Expiscor – your voyage of discovery: bugs, biology and beyond!

Here’s what I stumbled across this week:

• Ah, Botflies. Gross or cool? For entomologists, this is some pretty amazing stuff.

• Spiders on the move? An influx of poisonous spider bites.  Hmm – btw, spiders are not poisonous, although some are venomous…

• Lying for sex, spider style. An older post, but one that was relevant this week when I was teaching about nuptial gifts.

• Spider web evolution – a storify from Morgan Jackson, after tweeting a talk by Todd Blackledge.

• Remarkable spiders from Israel.

• Jumping spiders… jumping. Great videos and ideas on the physics behind these critters.

• Are you an aspiring artist AND arachnologist? Make sure you look at this guide for drawing spiders! (some important dos and don’t, e.g., make sure the legs are not emerging from the abdomen, a common mistake!)

• The amazing Ainsley Seago knows how to draw spiders. Here is one of her pieces; perfect for Archnophiles:

• Ghosts of the cloud forests. Amazing summary of new species of Diptera.

• Honey bees can distinguish between Monet and Picasso paintings. 

• Bad news on the beetle front: Asian long-horned beetle found in a new part of Ontario

• Better beetle news: here’s a nice wood-boring beetle, and one that is sexual dimorphic.

• Bioinspiration 1: springtails & super materials.

• Bioinspiration 2: a creeping robot for colonoscopy based on earthworms.

• Bioinspiration 3: synthetic spider silk.

• Ant sniffers. The odor of the odorous house ant (blue cheese, anyone?)

• A big win for McGill & Entomophagy: Insects to feed the world

• A lovely image from Sean McCann, showing a moulting Opiliones. (Thanks, Sean, for allowing me to share it here)

• Red food dye from potatoes NOT bugs.

• Ecological periodic tables. 

• Back to Nature: The ever-talented Malcolm Campbell hits a home run again with a wonderful post about field work and connections to nature. Lovely.

• War, space and the evolution of old world complex societies. Neat paper – very useful example for teaching population ecology.

• Please watch this: A murmation of hunted starlings. 

• There’s hope for all aspiring authors: Kurt Vonnegut (one of my favourite authors) got rejected too.

• Good news for Montreal – the Ecomuseum receives a major donation – its doors open the world of local wildlife to so many people.

• Tweet of the week goes to Paul Manning (Rhodes Scholar, and guy with a good sense of humour!)

• MOOCs & more: Questioning Higher Education.

• Dear students (part 2).

• Climate change: how hot will it get in my lifetime? An interactive (sobering) guide.

• From Business Insider: why you should care about Twitter. Some good ideas in there, including the fact that the learning curve is steep.

• String theory explained through Bohemian Rhapsody. Wow, some people are so talented.

• Our kids need to play: now, more than ever before. I agree.

• 13 little-known punctuation marks we should be using… 

• Some hairy photographs: top entries for the 2013 beard & moustache championship. 

• Grabbing your attention, with science: Creative advertising from Science World.

• Science Fiction fans: one giant poster comparing all kinds of starships. I want one.

• To finish, more on the peacock spiders (last week I was teaching about courtship behaviours in arthropods, and that discussion is not complete without viewing this video!):