Insects: Search and Destroy

Search: the cute ladybug that landed on my shoulder while I was taking a break during a long bike ride in the sunshine, la de da da da.

Destroy: the completely frightening and insanely quick-moving light-brown centipede-like bugs that crawl into my towel and then fall out just as I grab it after having a shower. aaaah! They are awful! One crawled up the shower curtain and all I could do was stare at it and make a low-pitched fear noise (eeeeaaaarrr) before it scurried away (to where? It's btwn the floorboards lair?) Thankfully these things seem to only come one at a time and are only around for a few weeks at this time of year. Still though, aaagh. It's a good thing some long-forgetten (obv bug-related though) childhood fear still causes me to shake my towel before using it.

(bugphobic? me?)

but search: ALL! i love bugs!!!
destroy: flies, anything going in or out of a bodily orifice

i am mortified of bees or anything that buzzes loudly.

mosquitoes can fuck off.

daddy long legses - did you know these things are really poisonous? but they can't bite! this cracks me up - poor little fuckers - all slow and spindly like smacked-out ballet dancers, they can never escape the fist of even the smallest or oldest or illest person who wants to kill them, and if they could actually bite us they could inflict some harm and we would all be scared, har har. wonder what happens if you eat one?

search - everything except that what does harm to you, easy
destroy - flies (ugh ugh ugh they shit and puke on our food ugh ugh ugh), cockroaches (ugh ugh ugh one of them stuck itself to my head between my eyes once ugh ugh ugh)

spiders RULE (at least in the uk where there are no deadly redbacks or whatever) cos they are totally on our side in the war against flies. and their webs are supercool. but they are not insects.

Crickets, grasshoppers - excellent. Beetles - fabulous. Bees, especially big bumble bees - cute. These are insects I'm not scared to pick up and examine closely.

Once one of the fuckers flew into my face as i was trying to get to sleep and just disintegrated. I had to go and have a shower.

My ultimate insect nemesis is the MAY FLY/MAY BUG though. They live for 24 hours and are super scary looking. They look like something from Godzilla for christssakes.

Apparently earwigs make the best mothers in the insect world.

destroy everything else. fuck the spiders. if we destroy all the flies and mosquitos, the spiders can shove it too, even though theyre not insects. also, anything with more than 8 legs, especially centipedes which are possibly the worst thing ever because they run like motherfuckers.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Damselfly_October_2007_Osaka_Japan.jpg/800px-Damselfly_October_2007_Osaka_Japan.jpg

http://io-noi-aldo.sonance.net/blogpix/spider.jpg

search roly polys and ladybugs

Reposting from Edible Geography

Deep in the archives of San Francisco-based Aquarius Records, buried between several days’ worth of “laptop glitchery” and “brutal industro-crunch,” lies this gem: Insect Noise in Stored Foodstuffs, (INRA, 2000, CD, 19:98).

The CD is currently unavailable or out of stock, which is disappointing but unsurprising, given its intriguing description:

Insect Noise in Stored Foodstuffs appears to be an industrial document produced by the 5th International Working Conference On Stored-Product Protection. This CD presents the sound investigation of the French team of Bunsel and Andrieu who used sensitive microphones with narrow frequency responses made to detect and identify the sounds of insect larvae which may be inhabiting otherwise quiet containers of grains and cereals.

A handful of examples of the sounds including the grain weevil, the Indian meal moth, and the Lesser mealworm are accompanied by a running narrative both explaining the techniques used and the identification of the insects. And in case you missed the first 30 minutes of the document, the kind people at the 5th International Working Conference On Stored-Product Protection repeat the program in French.

Mysteriously, the online proceedings of the 5th International Working Conference of Stored Product Protection (IWCSPP) do not include reference to any such CD. However, in Session 8, there is a short paper entitled “Automated acoustical detection of stored-grain insects and its potential in reducing insect problems,” by D. W. Hagstrum.

From that teasing clue, it is just a short step into the world of acoustic pest detection. David Hagstrum, as it turns out, is the co-author of a major textbook on the subject of food infestation control. His 323-page Fundamentals of Stored Product Entomology, published in 2008 by the American Association of Cereal Chemists, includes a chapter specially devoted to the subject of designing an effective acoustic sampling programme.

Silos, bins, elevators, or UFO-like grain storage rings filled with wheat, oats, barley, or sorghum make an understandably attractive home for a number of insects and their larvae. The problem, as outlined by Francis Fleurat-Lessard in a paper submitted to the 9th IWCSPP, is that while “the presence of live insects in commercial grain lots is unacceptable in grain trade,” standard techniques of insect detection are slow, inaccurate, labour-intensive, expensive, or all of the above.

...

However, since the larvae of many stored product pests grow inside grain kernels, where, Fleurat-Lessard notes, their “population density may be ten times more numerous than free-living adults,” a visually-inspected “clean” sample may actually be completely infested with rice weevil larvae. To look inside grains, laboratories use X-rays or resonance spectroscopy, but these techniques are too expensive and impractical to deploy in bulk grain lots.

But while rice weevil larvae are invisible, they are not inaudible: the “mean sound pressure” of rice weevil larvae feeding inside a wheat kernel is 23 dB, according to the USDA Agricultural Research Service. The idea, then, is that if you could somehow design sensitive-enough acoustic probes, combined with software to match the probes’ input against a database of field recordings, you might be able to monitor insect activity in stored grain automatically and detect infestations at the larval stage.

A fairly select group of entomologists, including several specialists at the USDA’s Insect Behavior and Biocontrol Research Unit, have thus spent the past twenty years investigating the acoustic detection of insect noise. Major steps forward, as described by Fleurat-Lessard, came with the development of ever more sensitive sound technology, as well as innovative designs for “muffle boxes” that shield acoustic sensors in grain bins.

Building a sound library of stored food insects was equally important – the field recordings on that Insect Noise in Stored Foodstuffs CD actually form the core of current acoustic pest detection databases. Years of research have gone into classifying the characteristic sonic signatures of different pest species at different stages in their lifecycles, to the point that a computer can now compare input from a grain silo’s acoustic sensor system against a library field recordings and tell you whether the rice weevil larvae eating your wheat kernels are sixteen or eighteen days old.

(For the curious, you can actually listen to the fairly revolting munching sounds of Indian meal moth and eighteen-day-old rice weevil larvae at the USDA website.)

And with that introduction, welcome everyone to Bug Bytes - the sound library of the USDA's Insect Behavior and Biocontrol Research Unit

http://i.imgur.com/Mxwwy.jpg

colony of ants forming a raft to carry their queen through a flood:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CQpITsdU8AAkNN1.jpg

http://www.foxcarolina.com/story/30186771/islands-made-of-ants-seen-floating-around-the-upstate

Bunch of these sighted this weekend in my neck of the woods:

http://www.foxcarolina.com/story/30186771/islands-made-of-ants-seen-floating-around-the-upstate

Good/Bad news: Not Just Bees, All Insects are in Decline and Heading for Extinction