21 June 2011

The birds and the beetles....

I've recently been able to catch up on some movie watching (thank you NetFlix) and two documentaries that have really stood out are "Ghost Bird" and "Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo".
These films, although both about animals, have very different story arcs, but have some pretty interesting similarities.

Ghost bird is about the reported sightings of the extinct (or so everyone thought) Ivory Billed woodpecker (photo above showing a male and female from the 1930s, wikipedia.org).  This bird is/was the second largest woodpecker in the southeastern US where it was found in native forests, and was especially known to strip the bark off of oak trees looking for beetles (their primary forage).   The last official sightings of living birds was back in the 1940s, and ever since the birds has been considered extinct.  In 2004 there was a new wave of sightings by some prominent birders followed by a video purporting to show a living bird in flight.  There was a lot of media buzz, money for research (and as the film points out this money was mostly diverted from other confirmed species), and a lot of attention to the small town in Arkansas near the reported sightings.  Without spoiling it too much, there is little tangible evidence that the bird is really still alive.


In the second film, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, the writer explores the fascination for insects (mainly beetles and crickets in the film) by the Japanese.  The film is very slow but methodical in showing how insects are imbued into the Japanese culture more so that anywhere else in the world.  Let's face it, grocery stores in the US don't normally stock insect rearing supplies and live beetles on the shelves!  But in Japan they do.   Much like we might breed cats or dogs and think nothing of going to the local kennel club show, in Japan you can crowd into a venue on a Saturday with other folks and gleefully peruse the various booths to find that new perfect insect pet.

So I said that the films have some interesting similarities.  I think these films give us different view about the loss of nature and about how we deal with it.  The sense of loss that I got from Ghost Bird was especially evident in interviews with a couple of scientists who are shown with preserved specimens that are locked away in museum collections, but also in the local townspeople in Arkansas who had hoped to hitch their wagon to the new flood of birders who would flock (pun intended) to see this rare bird.  The loss of the Ivory Billed is particularly difficult as you can still talk to people who saw this bird in the wild and hold museum specimens in your hand.  In Japan there is still a strong sense that nature is to be brought into the home, either through art, music, or insect pets.  It's explained that in Japan there is a philosophy of Mono no aware, which means the sensitivity to ephemeral things, and a sadness in their passing.  This is what drives many to appreciate nature or any form of experience, including insects.   I also think there is a strong sense of Mono no aware in Ghost Bird, but one that cannot be reversed, no matter how badly we wish it to be so.

14 June 2011

Storage Jars….and mosquitoes!


We work with a variety of man-made and natural containers in our pursuit of understanding the ecology of medically important mosquitoes.  I’ve personally seen mosquito larvae in some odd man-made containers, including empty oil drums, tarps, and soda cans, but a new article in this month’s Journal of Vector Ecology looked at mosquitoes and their predators in water holding jars around homes in Vietnam (here).  These jars are often necessary to have if you want clean drinking water or in places under drought conditions, water period.  The authors (including a friend of mine, Shin-ya Ohba) looked at predators in these vessels and found quite a variety of things than wish to eat mosquitoes.  This got me thinking about storage jars….

 

10 June 2011

Dengue in Florida!

Another great story about Dengue, this time right near us in Florida (Key West).  Listen to it here.  Will we have to worry about Dengue in southern Mississippi?  Well Aedes aegypti has been locally extinct from the area since at least the 1990s, so we might rest easy knowing that the main vector of the disease is not around to transmit it.  What is a concern is that Aedes albopictus, a somewhat less important vector of Dengue, is the most common container species in the southern US. 

 
Our recent work with Aedes aegypti has shown considerable tolerance to salt over a recent invader, Aedes albopictus.  This could help explain why Aedes aegypti is doing better in some coastal areas. 

09 June 2011

Complexity and beauty!

It's easy to miss the beauty in nature, especially for those of us who study it on a daily basis.  But sometimes really cool examples come along to remind us of not only that all that math and physics we learned actually works, but to remind us that it's all really cool as well.

My home page

You can visit my home page here:  http://ocean.otr.usm.edu/~w777157/

Dengue and Aedes aegypti.

My first post is a link to a story this morning by NPR on the resurgence of Denge in Peru, caused mostly by Aedes aegypti, the Yellow fever mosquito.  Aedes aegypti is long gone from our area of the country, but it was not that long ago that this species was responsible for seasonal outbreaks of deadly Yellow fever here in the deep south.

The link to the story can be found here



Aedes aegypti (from Wikipedia)