst the flowers. More specifically it’s Rhagonycha fulva, the common red soldier beetle. A little research tells me these guys are actually native to Europe, but they’ve become established in much of Canada. I’ve included these pics under the ‘pollinators’ heading, even though they aren’t principally nectar eaters, soldier beetles are carnivores, in fact the’ve been used as biological control agens for small pest insects like aphids .Rhagonycha fulva visits flowers, but only to to find other insects living in them:


The flower in question, for those of you wondering, is Astrantia major involucrata. As you might imagine, sticking your head into flowers all day does tend to move a bit of pollen around and Rhagonycha fulva has been shown to be an “incidental” pollinator of a number of plants. That’s all you’ll get from me today, but there’s much better blogging out there for you to read, including photos of the same beetles and the same gardens thank’s to the UBC Botanical Gardens own blog.There’s a stunning shot of this very beetle in flight here. If that’s not enough beetling for your Sunday then Ted MacRae is bound to have something stunning for you to look at, and if you really can’t get enough invertebrate blogging then there’s a whole mess of it at this moth’s Circus of the Spineless hosted by hectocotyli (you should probably look up just what an hectocotylus is too)

Sunday Spineless – Looking into jellyfish eyes David Winter Aug 01

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Eyes evolved once. That’s the headline conclusion from a recent study of the genetic basis of the development of eyes in jellyfish. If you want the details the ever-awesome Ed Yong has them, so I’ll just offer a précis here.

Building an eye is a complex business. Developmental biologists have uncovered a whole series of interacting networks of genes that work in concert to turn a piece of neural tube into your peepers. In just about all bilaterians (that is, animals other than cindarians, ctenophores and sponges) the whole process has one master switch – a gene called PAX6. The pax genes are a family of transcription factors(genes that drive the expression of other genes) that act to define regions on the animal body during early devlopment. The eye-establishing function of PAX6 is so strongly conserved that you express the mouse version of this gene in a Drosophila larvae and set off the eye-building networka(leading to the development of ectopic eyes). In the recent paper researchers went looking for PAX genes in one of the deeper branches of the animal tree, the Cnidaria (comprising corals, anemones and a diverse collection of creatures we usually call jellyfish).

On my recent visit to Vancouver I made it to that city’s impressive aquarium (tourist tip: go early or line up for a long time). They have sea otters and dolphins and beluga whales but, true to form, I was most taken by the jellies:

Above you have sea nettles (Chrysaorasp sp.) and below the moon jelly (Aurelia aurita) and my photos hardly do them justice. They were just stunning. My photos also fail to record and important detail, jellies and other cnidarians have eyes. Or at least tiny “eye spots” which are capable of detecting light, if not casting a focused picture of the outside. So,with the sequence of another cnidarian’s genome (the starlet sea anenome, Nemaostella vectiniss) as a starting point researchers went looking for PAX genes in the development of that eye spot. They found them in the familiar role, the master switch, but interestingly it’s not the PAX genes most closely related to PAX6 that are doing the work. In two different lineages of jellies, the Hydrozoa and the Cubazoa (neither represented above I’m afraid) two different PAX genes are setting the eye making machinery to work. The authors conclude that eye development was originally controlled by suite of PAX genes acting together with a degree of redundancy with each lineage – the Hydrozoa, the Cubazoa and the bilaterians – subsequently losing that redundancy and leaving just one of the PAX genes to act as the master switch. Sounds reasonable to me (but check out a criticism of the idea in comments to Ed Yong’s post) but the diagram they use to illustrate that idea is awful :

model of PAX6 evolution with "main line" pointing to verterbratesWho could imagine animals as wonderful as the cnidarian photographed above, or the sponges I wrote about here or Drosophila were side branches from evolution’s mainstream. Yuck. Anyway, I fixed it:

A tree of animals with gene-duplications illustrated

Sunday Spinelessness – Love and deception in Vancouver David Winter Jul 11

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I think I’ve finally got back into the rhythm of life in Dunedin after The Big Trip, so it must be time to get back to spending a little bit of my weekend documenting some of the goings on in the spineless world. Thankfully, having gone to visit the summer I’ve got quite a cache of bug photos to keep the series going

Let’s start by interrupting this couple, who I found enjoying summer amongst the flowers on the University of British Columbia’s very impressive campus:

At first glance I thought I’d stumbled across a pair of mating bumblebees. But it’s really the wrong time of year, bumblebee mating is usually restricted to the end of summer. As the days get shorter and cooler the flowers that keep a bee hive become in short supply. Honeybees get through the winter by hunkering down, but bumblebees skip it altogether. The sisterhood that runs a bumblebee nest sends out queens and males (drones) towards the end of summer, once she’s mated the queen hibernates and emerges in the spring ready to set up a new nest. So, not quite sure what I was looking at, I took a closer look.

Hmmm, thats odd. Those big eyes …

… those little, hairy antennae …

These are flies! I think, in fact, that they are hover-flies. The bee-like appearance is no coincidence, these flies are an example of something biologists call Batesian mimicry. Despite a widely held belief to the contrary, bumblebees pack a pretty mean sting and at least some would-be predators stay away from them as a result. By appearing enough like a bumblebee to fool birds these flies get the benefit of bumblebee’s sting without having to pay the cost of making the venom. Hover-flies in particular make good mimics, there are species that specialise in aping wasps and honeybees and indeed there are other bumblebee mimics.

I’m afraid I can’t say very much more about these particular flies, after all the Pacific North West’s fauna is entirely new to me. Perhaps the dipterous and the British Columbian wings of the of the bug-blogosphere can at least give them a name. As always, the images link to higher resolution versions.