Foraging honey bee: Getting ready for the dance.
Courtesy Mark RyanOne of the strangest behaviors observed in nature is the honey bee “waggle dance”. Foraging bees use this get-down-get-funky display to communicate to their hive mates the discovery of a new food source. It usually takes place whenever the food is of a high quality or when the hive’s pantry is growing bare. The dance is performed on a special “dance floor” in the hive and is a way for the foragers to let the other bees know what’s been found and how to get there.
“The honey bee dance is this incredibly complex set of activities,” said University of Illinois entomology and neuroscience professor Gene Robinson. “It’s a very integrated communication system, very elaborate and very elegant, one of the seven wonders of the animal behavior world.”
Check it out for yourself:
Robinson and his colleagues wondered what motivated such behavior in foraging honey bees. Did they experience some sort of pleasure response, just like we humans do when we do something nice for others? To find out, the researchers decided to shake things up and see what happens when the celebration gets kicked up to another level and party drugs are thrown into the dance mix.
Robinson became interested in the waggle dance during a previous study investigating the role of octopamine in insect eating and movement behaviors. Octopamine is a biogenic amine (like histamine and serotonin) that’s found in higher levels in the brains of foraging honey bees than any other bees in the hive.
“The idea behind that study was that maybe this mechanism that structures selfish behavior – eating – was co-opted during social evolution to structure social behavior – that is, altruistic behavior,” Robinson said. “There are various lines of thought that indicate that one way of structuring society is to have altruistic behavior be pleasurable.”
Altruism is known to trigger a motivating pleasure response in the human brain, but the question remained whether the same reward mechanism existed in an insect’s brain.
So, in this new study Robinson and his research team at UI in Urbana-Champaign took things a step further. They found that when a foraging bee gets all hopped up on cocaine, it doesn’t matter how good the found food is or how much is stockpiled in the hive’s cupboards, bees just “Gotta Dance”.
Not only that, but the study’s results have also led the researchers to theorize that insects have motivating reward centers in their brains, just as humans do.
“This study provides strong support for the idea that bees have a reward system, that it’s been co-opted and it’s now involved in a social behavior, which motivates them to tell their hive mates about the food that they’ve found,” Robinson said.
Because cocaine causes honey bees to dance more – an altruistic behavior – the researchers believe their results support the idea that there is a reward system in the insect brain, something that has never before been shown.
A second set of experiments showed some interesting results. Non-foraging bees, it seems, were strict wallflowers: they never danced at all – no matter if they were on cocaine or not. And the coked-up foraging bees didn’t move about any more than non-foragers except when dancing, and when they did dance they only did so at appropriate times and only on the “dance floor”, no place else.
The honeybees, unfortunately, also seemed to suffer cocaine withdrawal symptoms, but the results of the study could lead to a better understanding of substance abuse in humans, and that’s fortunate for us.
The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
LINKS
IUUC news release
Tags : Did you ever wonder what those pesky moths ate before they ate your clothes in your closet? Clothes moths were known previously to feed on dead animals. Recently, scientists also discovered that the casemaking clothes moth, one of the two most common closet menaces, can be helpful in forensic work as well!
The casemaking clothes moth, so named because it makes a fuzzy case-like home for itself as a young caterpillar, will eat human hair and can even feed on corpses. The caterpillars can eat enough hair to identify a body with DNA.
These moths can be particularly helpful if a body is moved to a new location. The caterpillar will move to a nearby spot, away from the body, to make its cocoon. Then, if the body is moved, DNA evidence from the caterpillar in the cocoon can tie the victim to the original location.
More information on this can be found at Science News.
The maggots will set you free...
Almost 50 years ago in Canada, a 14-year old boy was sentenced to death for the alleged murder of a 12-year old classmate. The 12-year old was found murdered two days after she was last seen with the 14-year old. Public opinion resulted in the boy being sentenced to life, due to what many thought was an improperly carried out investigation. Some of the evidence from this investigation included photographing and collecting some maggots from the body of the 12-year old. In 2000, the case was reopened.
Part of the research of the defense centers on the maggot evidence collected in 1959. In 2006, the corpses of three pigs were placed at the crime scene to collect additional maggot specimens. For those not in the know with regard to fly lifecycles, the development of a fly from egg to larva (maggot) to pupa to adult is tied to local environmental conditions, such as the temperature. Richard Merritt, a fly specialist from Michigan State University reviewed the specimens and environmental data. After examining the small size of the 1959 maggots, larval growth rates and the temperature, Merritt determined that there was no way that the boy could have committed the murder the day the girl disappeared (the boy had an alibi for the following day).
To check out some maggots in action on a pig corpse, check out Liza's pig cam log on Science Buzz pig!
http://www.smm.org/buzz/topics/forensic-entomology/lizas-pig-cam-log
Aphid in amber: The new species is trapped inside fossilized tree sap.
Courtesy Rothamsted Research Visual Communications UnitA British man purchased an item on eBay that has proven to be a species not seen before. No, it’s not a new species of toast sporting the image of some religious or political icon, but rather a new species of fossil aphid encased in a 40 to 50 million year-old piece of amber.
The purchase took place last year from a seller in Lithuania, and was only made public this week. The lucky buyer was Dr Richard Harrington, vice-president of the UK's Royal Entomological Society. The small chunk of amber was a bargain, too - only £20 (about $36).
I guess this isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened. Just two years ago, a previously unknown species of sea urchin was acquired on eBay.
In this recent case, Dr. Harrington sent the fossil to Professor Ole Heie, a fossil aphid expert in Denmark, and was delighted to learn his new acquisition was an unknown extinct species.
Harrington wanted to name the new species Mindarus ebayi in honor of the online auction site. Unfortunately, it seems the scientific community has no sense of humor in regards to frivolous nomenclature, unless it involves a favorite rock musician. So instead, the newly described aphid was named Mindarus harringtoni in Harrington’s honor. Gee, I hope he isn’t too bummed out about that. Go here to see a photo of the buyer with his prized fossil bug.
SOURCES
Rothamsted Research story
Story on NowPublic site
Story on BBC site
As I watched the praying mantis crawling on my hand, I noticed something brownish coming out of its bottom. At first I thought it was feces, but then it started wriggling around vigorously. Was it a tapeworm, or some unknown species of worm?
Praying mantis: This isn't the mantis with the hairworm. But any excuse to post a photo of a praying mantis is a good excuse to do it.
Courtesy CatDancing
We brought the worm home in a bag and searched on the internet. It was a hairworm, a parasite that feeds on the insides of insects and brainwashes the insects into jumping into the water, where it completes its lifecycle. That makes sense because the praying mantis jumped off my hand into a wading pool just before I brought it onto land and the hairworm started coming out.
We've only found examples of hairworms coming out of grasshoppers and rarely emerging from damselfies/dragonflies. Has a hairworm ever before been observed coming out of a praying mantis? I found it on Oct. 4, 2006 at Kyodo no Mori in Fuchu-shi in Tokyo when my 4th grade class from ASIJ was on a field trip.
My name is Elsa and I am nine years old. I want to be either an entemologist or a herpetologist when I grow up.
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