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Showing posts from September, 2012

Dancing Stick

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The species I find in the county never cease to amaze me.  This delightful stick insect, for example, takes a discerning eye to pick out in the forest. "My dream in life is....TO DANCE!" But not really. This guy found me when he started to crawl on a friend during a recent potluck. It's a Northern Walkingstick, Diapheromera femorata , the continent's most common walkingstick. It's about three inches long, but looks bigger because of how long its legs are.  Its limbs are leafy green and its body looks like it's been sculpted straight from a tree, giving it some terrific camouflage. I've been observing it in an insect cage for the last few days and it truly is a remarkable insect. Walkingsticks are the world's best method actors, taking their role as a stick very seriously.  ...which is a good strategy, as birds are liable to pick these guys right off the plants they're feeding on. 

Science Video Friday - Gangnam Style Science

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If you haven't yet heard of the massively popular video Gangnam Style , click that link to check it out. Personally, I'm more of a Call Me Maybe guy, but to each his own. But what if you add Bill Nye the Science Guy to Gangnam Style? Well, I end up liking the video a whole lot more. This is where social media meets science, and it is glorious.

Species of the Beiser Field Station

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I've been busy lately, in a good way. My current project is identifying all the species of insects, spiders, millipedes, and other arthropods I've found at the Barbara A. Beiser Field Station (BBFS) over the past few years as an undergraduate at Marietta College. I spent many hours at the field station and thoroughly explored much of it, taking many photos along the way. I have an article about my experiences coming up in the next issue of the Marietta Natural History Society's newsletter, which I'll link to when it comes out. UPDATE! : You can read my article here (PDF warning). It starts on page 4, titled Beiser Browsings . So far I've identified around 200 arthropods from BBFS. The timeline for my sightings and collections goes back to 2010 or so, when I first started going there for things like labs and work days, and the identifications have been a long time in coming. It feels great to have so many identified though, as there hasn't been a taxonomic inven

Science Video Friday - A mass of harvestmen

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After attending a harvestman workshop this past summer, I've become quite interested in the Opiliones. They're a much more diverse group than I previously thought. One of the things I've been searching for since then has been a massive gathering of them, which this lucky person found. , Neat? Or terrifying? Definitely neat. Come on, harvestmen don't even have venom glands!

R.I.P., Richard Hoffman

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I recently learned that Dr. Richard Hoffman, the emeritus curator of the Department of Recent Invertebrates at the Virginia Museum of Natural History, passed away a few months ago. This is sad news, and it affected me more than I expected. I never met him, but after I started researching millipedes, there was no getting away from his work. It's difficult to find a millipede article without at least one citation to Dr. Hoffman, and usually you find more. He laid the foundation for millipede research in North America, and boy was he prolific. His research interests weren't solely limited to the millipedes, however. He also studied reptiles and amphibians, and other arthropods. Just today I received a publication about the Assassin Bugs of Virginia authored by Dr. Hoffman in 2006, one of the hundreds of publications he authored during his life. Dr. Hoffman will be sorely missed, but certainly won't be forgotten by anyone with even a passing interest in millipedes. For more inf