Welcome back to another exciting episode of the Bug Blog! I know you've all been on the edge of your seats for the last three months, so I'll finally address that burning question I left you with last time...

Did Erin's cranberry plants survive the Polar Vortex?!

This is yet to be determined. Right now, they are chilling in a cold room in the Biotron, which is a windowless block of a building built in the 70's in order to provide researchers with any type of controlled environment they could want. Temperature, light, pressure, humidity- anything could be acheived. They had originally envisioned NASA running experiments with astronauts and built a sound and vibration proof room for new experiments . However, partially due to an incident with imploding sheep, this grand vision never seemed to be reached, and now the whole place has an air of cold-war era disrepair about it with ancient digital clocks ticking away in military time on the walls.  It's also undergoing reconstruction so half of the lights are out, but people in nondescript brown jumpsuits, like a very earnest and enthusiastic manager named Bjorn, still busily rush around.
 My room is kept at a steady 40 degrees Farenheit, and is in a suite of rooms shared with mice on cancer drugs at "Hawaiian" temperatures and blocks of road concrete being subjected to freezing and thawing.

Right now, my plants are a patchwork of deep red and brown, which to my untrained horticultural eye look hopelessly dead, but according to an actual propogator, this is what they do in the winter.  Hopefully, I will  be moving into the warm greenhouse soon, so we will see if they turn green and grow.


  Now that that's been answered, I'll share with you some novice photography. I am honing my skills at holding-an- iPhone-steady-enough-to-take-a-photo-through-a-microscope. Yes, it can be done, and I'm thinking selling my iMicroscopecamera to Apple. I might work on the name though.

Below are some of the sparganothis fruitworm moths that I'm raising. My technique isn't quite perfected, so they may not be completely centered or clear. So I'll call it  amateur art.  I hope you'll all attend the opening reception for my Guggenheim installation...

Jim Henson Inspiration?

 

X

Not Fully Cooked

Eclosion

To Scale

*************

  Duke

 

Also, allow me to introduce my lab pet, Duke! Duke is a Manduca sexta, or  tobacco hornworm. A vegetable gardener's sworn enemy, but I think he's kinda cute. I mean, a turquoise caterpillar with white stripes and a red spike on its butt is pretty cool. And since 800 sparganothis fruitworm larvae clearly weren't  enough, I needed another caterpillar in my collection. I got him as an egg from a guy in the elevator. Because that's what happens in entomology buildings.

On a diet of wheat germ blocks, Duke developed quickly into a large caterpillar because Manduca larvae really are the perfect eating machine and basically never stop munching. I believe he had actually started chewing on my hand in this photo. One day, Duke began to look sick- kind of brown and sluggish. I was concerned when he stopped eating. But yesterday, as if from the pages of a  children's book about butterflies, I opened the door to the incubator and found a beautiful...

 

  Ummm. So maybe beautiful is a little strong of a word. Overnight, my cute little caterpillar had become some kind of tentacled alien pupa.

  

The Star Wars cantina scene comes to mind.

 

 Throughout the next  hour, I watched the green gradually harden to a leathery brown pupal case, in which Duke will undergo the mind-blowing process of metamorphosis. Basically, besides for a few tiny structures called imaginal disks, which form the basis for future wings, legs and other body parts, the entire caterpillar breaks down into green goo, sort of a protein soup, and somehow the proteins in this goo magically realign themselves and reform into a completely different creature. Its really pretty amazing.