May 9, 2012

Welcome to Writing Wednesday! Every week there is a new opportunity to publish your own creative writing on the Seymour Science blog. This week, we are asking you to do your own research, and explain what is happening in the photograph below.

The Facts: 

It is spring, and all over the world, bees like this one are drinking nectar from apple blossoms and other spring flowers. When a bee travels from flower to flower, it is moving pollen from one flower to another.

Your Assignment: Working with a partner or several of your classmates, find out about bees, how they help to pollinate flowers, and why that is important for us who eventually eat the fruits and vegetables that come from these flowers. You can use books in your library or sources on the Internet to do your research. Then, write a paragraph explaining pollination and post it here by clicking on the yellow "Comments" button below.

Happy writing!

Educators: Today’s Writing Wednesday is designed to use in support of CCSS Anchor Standard W.3.7. Conduct short research projects that build knowledge about a topic.

December 4, 2011

Entomologist (bug scientist) Mark Moffett, who works at the Smithsonian institution, traveled all the way to New Zealand to try to find a Giant Weta (Deinacrida heteracantha).

He found one, all right - what he claims is the largest insect ever found…..or at least, the heaviest. Moffett says: "I did not measure anything but the weight. I’ve seen a walking stick nearly 19 inches long in Sarawak, Malaysia, but it weighed next to nothing." The giant weta weighed in at 2.5 ounces (71 grams) - that is as much as three mice!

These huge insects are members of the cricket family; their genus name, Deinacrida, is Greek for terrible grasshopper. They are vegetarians, which is why Moffett offered her a carrot. "She enjoyed the carrot so much she seemed to ignore the fact she was resting on our hands and carried on munching away. She would have finished the carrot very quickly, but this is an extremely endangered species, and we didn’t want to risk indigestion."

Photo: Mark Moffett / Minden / Solent

September 21, 2011

My goodness. It seems that every morning when I go out to pick raspberries for our breakfast cereal, I find another exciting-looking caterpillar! Of course, they are eating nearly around the clock these days, getting ready to spin their cocoons, where they will spend the winter before emerging as butterflies or moths in the spring.

As I wrote the other day, it’s best not to handle hairy caterpillars because some of them are poisonous or otherwise dangerous. Some of them have specialized hollow hairs, and when they are touched by humans, the hairs can create a tiny scratch on our hands and release a strong toxin (poison) into the almost invisible cut. This process is called "urtication," and caterpillar urtications can cause severe allergic responses in some people. So keep your hands off hairy caterpillars!

I picked this one up on a piece of cardboard and moved it out of the grass to a rock in order to get a better look at it. It was still sparkling with morning dew, and curled up into a ball as soon as I got near it. That is a defensive mechanism, to protect itself from predators (though I really wasn’t going to hurt it!). I could see immediately that this kind of caterpillar is a typical "woolly bear" variety, with a thick coat of black bristles called setae. The red bands around its body are so distinctive that I was able to easily identify it simply by typing "caterpillar black hairs red bands" into a web browser.

Well….I can say is…..WOW! This is the caterpillar of the Giant Leopard Moth (Hypercompe scribonia). 

It is one of the most beautiful of all moths - white with iridescent blue spots. And it truly is "giant," with wingspan of about 3-inches (8 cm). That is biger than your middle finger - a good-sized moth, for sure.

We do not clean up our garden very much in the fall, leaving the dry stems and leaves to create winter shelters for helpful and beautiful insects like these. I hope that lots of them find a safe haven up under the raspberry bushes, because I would love to see a giant leopard moth in person come the spring.

Keep your eyes open when you are walking in the outdoors, and then write and tell me what interesting wild creatures you see.

Moth Photo: Wikimedian Kevincollins123

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September 21, 2011

Last week (before it got so chilly here in Columbia County, NY) Liz and I were sitting on the deck watching the sunset when we saw this swarm of gnats (pronounced NATS - silent "g". They are small, two-winged flies).

Click Ghost of Gnats to see the video. 

Turns out it was indeed a mating swarm. When this happens, a big group of male flies are irresistibly attracted to pheromones secreted by a female or females who are ready for mating.  Pheromones (pronounced FAIR-uh-moans) are a chemical substance given off by some animals, especially insects, that influences the behavior of other animals of the same species. The males detected the pheromones from hundreds of yards away, and all rushed to the same place to try to find the female.

You end up with this ball of almost all male flies, searching for the female who is somewhere in the middle. The expression for this is "a ghost of gnats." Isn’t that great? It does look a little bit like a ghost haunting in the sunset twilight, as all the gnats move as a big group. 

Photo: A Fungus gnat, courtesy Maine.gov

August 31, 2011

For the past twenty years, a rare group of spiders in Britain have been in danger of becoming extinct. Their natural habitat had become endangered due to the development of towns and the conversion of their environment to farm land. These beautiful spiders are called ladybird spiders in England – because the males have bright red bodies with 4 big black spots on them (much like the insect that we call the ladybug here in the U.S).

When British wildlife experts realized their local population had dwindled to just 56 spiders, they realized it was time to find them a new home! They started by collecting the spiders and allowing them to mate in captivity, so that their numbers could grow. Now, they’ve started introducing the spiders back into the wild. They’ve placed the spiders in a site that’s already home to 240 other species of spiders and hundreds of other insects. What’s interesting is that they’ve introduced the ladybird spiders to this area by placing them in recycled plastic bottles! These bottles are filled with heather and moss to resemble the spiders’ past environment and when the spider is ready to move out, it can crawl out of the bottle and find a suitable new home. Here’s hoping their group gets bigger and we get to see many more of these beautiful spiders in the future!

 Would YOU like to see one? I would!

Read lots more about spiders in these Seymour Simon books:

   Spiders 

Photo Credits:

Image 1: Maarten Bos/Flickr 

Image 2: Ian Hughes 

August 24, 2011

I’ve been writing all summer about all the magnificent wild animals that I’ve seen simply by getting outdoors and exploring - spotting a red fox leaping across a road, a shy lynx slipping into the shadows, a bald eagle soaring over the lake, a very grouchy (and big!) snapping turtle, and a delicate tiger moth.

Here is what some of you shared this week about your interesting summer encounters with nature and its wild creatures:

Marissa, who is a regular reader and commenter on this blog, wrote that she really loves pythons, which are the longest snakes in the world.

"I went to a zoo and found a 20 foot long, 250 pound Burmese Python! They feed it 10 pound rabbits and when they feed it they use police shields! It’s that big!" 

On a completely different note, Jennifer, a teacher in Johnson City, NY, wrote about a summer adventure that she had with her twins, Ben and Anna.

 

"So cool that you released your BUTTERFLIES book yesterday…That’s when the Monarch caterpillar that we found at the Rail Trail in Vestal came out of its chrysalis and turned into a butterfly on the same day! We were so excited! We let it go this morning and it flew away… so beautiful and graceful!" 

 

What did YOU see as you explored the outdoors this summer? Press the "Ask Seymour Simon" button to send me a note, or click on "Send us Photos/Video" link at the very top of the homepage to send me a picture. We will publish stories about your summer vacation science adventures for the next few weeks, so write in now!

August 23, 2011

Well, it’s not officially Butterfly Day, but we have declared it here at SeymourSimon.com, because today is the publication day of his beautiful new book, BUTTERFLIES.

One of the reasons I love butterflies and moths so much is that, unlike other wild animals, you can see them right in your own yard, park, or vacant lot! Next time you head outside early in the morning, look and see if there is something that looks like a piece of dead leaf stuck to one of your window screens. If you look closely, you will probably discover it is a cleverly disguised, slumbering moth!

We have created lots of great support materials for BUTTERFLIES. Educators and parents can go to their section of the site and download a free Teacher Guide with lots of supplementary information and activities, as well as a guide to starting your own butterfly garden.

Kids - click here to download your own Butterfly Observation Log, and record your sightings like a real lepidopterologist (that’s a scientist who studies butterflies).

Seymour has also blogged a lot this year about butterflies, because as he often says, his "favorite animal" is whichever one he is writing about at the time! You can read all the butterfly posts here.

Celebrate "Butterfly Day" with us by getting outside and seeing these beautiful creatures for yourself!

August 23, 2011

Many photographers like to shoot macro (very close up) photographs of insects because the macro camera lens reveals details of alien-looking creatures that we can’t see with our own eyes. A Polish photographer named Miroslaw Swietek goes even further. He goes into the forest in the early morning and photographs the insects when they are covered with dew. Through the camera lens, the drops of water make the insects look as though they are covered with diamonds.

This is a photograph of a dragonfly. Look at how the water drops magnify the lenses in its compound eyes! (click here to read another one of my posts if you want to understand how compound eyes work).

LiveScience interviewed Swietek about how he takes these amazing photographs, and he said that the time of day makes it easier. "That early in the morning, insects are very sleepy so the camera doesn’t disturb them."

If you would like to see more of these amazing images, click here to go to the LiveScience website , where they have a slideshow of Miroslaw Swietek’s  "jeweled" insect photographs.

June 20, 2011

Good morning, campers! It’s time for SUMMER VACATION SCIENCE!

Click here to download the full project guide, which has everything from how to find the right plants, how to plant them, and what butterflies need to thrive and return. Get started today and create your own, personal, very unique butterfly garden!

This summer, our goal is to get kids outdoors, exploring and enjoying the world around them. Check back here throughout the summer for new installments of Summer Vacation Science.

June 17, 2011

I took a walk today in Great Falls National Park, along the Potomac River in Virginia. The falls are really beautiful, and the trails are wooded and shady, but the best part, for me anyway, was spotting all the wild animals.

This Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) feeds at the water’s edge, using its long legs to wade through the water, spearing small fish and frogs with its long, sharp bill. 

You can clearly see the compound eye of this beautiful Dragonfly (an insect belonging to the order Odonata), which was perched in the foliage high above the falls. You usually find dragonflies near the water, because their larvae, called "nymphs" live in the water. These insects are valuable predators (valuable to humans, at least) because they eat mosquitoes.

My grandson Ben Simon took this great photograph of a wolf spider, which was hiding inside a crack of an old stump. Wolf spiders are members of the family Lycosidae, from the Ancient Greek word "λύκος" meaning "wolf". The blue and white mass, which almost looks like a piece of jewelry, are actually all her babies - dozens of tiny wolf spiders, riding on her back!

Have you taken a walk in the outdoors this week? If not, get outside and keep your eyes peeled. There are fascinating wild creatures all around you.

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