Category Archives: Science

Monarch monitoring workshop June 6 & 7- citizen science opportunity

Monarchs are one of the most well-known symbols of the insect world, and many populations across the United States are in decline. If you have an interest in contributing to the understanding of western monarch population dynamics, there is a great opportunity to help out coming up right here in northern Nevada in June.

The Monarch Joint Venture is putting on a workshop to engage citizen scientists in western monarch conservation and citizen science monitoring. It will be a 2 day workshop open to the public (must register beforehand). Speakers for the training include experts from the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, Southwest Monarch Study, and Project Monarch Health. Participants will learn protocols for a variety of monarch citizen science programs and will be able to experience monitoring in the field and sampling with live organisms.

The workshop is Friday June 6th and Saturday June 7th at the River Fork Ranch between Genoa and Minden, NV. You can register for the workshop here. For more information, email Sarada at ssangame@umn.edu, and feel free to share this with anyone who would be interested! We here at Nevada Bugs are definitely going and we hope to see you there too!

More information about the workshop can be found here: Nevada Monarch Monitoring Workshop FLYER

Photo from MVJ

Photo from MVJ

UNR opens a new Museum of Natural History

The University of Nevada, Reno is opening a brand new Museum of Natural History and they’re having an open house to kick it off! The museum, located in the Fleischmann Agriculture building (room 300) on the UNR campus, will be open Wednesday, March 5th from 4-6 PM, and Nevada Bugs and Butterflies will be there too. We will have a variety of insects to hold and observe, and you can come check out some of the great collections at UNR and meet some of the researchers that use them. See the announcement below or online here for details.

Hope to see you there!

Meet our bugs- velvet ants!

For this week’s installment of the “meet our bugs” series, we’re profiling a fascinating example of Great Basin biodiversity, our velvet ants. Despite their name, these cuties are actually wasps (Hymenoptera) in the family Mutillidae. Velvet ants are all solitary species, unlike many of the un-friendly wasps you might be more familiar with. Species of these wasps are found all over North America, though they are especially diverse in the arid West, and you can sometimes find them if you are hiking in undisturbed habitat. One feature almost all species share is the presence of aposematic coloration, or bright coloring that is meant to convey danger to potential predators. In the case of velvet ants, females are armed with a powerful sting, one of the most painful in North America! However, they are not aggressive and very rarely sting if unprovoked. As shown in the picture, many species in a given area will mimic each other to increase the protective ability of their coloration, a process known as Mullerian mimicry. So, it can be hard to identify individuals as different species; we do know that our wasps are all in the genus Dasymutilla.

Velvet ant in our display

Velvet ant in our display. Cotton ball is soaked in nectar solution.

Figure of Dasymutilla diversity in North America, along with associated mimicry rings (figure from Wilson et al. 2012).

Figure of Dasymutilla diversity in North America, along with associated mimicry rings (figure from Wilson et al. 2012). You can read more at the website of Joe Wilson at Utah State University Tooele.

Velvet ants have a number of interesting biological features. Males and females are extremely sexually dimorphic, meaning the sexes look very different. Sometimes, males and females of the same species don’t even share the same color pattern, making it hard to tell which species is which. In addition, females are all wingless (thus, all of ours are females), and are also the sex with a stinger; males fly and are harmless. One other characteristic of velvet ants is an extremely tough exoskeleton, which comes in handy for their lifestyle. Velvet ants share an unusual reproductive strategy in that they are ectoparasitoids of other solitary hymenoptera. A female velvet ant will locate the burrow of a solitary ground-nesting bee or wasp that contains a developing larva, invade the nest (often to the dismay of the host), and lay an egg next to the larva. The velvet ant egg will hatch into its own larva and proceed to kill the developing host, devouring it and/or any prey items in the burrow. However, once the velvet ant metamorphoses into an adult, the wasp will be a nectar feeder, visiting flowers during the morning and evening, making these species important pollinators of arid regions. Adult velvet ants can live for one to a few years, relatively long lived for wasps. Below are a couple short videos that demonstrate the nectaring behavior of velvet ants (the white ball is a cotton ball soaked in nectar solution).

Velvet ant drinking

Velvet ant drinking

In addition to the mimicry of velvet ant species to each other, other types of insects that may not be as well defended also mimic velvet ants to try and gain protection via association, a process called Batesian mimicry. These species include spiders, beetles, and antlion larvae. In fact, the spider mimic below was found right at the butterfly house, and we have seen velvet ants on the site as well. The unusual biology and ecology of these organisms, along with their diversity in the Great Basin, make them great species to exhibit at our butterfly house and outreach events.

Jumping spider velvet ant mimic

Spider velvet ant mimic

 

Up close and personal. Big eyes are essential for a hunting lifestyle.

Up close and personal. Big eyes are essential for a hunting lifestyle.

Spider mimic dorsal view

Spider mimic dorsal view

Velvet ant dorsal view

Happy Darwin Day!

Happy Darwin Day! Charles Darwin was born this day in 1809. Today many institutions and people across the globe celebrate his many important contributions to science and natural history.

One of Darwin’s many predictions of natural selection was the existence of a pollinator (a moth, specifically) to fertilize the orchid Angraecum sesquipedale, published in 1862. This species is unique in that the nectar lies at the bottom of a flower over a foot deep. Dismissed at first by scientific contemporaries, this moth was later discovered in 1903. Xanthopan morgani has a proboscis measuring almost 35 cm (over 13 inches)! This is a classic example of coevolution, where the fitness of both plant and pollinator is on the success of the interaction that is plant pollination.

Go Darwin!

Angraecum sesquipedale

Angraecum sesquipedale

440px-NHM_Xanthopan_morgani

Xanthopan morgani