lightsinthedistance-modernlife

If you haven't yet noticed, I'm fond of writing about millipedes. Since I moved to Arkansas, I've seen a few species that don't live in Ohio, which is exciting--it's nice to see more millipede diversity. A wide-ranging genus in the eastern United States is Apheloria (Family Xystodesmidae). It contains species that utilize cyanide as a chemical defense and exhibit aposematism to warn predators to leave them alone (this is common in the family). Apheloria virginiensis is the most widespread species in the genus, and has five subspecies. Two of them occur west of the Mississippi River: Apheloria v. iowa and Apheloria v. reducta. A. v. reducta is a bit more widespread, being found in Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri. I recently came across this millipede in a leaf litter sample in Arkansas. Apheloria virginiensis reducta Instead of the bold black usually seen in A. virginiensis, this one sports a chestnut brown color. I wasn't quite sure of the exact spe...

I was asked recently what my favorite millipede is. That's not an easy question, but I was forced to pick one, so I thought about it for a bit and then figured, why not share it with everyone? I find myself doing more tweeting than blogging lately, but Twitter is terrible for long form responses. There are about 12,000 described species of millipedes, and I've seen maybe 70 of them in life or in photos, so I'm drawing from a limited pool of millipede diversity. Even so, I know of many amazing species. Is my favorite something like the shocking pink dragon millipede, Desmotyxes purpurosea ? Desmotyxes purpurosea from Enghoff et al 2007 . Read the paper, it's really neat! Or maybe my favorite is another tropical millipede. After all, Psammodesmus bryophorus , a millipede I've blogged about before , has mosses that grow on its back! Photo from Martínez-Torres SD et al 2011. You won't be disappointed if you browse photos of millipedes from the tropics. There are ...

When doing a lot of research with older literature, you start to gain a strange sense of respect and familiarity with authors that are by now long gone. I've written about this before, with regards to Samuel Hildreth , but lately, I've had a different connection with another scientist who has passed. Usually, when I visualize these old scientists, I imagine senior scientists writing with a large degree of certainty, brought on by their age. Of course, this isn't an accurate visualization, but it's been my go-to imagery. It's sort of a pleasant surprise when I find out an author is younger, especially when they're in their early 20s, since that's where I am right now. It's easier to connect with another 23 year old than a 35 year old. It also impresses me and motivates me to match that level of commitment. Those were the thoughts swirling around my head when I came upon the papers of Charles Harvey Bollman, born in 1868 in Monongahela City, Pennsylvania. ...

My millipede research always seems to throw me into new adventures. Neat information just sort of hangs out in the old literature, sometimes in the form of a new species that no one is quite sure about. The species in question is Chaetaspis albus . Sort of. First, we'll go over the information we have about this species. Chaetaspis albus (no common name, sorry) was described by Charles Harvey Bollman in 1887 ( Entomologica Americana , II, 1887, pp.45-46). It's a millipede in the order Polydesmida and family Macrosternodesmidae. His description was also included in an 1893 publication of his works, which is great, because that means I can post the whole thing here without having to worry about copyright. If it's tough to read, you can click the photo to enlarge it. From Bollman 1893 So there's our information on the original specimen. It's white, less than a centimeter long, less than a millimeter wide, and was found in Indiana under a log. That's a millipede th...

Millipede - Abacion sp. I've been doing some research lately on a few millipede genera and have found myself lamenting the lack of well-written and accessible resources for millipedes. I have a good enough knowledge base to navigate through the published literature, but it's too inaccessible for general audiences. BugGuide's millipede page is probably the best online resource, but it still lacks good introductory resources for people wanting to learn more about the many-legged critters. You're able to submit a picture, and if you're lucky, someone will help you get it down to genus and maybe tell you how they identified it. Concise keys for the millipedes don't really exist like they do for other arthropods, due to the characteristics used to identify millipedes. It's not like identifying a moth or a beetle, where coloration, pattern, and overall look can go a long way. You can get to Order from a photograph relatively easily with millipedes, ...

Yesterday was a nice day outside, and I figured it would probably be one of the last before the snow started falling. I decided to take advantage of this, and set off to find some mushrooms. (Also, it was snowing when I woke up this morning, so I was correct in my assumption. Maybe I should take up weather forecasting.) I packed some collecting supplies and set off for the nature trail near my old elementary school. It has a nice array of habitat types and gratuitous amounts of decaying logs, so I was optimistic that I would find some nice mushrooms. However, almost immediately after I stepped onto the trail, my trip turned into millipede hunting. It's just too difficult to resist turning over every decaying log I find in hopes of getting some millipedes out of it. My habit ended up paying off: I found many millipedes and collected 7 specimens from 4 separate species. It's astounding how many little critters live in decaying wood and the surrounding leaf litter. It's a mini...

I learned a new word recently: epizoic. It's related to epiphytic, which describes the relationship of plants that grow on top of other plants (think of bromeliads or lichens that grow on trees). While epiphytic plants have a house, epizoic plants have a mobile home---they grow on top of animals. And what do some mosses use as a mobile home? Millipedes! In a paper published in December 2011, S. Daniela Martínez T. et al . describe this relationship between 10 species of mosses and a tropical millipede, Psammodesmus bryophorus . Obviously this millipede is at the cutting edge of fashion. Field work for this study was done at the Reserva Natural Río Nambi in Colombia. As the scientists sorted the 124 millipedes they collected, they noticed that some of their P. bryophorus specimens looked a bit green...because they had moss growing on their backs. (Sadly, the paper doesn't indicate whether or not the mosses caused any uncomfortable itching.) Intrigued, they set to work and checke...

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...

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...

When I need to talk to someone about a facet of Entomology that blows my mind, I've taken to mentioning millipedes. I've been keeping millipedes as a labor of love over the past year, which is something that has taught me a lot. Probably the coolest thing I've learned about is some species' propensity to fluoresce under ultraviolet light. I've chronicled my previous experiences with a millipede species that fluoresces under ultraviolet light previously here and here , so if you want a primer about Semionellus placidus , check out those posts. I've established that this species fluoresces under UV light quite nicely, and I've found it in the field from spring until fall. It also appears to be quite abundant (in southeastern Ohio, at least) and lights up the leaf litter whenever I'm looking for it. UV fluorescence in arthropods isn't anything new: it's been reported most notably in scorpions, many insects, and some other millipede species. A few m...

Let's talk about millipedes! You may have read my entry on a millipede that fluoresces under ultraviolet light I found this past fall that grabbed my attention. I've since done some more research, and after working on a poster a few weeks ago for the Ohio Natural History Conference, I have more information and motivation to summarize what I've learned. How did I find out about these UV fluorescing millipedes in the first place? I was on a night hike with some friends last fall and had the foresight to bring a UV flashlight along, just in case there was anything neat to look at under UV. It was a bit chilly, and we weren't finding much. Then I turned the flashlight on. As we passed by areas with fallen leaves, I started catching glimpses of blue-green light: millipedes were fluorescing while milling about in the leaf litter. If you haven't seen this, you owe it to yourself to grab a UV flashlight and check it out. As it turns out, the millipedes I was seeing were o...