This week I’ll be running a whole series of posts and ideas on using social media as a scientist; both for connecting with other researchers, but also as a tool to communicate with the general public. I encourage you to chime in and share some of your own ideas on how to use social media in science, either here in the comments section, on your own blog, or through any of the plentiful social network sites. If you don’t have a blog and want to expand on some ideas, contact me and we can set up a guest post here!
I’ll be using the hashtag #ScienceShare throughout the week (and beyond I hope) while discussing the topic on Twitter and Google+, so feel free to follow along across the web!
I figured I’d start the week off by sharing a talk I gave at both the Entomological Society of Ontario and Entomological Society of America meetings this past fall, which should serve as an overview of where this week may go!
If you’re interested in exploring some of the things I discussed, here’s the Prezi I gave at the ESO meeting. I’m looking forward to seeing where this week takes us! Be sure to stay tuned!
This project was originally conceived to assist the multiple groups working with Cerceris fumipennis and bringing in hundreds of jewel beetle specimens, and was funded by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Featuring 165 species of Buprestidae and hundreds of colour photos, maps and other identification tools, we’re in the final stages of preparation before bringing this bad boy to print!
The video capture and multiple conversions robbed some of the quality of the beetle images, so be sure to check out the SlideShare below for slightly better representations. Look forward to seeing plenty more information on this book in the coming months, as well as a sneak preview of some of the more charismatic species!
For those who were unable to make it to the ESA Annual Meeting this year, I’ll be sharing all 3 of the presentations I gave over the next week or so. The audio is my actual presentation from the ESA meeting (recorded using my iPhone set on the lectern), which I later synced to screen capture video of the slideshow, essentially transporting you through time & space to ESA 2011! Turns out I’m no David Attenborough or David Suzuki, but hearing myself present was actually a pretty useful tool for how to improve in the future!
This presentation was part of the Citizen Scientists in Entomology Research, and aimed at sharing how the Canadian Journal of Arthropod Identification is a great place for citizen science projects to publish identification aids specifically for their volunteers.
Here are the (slightly modified) slides if you’d like to explore a little further:
Let me start by saying that when I went looking for a song for this week’s Tuesday Tunes, I didn’t expect to find such a gem as this. All I wanted was something simple that would allow me to segue into some very cool insect news, but what I got instead was one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard, but which actually has some relevant biology included in the lyrics. That being said, consider yourself warned: there’s cool science ahead, but also some really, really, bad music!
The University of California Davis insect collection announced yesterday (with future taxonomic publication to come I assume) that they collected specimens of Bombus cockerelliFranklin 1913 for the first time since 1956. Collected again from it’s extremely restricted known range (a 300 square mile plot of land in New Mexico), this species is understandably rare in insect collections. There has apparently been considerable debate amongst Bombus experts over whether B. cockerelli represented a unique species or whether it was a variant of the much more common Bombus vagans, and with museum specimens 50+ years old, there has been no ability to compare DNA between species. Lead researcher Doug Yanega implies that molecular evidence obtained from these new specimens supports B. cockerelli as its own species, and it will be interesting to see in future publications how this species fits into the larger Bombus picture! Doug has some succinct comments on why it shouldn’t come as a surprise to rediscover an insect species thought to be “lost”, so I’d highly recommend giving the press release a read!
Bombus cockerelli courtesy of EOL.org (CC-BY-NC-SA)
Moving on to this week’s “killer” song, if you grew up in the late 90’s (or had offspring doing so), you’re probably familiar with the musical torturestylings torture that was Aqua, the Danish pop band responsible for the hit song Barbie Girl. This week I bring you another musical instrument of torture, Bumble Bees:
Well, did you catch the surprisingly accurate lyrics as pertaining to pollination biology? From the “Wham bam, thank you mam” insinuating the correct sex for flower visiting bees, to the fact that bumblebees regularly leave “donations” of pollen while “invading” deep flowers, the song is actually pretty good for biology. Even though it sounds horrible, Aqua get props for taking the time to pen some pollination biology into their “music”!
