Ep 54 - Black Quills

A discussion of metamorphosis - focusing on simple metamorphosis as it relates to mayflies, stoneflies, and damsel and dragonflies. And of course rambles about the nature of change. I hope you enjoy.

Hey Everyone, Here are the pictures and patterns that are relevant to Part 1 on of metamorphosis - focusing in incomplete metamorphosis and the critters that do that. (Primarily mayflies, stoneflies and dragon and damselflies). First, though, as promised in the podcast, here is what a silverfish looks like. A little worse for wear - he's (or she) has been pickled for 8 years, so it's lost a lot of its color. Normally, they are a very silver color - hence the name. In some ways you may say this looks a little like a mayfly nymph. In real life, looking at them, you would not mistake them as being different.

Hey everyone. Here is my blog post for Episode 54: Pics and Patterns for Black Quills. First let's take a look at the nymph. Here is a nice black quill nymph with a scale in centimeters. It is hard to see, but note the length of the antennae and the nice dark wing cases. That suggests he (or she) is likely to hatch soon. (Well, if he (or she) wasn't pickled in alcohol since 2003). Also fyi, this one was collected in a pond - which make sense, they migrate from moving water to still water to hatch. In contrast, the next specimen was collected in a stream, and you'll note the lack of developed wing pads (noting it was also collected earlier in the season).

Hey folks, hope you all enjoy part 2 of our discussion about how insects reproduce. Lots of wild stuff in this. And check out the blog - I added lots of cool pictures that are relevant to both episode 51 and 53. Enjoy!

Hey folks. Normally I record an episode and then develop the blog post based on what I've said. While usually that works well, this time I fell down several rabbit holes which, quite frankly while help with understanding the episodes, don't relate to them directly. Namely, I found my old slides from 30 to 40 years ago - which include really interesting slides around histology (study of tissues) and other things. It was fun to dive into my compound microscope (for which I rarely use for insect identification) to show you some very cool stuff (like sperm cells, and chromosomes). It's also the case that while there are a million pics like this around the internet, I always like to use my own pictures - so these are from my old slides. Alright - so put on your smarty pants hat, and dig this shit. OK, first we're going to start with some shots of onion root tissue slices. Teachers love this tissue for teaching about mitosis, because if you think about it, it is growing fast, and hence you are likely to see signs of cell division. To remind you, mitosis is the bread and butter cell division - which we use for growing, healing, replacing cells, etc. This is how cells reproduce on a day to day basis.