Tuesday Tunes – Alien Ant Farm edition

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Jan 032012
 

Ryan FleacrestWell here we are, a full year after I started this little musical column. Turns out there are a lot more artists who have brought in the funk with insect content than I could have imagined, making quite a diverse playlist (which I’m going to curate in one place and post soon, don’t worry). My goal was to feature a new song every week, and I almost made it, having only forgotten last week! So close! Oh well, I’ve covered more than 52 songs throughout the year, so I suppose I’m still ahead of the game.

I enjoyed writing these pieces each week, and often surprised myself with where the final product ended up. Some were silly, some I tried to deliver a message, and some were intimately personal. It goes to show just how a song can impact a person and inspire a full range of emotions.

With that being said, this may be the last Tuesday Tunes for a bit. No fear, I still have plenty of insect music to share and write about, but there are some other weekly projects I want to try and do, and I’m ready to turn this into an occasional feature, coming around maybe once a month or so.

Today is as good a time as any for another multi-song version of Tuesday Tunes, with another band I listened to through high school; Alien Ant Farm.

When you hear about Alien Ant Farm, you probably think of their biggest hit (and Michael Jackson cover), Smooth Criminal. Other than the band’s ant-head logo on the canvas of the boxing ring, there’s not much entomological about this song, but it’s still a fun song, so enjoy!

Their logo isn’t their only entomological expression however, as they also penned and performed the songs Crickets and Beehive on their 2006 album Up in the Attic:

And to top it all off, Alien Ant Farm wrote a special song for the 2002 movie Spider-Man, Bug Bytes:

So that’s it for Tuesday Tunes for awhile! Thanks to those of you who joined me on this journey through music history, and keep an eye out for more songs in the future!

These songs are available on iTunes (except for Beehive, which was a bonus song):
Smooth Criminal – ANThology
Crickets – Up In the Attic
Bug Bytes – Spider-Man (Music from and Inspired By)

Tuesday Tunes – I Am the Fly – Wire

 Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tuesday Tunes  3 Responses »
Nov 292011
 

Ryan FleacrestIt’s been awhile since Tuesday Tunes featured a song about those beautiful bi-winged bugs the flies, so I think we’ll rectify that!

This isn’t the first time that Wire has been featured here on Biodiversity in Focus, with their song Outdoor Miner previously making the list. That song featured a relatively accurate depiction of a leaf miner fly, probably in the family Agromyzidae. Today’s song features flies a little closer to home, repeatedly talking about a fly in the ointment and flies causing more disease than fleas.Well, that and a divergent wasp dealing with plate-glass (side note: Flickr is fun).

So what might the flies be? Well I’m going to go with the common house fly (Musca domestica) for the fly in the ointment, just based on ubiquity and the odds of one ending up in someone’s moisturizer/tonic/soup. How about the flies causing more disease than fleas? Well, fleas are vectors for a number of diseases, with the big one being the Bubonic Plague. With an estimated 75 million people killed during the Black Death pandemic and another 12-15 million more killed in epi- and pandemics up until the mid 20th century, I think we can confidently put a back-of-the-napkin (BOTN) estimate of 100 million deaths attributable to fleas in recorded history. Tsetse flies (Glossinidae, 23 species total, 2 of which are of medical importance to humans) are vectors for the trypanosome that causes African Sleeping Sickness, which was listed as killing 48,000 people in 2008. A BOTN gives me an estimate of 100 million deaths in the last 2000 (50k x 2000 years, assuming smaller populations but higher mortality rates), so Tsetse flies are a possibility. Our next suspect might be the common house fly from earlier. Known to spread diseases such as typhoid (BOTN = 20 million deaths out of 450 million in past 2000 yrs), cholera (BOTN = 30 million deaths out of ~600 million in past 2000 yrs), and dysentery (BOTN = 50 million deaths out of 1.5 billion in past 200 yrs) among others, the house fly may be a dark horse in this race.

Of course, the best bet are the mosquitoes. With the genus Anopheles (the vector for Malaria) responsible for easily 100 million deaths in the past 200 years, not to mention the deaths attributable to Yellow Fever & Dengue Fever (Aedes aegypti) and “minor” diseases like West Nile Virus and Japanese Encephalitis (Culex). I think it’s pretty safe to say that mosquitoes are the most deadly insect known to man!

Anyways, that was a pretty morbid tangent from the song, so let’s just listen to some music shall we?

 

 

(All estimates based on conservative values found in Wikipedia. Some estimates may be horribly off, so best to do a more thorough literature check if you need more reliable numbers!)

This song is available on iTunes – I Am the Fly – Chairs Missing (Remastered)

Tuesday Tunes – Empire Ants – Gorillaz

 Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tuesday Tunes  1 Response »
Nov 212011
 

Ryan FleacrestFrom last week’s ESA meeting, you’d think that ants were all powerful and super diverse or something by the number of people talking about them and the level of excitement surrounding those talks! You might say people were going ape over the empire of ants…

 

Ya, that was a pretty horrible reference. But the thing about ant enthusiasm and the large number of talks about a single family wasn’t hyperbole!

 

This song is available on iTunes – Empire Ants (feat. Little Dragon) – Plastic Beach

Tuesday Tunes – All My Friends Are Insects – Weezer

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Nov 152011
 

Ryan FleacrestSince I’m here at ESA 2011 and becoming reacquainted with old friends and meeting all sorts of new people interested in insects, I thought it was only fitting to share this short song from Weezer! We’ll forgive the slight transgression about earthworms being insects for now, but Rivers Cuomo best watch his taxonomy in the future!

Don’t be afraid to go out and make an insect/entomologist friend of your own this week!

 

This song is available on iTunes – All My Friends Are Insects (Bonus Track) – Hurley (Deluxe Version)

Tuesday Tunes – Butterflies – Stereos

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Nov 082011
 

Ryan FleacrestWell, it’s been awhile since the last sugar pop edition of Tuesday Tunes, so I guess now’s as good a time as any.

Proudly Canadian, the Stereos share that feeling of gastric unease in Butterflies.

 

 

Speaking of gastrointestinal Lepidoptera, I’ll be traveling to Reno, NV this weekend to take part in the Entomological Society of America Annual Meeting. It’s going to be a busy week for me, and I’ll be sharing my schedule with times for my talks, what I’ll be talking about and some of the other events I’ll be looking forward to tomorrow! So watch next week when I hope to be active sharing the experience with all of you, here on the blog and on Twitter (where you can follow me @BioInFocus).

Tuesday Tunes – Bullet with Butterfly Wings – Smashing Pumpkins

 Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tuesday Tunes  2 Responses »
Nov 012011
 

Ryan FleacrestWell, it’s the day after Halloween (commonly referred to as November 1st) and what better song to accompany the tossing of Jack-o-Lanterns to the curb than something by the Smashing Pumpkins? Another 90’s hit that I remember quite fondly from my formative years, Bullet with Butterfly Wings doesn’t really have much to do with insects beyond the title, but with reference to vampires and plenty of rats, it’s a pretty decent Halloween song (complete with creepy zombie-like miners).

 

And speaking of Smashing Pumpkins, stay tuned later today for the big reveal of our lab’s annual Ent-o-Lantern!

 

This song is available on iTunes – Bullet With Butterfly Wings – Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Tuesday Tunes – Dragonfly – My Brightest Diamond

 Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tongue in Cheek, Tuesday Tunes  1 Response »
Oct 252011
 

Ryan FleacrestWhen I first found today’s song, I immediately thought of this dragonfly photo I took while on vacation a few weeks ago:

Dragonfly Dreams

 

That is, until I finished watching the music video and realized the video director and the artist might not realize the difference between a butterfly and a dragonfly…

 

If you’re keeping track at home, that’s a Taxonomy Fail Index of 57.8, and quite frankly, one of the least imaginable given the general popularity of both orders! Perhaps that was an artistic choice of some manner…

 

This song is available on iTunes – Dragonfly – Bring Me the Workhorse

Tuesday Tunes – Fly on the Wall – AC/DC

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Oct 042011
 

Ryan FleacrestHere we are at Tuesday again already. If you didn’t catch it last night, I finally got around to answering the ID challenge from August. Pretty depressing it took so long, but September was another busy month with papers submitted, friends defending their PhD’s, and of course NSERC applications coming due. I was little more than a fly on the blogosphere wall all month, but there was some fantastic things being posted by my fellow insect bloggers. Here are a few I’d highly recommend checking out:

The entomological blogging network has been rapidly expanding in recent months, providing me plenty of procrastination material coming into the conference season! And here’s a little something to help you put off starting your talk or poster, Fly on the Wall by AC/DC!

Tuesday Tunes – Crab – Weezer

 Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tuesday Tunes  2 Responses »
Sep 272011
 

Ryan FleacrestOf all the insects that someone could write a song about, I would never have thought that crabs would be one of them. But I suppose some artists just need to scratch that itch!

Crabs (Phthirus pubis), also known as pubic lice, generally find new dance partners during the horizontal hokey pokey, so be warned that this post is heading towards the gutter…

Have no fear, taxonomy and phylogenetics to the rescue! The human pubic louse has but a single sister species, Phthirus gorillae. As you might be able to guess, P. gorillae is found on gorillas, and these two species last shared a common ancestor roughly 3-4 million years ago (Reed et al., 2007). For the record, gorillas and humans last shared a common ancestor ~7 million years ago. So our pubic lice and the gorilla louse didn’t diverge when we did, but at some later point while we were on our way to becoming human and pre-gorilla’s were getting more gorilla-like. Anyone else sensing some weird hanky panky going on here? Clearly a speciation event took place, and it seems that our ancestors (perhaps members of Australopithecus, of Lucy fame) were colonized by a louse native to pre-gorilla pubes. Although there are some rather tame theories on how we first contracted our own crotch crickets (gorilla’s being hunted, us sleeping in old gorilla nests, blah blah blah), it must be considered that perhaps there was a little “Jungle Love” going on back in the day…

Anyways, back to present day musical crabs!

In case you’re concerned, the crabs in that video weren’t the crabs I’m talking about (or the ones Rivers Cuomo was singing about), and earns a Myrmecos Taxonomy Fail Index number of 75.

All this talk about crabs reminds me that Bug Girl wrote an awesome piece on whether Brazilian waxing is taxing pubic louse populations (loss of habitat don’tcha know). Definitely worth a read.

And speaking of Brazilians, I’d like to wish our resident Brazilian (nationality, not hairdo) a fond farewell! After 4 long years of teasing from his lab mates, Gil Miranda successfully defended his PhD dissertation and is headed back to Brazil to begin what will surely be a long and successful career! Must… resist… crab… jokes…

This song is available on iTunes – Crab – Weezer (Green Album)

 
ResearchBlogging.orgReed, D., Light, J., Allen, J., & Kirchman, J. (2007). Pair of lice lost or parasites regained: the evolutionary history of anthropoid primate lice BMC Biology, 5 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1741-7007-5-7 OPEN ACCESS
 

Tuesday Tunes – Escapism (Gettin’ Free) – Digable Planets

 Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tuesday Tunes  No Responses »
Sep 202011
 

Ryan FleacrestWell, I’m back from a relaxing vacation with my wife at the family cottage, well-rested, recharged, and ready to dive back into my work with fresh eyes and new ideas! That goes for the blog as well, with inspiration for bigger posts and a themed week or two to come in the future!

Generally when you go on vacation it’s to escape from the stress and workload that comes with day to day life, so it’s somewhat fitting that today’s song is titled Escapism (Gettin’ Free). That’s not really entomological, and neither is the band name, Digable Planets, at first glance. But sometimes the sum of the parts are greater than whole, and Digable Planets is made up of Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler, Mary Ann “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira and Craig “Doodlebug” Irving! A triple threat of entomological nomenclature!

I’m a fan of nicknames, finding them considerably easier to remember (a task I’m normally horrible at), but how the 2 male members of the trio managed to acquire “Butterfly” and “Doodlebug” as their nicknames has got to be an interesting story…

 

This song is available on iTunes – Escapism (Gettin’ Free) – Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time & Space)

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