Berus Institut

conservation through education

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Video Clip SS218421 (Tardigrade Walking Through Algae)

Tardigrade (Hypsibius dujardini) walking through algae, microscope view.

Tardigrades are commonly known as water bears or moss piglets. They are found in practically every habitat on Earth, from hot springs to beneath ice sheets, and are renowned for their toughness. 

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Experiments have shown they can survive being frozen to nearly absolute zero and heated to 150 degrees Celsius. They have survived pressures of more than 6000 atmospheres, and have survived after prolonged exposure to the vacuum and radiation found in space. 

In unfavorable conditions they can dehydrate to 1% of their normal water content and remain alive in stasis for over a decade. In more normal conditions, they prefer moist environments where they feed on algae and bacteria. 

This tardigrade is often used as a model organism in biological research, and its genome is being sequenced.

© Sinclair Stammers / Science Source

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This is Cossus cossus, a caterpillar that don't feed on leaves. It lives in wood until it turns into a moth.

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Macrovipera lebetina © P. Urban

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Texas Wasp Moth

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Geniale Mimikry

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WHICH INSECT HAS MASTERED BOTH BRAIN SURGERY AND MIND CONTROL?

The answer is, the emerald cockroach wasp, or jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa), which is a colorful solitary wasp who uses cockroaches as hosts for its larvae, because why lay your eggs in a hole in the ground when you can lay them right on top of their food source?

The female wasp stings the cockroach, often six times bigger than herself. The first dose of venom paralyzes the front legs. The second dose of venom, however, is when it gets interesting. While the roach is paralyzed and defenseless, the wasp injects her venom into the brain.

When all this is done, she bites off the roach’s antennae, drinks its hemolymph (insect blood, simply put), and leads the still alive, zombified cockroach to her burrow.

At the burrow, she lays an egg on top of the cockroach and buries them both. When the egg hatches, the larva eats its way into the cockroach’s abdomen, living off the sugar-rich hemolymph. After that, the larva will kill the cockroach (yes, it was alive during this whole process) and proceed to pupate inside the body.

Isn’t nature beautiful?

Classification: Animalia - Arthropoda - Insecta - Hymenoptera - Apocrita - Apoidae - Ampulicidae - Ampulex

Image credit: Enio Branco, Gudrun Herzner, Ram Gal.

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Hatten wir ebenfalls im Labor.

[libutron]

The rarity of the Stalk-eyed Flies 

Flies of the family Diopsidae (Order Diptera), commonly referred to as Stalk-eyed Flies, sure look bizarre. They are hypercephalic, which means that their head is extremely expanded in a way that places both their eyes and the antennae at the tips of very long, often almost horizontal stalks.

Diopsidae occur mostly in Africa and SE Asia, although two species are found also in North America and one in Europe. 

Although flies with hypercephalic features are considered a classic case of sexual selection driving the development of exaggerated morphological characters, Diopsidae don’t quite fit this explanation as both males and females have similar, greatly modified heads.

In some species, however, sexual dimorphism exists, and males have longer eye-stalks than females. In such species females preferentially mate with males having the longest stalks, and these matings result in increased fitness of the females. Males engage in long, ritualized contests, where they clash with their heads, and the winner is almost always the individual with more widely separated eyes. This is because of a phenomenon known as hyperallometry – the larger the armament, the larger the body size, and thus the strength of the individual. Such contests serve as a simple way to assess the overall size of the rival, and smaller individuals will quickly give up the duel, sensing the strength of the larger rival.

It is not surprising that carrying your eyeballs at the ends of a long broomstick does not make your life any easier, and it has been shown that males who have particularly long stalks must also develop larger wings to compensate for the drag caused by their eyes. This, in turn, supports the idea of the “Handicap model” of sexual selection in these flies – because the long eye stalks make the male’s life more difficult, surely he must be a carrier of some excellent genetic material to be able to overcome the handicap of the gargantuan ornaments.

Reference: [1]

Photo credit: [Top: ©Rodrigo Layug - unidentified species | Locality: unknown, 2011] - [Bottom: ©Paul Bertner - Teleopsis sp. | Locality: Mulu National Park, Sarawak province, Borneo, 2009]

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Wow, Stielaugenfliegen sind super.

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Nuctenea umbratica

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