Month: June 2012

A Tribute to Mayflies

/ Chris Buddle / 2 Comments

For about a week, one of the main buildings at McGill’s Macdonald Campus has been covered with mayflies (Order Ephemeroptera):

Mayflies (Ephemeroptera) on a brick wall

It happens every year, about this time. It is lovely, and reminds me of why I love entomology.

I decided to write two Haiku about them. Short poems to honour their short lives (as adults) Caveat: I claim no real ability in writing Haiku!

Fleeting life on land

Triangle wings on brick wall

Fly into summer

&

Wings unfold and dry

Fragile signals of solstice

Goodbye fish, I’m free

Thanks, by the way, to Three Lines about Six Legs -a post there (about mayflies) inspired this (and I know that the author of that post walked by the same brick wall…).

P.S. Later this week I’ll be off for a week’s vacation so there won’t be any new posts for a little while. I’ll write again in early July.

Why a scientific society needs a blog

/ Chris Buddle / 7 Comments

I’ve been involved with the Entomological Society of Canada for a long time. It’s a wonderful community of Canadian entomologists sharing an interest and enthusiasm for arthropods. The ESC’s activities are mostly centered around its annual conference, its range of publications, and it offers a suite of awards and scholarships. The society’s website also hosts career opportunities, photo contests, and a range of other rich and varied entomological content. The latest, big news for the society is that on 1 June, the ESC officially launched its own blog. This blog was the brainchild of a few members of the society, and two great Canadian entomology bloggers, Crystal Ernst and Morgan Jackson, are the administrators of the blog.

So…why does a scientific society need a blog? What’s the benefit to members of the society, to the society itself, and what’s the benefit for the broader entomological community? Here are some thoughts about this:

1) Visibility: it’s a tough time for scientific societies - funding is tight, and for a lot of people, the value of memberships to societies may seem less important than it once was. Therefore, increased visibility though an on-line presence is important. A static website is essential, but a blog has a fluidity and dynamic presence that is hard to match with a website. An active blog with well-written and interesting content will do a lot to increase a society’s visibility. The visibility from an active blog is also global in its reach.

2) Opportunities to contribute: the ESC blog will have dozens of contributors - means anybody with an interest in entomology (regardless of their profession and educational background) has an opportunity to write something for a broader audience. Blog posts are often easier to write, they are shorter than research papers, and the content need not be vetted through a peer-review process. It’s a forum for creative ideas, stories, photographs, and fun facts about insects. The blog already has a couple of nice examples to illustrate this point. For example, Chris Cloutier, a naturalist at the Morgan Arboretum on the Island of Montreal, just wrote a lovely post about the Hackberry Emperor. Chris is an example of a different kind of entomologist - he’s not a research scientist, nor is his primary profession Entomology. However, he does outreach, has a wealth of expertise and talent, and he has a lot to offer the entomological community. These kind of opportunities create an environment of inclusion for a society - members have a voice and can share their ideas and expertise. Non-members can also contribute and recognize that there is a strong community associated with the ESC (…and perhaps some of the non-members will see the value of the society and join).

Screen shot of Chris Cloutier’s post

3) Economics: more than ever before, scientific societies are struggling to maintain members, and balance their books. A blog is a cheap and effective way to promote their science to the world and the cost can be as little as a domain name. I can think of no other method by which a society can promote itself at this cost point. You could even argue that the time for static websites may be coming to a close since they are costly to host, require people with specific technical skills, and require a lot of back-end support. The good blog sites can be administered by people with relatively few of these skills (I’m proof of that!!).

The ESC logo

4) Marketing and branding: a high quality blog helps a society get its brand to a broad audience, and helps to market the society to the world. The ESC has a long and wonderful history, but its main audience over the years has mostly been academics, research scientists, and students of entomology. The ESC brand has excellence and quality behind it and that kind of brand should be shared, expanded, and through this process, the society will hopefully gain positive exposure and more members.

5) Communication: At the end of the day, knowledge is something to be shared. Scientific communication is a fast-changing field and one that is making all of us reconsider how we talk and write about our interests. I think we all have a responsibility to do outreach. There is so much mis-information out on the Internet, and people with specialized and well-honed skills must be heard and must have a means to share accurate information in a clear and effective manner - e.g., a society blog. I also think many entomologist are perfectly positioned to do effective outreach (I’ve written about this before). Part of the ESC’s mandate is dissemination of knowledge about insects and social media is a key piece of any communication strategy.

What do you think? Can you think of other reasons why scientific societies need to embrace social media? Please share your ideas!

I will finish with a stronger statement: scientific societies are perfectly positioned to have the BEST blogs on the Internet. A scientific society is a community, a community with history, and a community built on high level of expertise. A scientific society also provides a structure and framework for bringing together high quality knowledge about a particular topic. A blog can be amazingly strong with this kind of support. A society is also about people and these people work tirelessly behind the scenes to facilitate the dissemination of high quality content. These people, structured in committees, and with oversight from an executive committee, can provide tangible support that will help to keep a blog from becoming unidimensional. The ESC’s blog administrators (Crystal and Morgan) know how to keep the content of high quality, and know how to put all the pieces together - and they know they can do this because they have an entire community behind them. The society is committed to supporting the blog and for that reason, there is reason to be optimistic about its long-term success. Please follow the blog!

Urban field work: Pollinators in Montreal

/ Chris Buddle / Leave a comment

I finally managed to get a little bit of field work in this week. Although some would question whether it’s REALLY field work, since it involved driving to a couple of cemeteries and community gardens in the city of Montreal! This urban field work is the start of a terrific new Master’s project by student Étienne Normandin. Here he is, happily doing field work in a community garden:

Sweeping for bees (and other insects) in a Montreal community garden

Étienne is worked with Valérie Fournier and me in a collaborative project about bees in Montreal. In this project, we are interesting in asking about the diversity and community structure of wild and domesticated bees in urban areas, and we are working in two major urban centres: Montreal and Quebec City. Over the past couple of weeks, Étienne has been setting up traps in community gardens and other habitats (including cemeteries) to assess the bee biodiversity. Étienne is using a combination of approaches to collect bees, including sweep-netting (as pictured above) and elevated pan traps, as illustrated here (the different colours are used to attract different kind of bees):

Étienne setting up elevated pan traps, to collect bees

This is the very start of what will be an interesting and important project, especially given the concern about the losses of bees, and the economic and ecological consequence of changing pollinator communities. I will continue to post developments in this project. And, I warmly welcome Étienne to the Arthropod Ecology laboratory!

You are always within three feet of a spider: Fact or Fiction?

/ Chris Buddle / 20 Comments

A lovely crab spider (Thomisidae).

Last week I wrote a post about the life history of Arctic wolf spiders - and in that post I discussed how some of our recent research results show wolf spider densities in Arctic tundra habitats are just under 0.5 per square metre. Morgan Jackson commented on that post, and asked about whether it was true that you are always within six feet of a spider. This is one of those common myths (along with ‘do spiders bite?).

A quick scan on the Internet suggests this myth can be stated in many ways (e.g., within a metre, within six feet, within three feet, etc.) but you get the point: are you always close to spiders? . This ‘myth’ has been submitted to Mythbusters as one that the show should tackle, and ‘yahoo answers‘ has this question - some of the answers are hilarious (e.g., not when you are swimming). So…is it fact or fiction? When in doubt, let’s go look at the scientific evidence.

What does the scientific literature tell us?

As mentioned in my post last week, our laboratory just published a paper in the Canadian Journal of Zoology about wolf spiders in the Arctic. In this work, wolf spiders occurred at densities of close to 0.5 per square meter. In some of my own earlier work in Alberta (more shameless self-promotion! see Buddle, 2000), I estimated densities of wolf spiders (in a forest environment) to be between 0.5 and 1 per square meter. Not long ago, I had a discussion with a PhD student working in Alaska, and she also had densities estimates of wolf spiders within a similar range. Kiss & Samu published a paper in 2000 that was about densities of wolf spiders in agroecosystems in Europe, and their estimates were at a minimum of three adults per square metre.

A wolf spider (Lycosidae) - they are everywhere!

Those aforementioned estimates are for one family of spiders only (the wolf spiders, Lycosidae), and wolf spiders are active and easy to see. I would argue that densities of other spider families are likely higher than wolf spiders. Most spiders are quite small and easy to miss, but they are everywhere.

In a classic and seminal paper by Turnbull (1973) (all Arachnologists should read that paper!) there are a series of estimates of spider densities in a range of habitats - and these are estimates for all spiders, not just a single family. The lowest estimate he provides is from work in a Polish meadow where densities of 0.64 spiders per square metre were reported. The highest density was 842 spiders per square metre in an English pasture. Turnbull averaged all previous published estimates and ended with a mean of 130.8 spiders per square meter. Turnbull does point that it is kind of a meaningless statistic, except that it helps us tackle the question of interest: Is there always a spider within three feet of you…?

So…. in most “natural” habitats, I think it is true that you are always within three feet of a spider.

There are some exceptions, of course. Here are some:

-spiders are not nearly as common in heavily managed, monoculture habitats (e.g., turf grass, golf courses, some urban greenspaces)

-spiders are not as common in buildings as in natural habitats (although they are there, as I’ve written about in posts about the zebra spider, cellar spider, and ceiling spider)

-in Northern climates, spiders are not active in the winter months- so although you could still be close to them (i.e, they are under the snow, somewhere…), it’s quite a different context

-spiders are terrestrial, so you are not close to spiders when you are swimming!

-on the theme of ridiculous exceptions, spiders don’t tend to be common on trains, in airplanes or in trucks and cars (although have you noticed there is often a spider tucked away in your side-view mirror?)

Spiders: you gotta love them - in natural systems, they are always close to you!

Spiders - they really are everywhere - even as sculpture.

References

Buddle, C. (2000). LIFE HISTORY OF PARDOSA MOESTA AND PARDOSA MACKENZIANA (ARANEAE, LYCOSIDAE) IN CENTRAL ALBERTA, CANADA Journal of Arachnology, 28 (3), 319-328 DOI: 10.1636/0161-8202(2000)028[0319:LHOPMA]2.0.CO;2

Kiss, B., and Samu, F (2000) Evaluation of population densities of the common wolf spider Pardosa agrestis (Araneae : Lycosidae) in Hungarian alfalfa fields using mark-recapture. European Journal of Entomology 97(2) 191-195 Link

Turnbull, A. (1973). Ecology of the True Spiders (Araneomorphae) Annual Review of Entomology, 18 (1), 305-348 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.en.18.010173.001513

ResearchBlogging.org

Life History of Arctic Wolf Spiders: Part 1

/ Chris Buddle / 10 Comments

For those of you who follow my blog, you will notice I’m somewhat obsessed with the Arctic - in part because of our large Northern Biodiversity Program, but also because it’s an ideal system for studying the ecology of arthropods. It also doesn’t hurt that the Arctic is a beautiful place to work!

The northern Yukon landscape: spider habitat

I am very excited to write about the latest paper published from our laboratory, titled Life history of tundra-dwelling wolf spiders (Araneae: Lycosidae) from the Yukon Territory, Canada. This has just recently been published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, with Dr. Joseph Bowden as the lead author. Dr. Bowden graduate from my laboratory just over a year ago, and is now living in California with his family. Although the climate is somewhat warmer in California compared to the Yukon, he’s still actively working on research related to the biology of Arctic arthropods. Dr. Bowden was a terrific student in my laboratory, and has already published some work about the community ecology of Arctic spiders: he has one paper in the journal Arctic and another in Ecoscience.

Dr. Joseph Bowden, working in the Yukon and ready for the biting flies!

In the CJZ paper, Joseph studied three species of tundra-dwelling wolf spiders (family Lycosidae) and asked whether body size or condition better explained variation in fecundity and relative reproductive effort (defined as the ratio of female body mass to clutch mass). He also tested whether a trade-off exists between investment in offspring size and number. The field work for this research was really enjoyable, as it involved collecting spiders by visual surveys and dry pitfall traps - after collection, Joseph set up a laboratory in a local campground shelter to do measurements on the species:

Dr. Joseph Bowden in a Northern “laboratory”

One of the main findings was that body size explained well the variation in offspring number. Stated another way, larger female wolf spiders produced more eggs, a finding well supported in the literature. A second main finding was that females with a lower condition allocated relatively more to offspring production than did females in better condition. This makes some sense - if the going is tough (i.e., poor condition), the females primary objective (from a fitness perspective) is to invest in offspring. A third key finding was that we found a negative relationships between egg size and number. These trade-offs may in part be because of variation in resource availability at some of the study sites in the Yukon tundra.

An Arctic Pardosa (Lycosidae) female, with egg sac

Joseph also calculated tundra wolf spider densities. Here’s the text of the CJZ paper that describes the methods (straightforward but time consuming):

Densities of the three focal species were estimated using a ring of hard plastic measuring 1.13 m in diameter (1 m x 1 m area) and about 12 cm high. The ring was haphazardly and firmly placed on the tundra surface in each site and all wolf spiders collected inside the ring were identified and counted. This protocol was adapted from Buddle (2000).

Results? Well… the most common species Pardosa lapponica averaged about 0.4 spiders per square metre. Some simple calculations will tell you just how common wolf spiders are on the Tundra: 4000 wolf spiders per hectare. Don’t forget - wolf spiders are only part of the Arachno-fauna in the Arctic. With confidence, this estimate of 4000 spiders per hectare represents a minimum. There are a LOT of Arachnids living on the tundra!

In sum, this paper by Joseph is about studying some good old-fashioned natural history of a fascinating group of animals. The methods are straightforward, but the findings are significant. It’s pretty difficult to progress in ecology without a deep understanding of a species’ biology and life-history. Life-history studies are the cornerstone of biology, and I’m thrilled that Joseph recognized that fact and did this research on Arctic wolf spiders.

You will see that this post is titled Part 1: some more work will hopefully be published soon - stay tuned for Part 2…

References

Bowden, J., & Buddle, C. (2012). Life history of tundra-dwelling wolf spiders (Araneae: Lycosidae) from the Yukon Territory, Canada Canadian Journal of Zoology, 90 (6), 714-721 DOI: 10.1139/z2012-038

Bowden, J., & Buddle, C. (2010). Determinants of Ground-Dwelling Spider Assemblages at a Regional Scale in the Yukon Territory, Canada Ecoscience, 17 (3), 287-297 DOI: 10.2980/17-3-3308

Buddle, C. (2000). LIFE HISTORY OF PARDOSA MOESTA AND PARDOSA MACKENZIANA (ARANEAE, LYCOSIDAE) IN CENTRAL ALBERTA, CANADA Journal of Arachnology, 28 (3), 319-328 DOI: 10.1636/0161-8202(2000)028[0319:LHOPMA]2.0.CO;2

Bowden, J. & Buddle, C. (2010). Spider assemblages across elevational and latitudinal gradients in the Yukon Territory, Canada. Arctic 63(3): 261-272 http://arctic.synergiesprairies.ca/arctic/index.php/arctic/article/view/1490

ResearchBlogging.org

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