and good morning good morning good morning good morning welcome it's Monday and it's not sunny it's cloudy and it's snowy and it's sloppy but we persevere so well done you i hope that you had a uh a weekend that was exactly what you needed to be uh I hope that it provided some uh health for you some health being outside uh doing some kind of artistic endeavor that is good for you being with people that are good for you and I hope that you were all of those things for others thank you for finding nearly all of these well done you and what we're going to do today is wrap up all of the arthropods all of the hexopods and all of the remaining ectoones so thank you for doing the word find i'm going to clear those now and we're going to talk about where we were last week and you remember it was we were talking about your demodex results so we talked about the results of the surveys that you had done your tape surveys and your genetic surveys or your large you as a participant in the long history of 2700 where we have been studying these things and we talked about correlations with where we found them uh some that were definitive some that were not and then we talked about some of the genetic results and put them into a larger context around the world and um you actually use the barcode of life data system to identify species based on their DNA so that was pretty cool today wrapping up our discussion about the hexopods we're going to be talking about some gel focused things we're going to talk about usociality uh we're and some of the usocial insects you know them the bees and the wasps well we're going to start out with an example of a taxon that lives in G that is not um shouldn't be here so we'll talk a little bit about the history of that and the future we'll talk about how efficient predators uh these arthropods these insects can be how they can defend themselves from predation very effectively and how they can communicate with each other and then to wrap things up in about 45 to 50 minutes we will talk about the um scalodophrins which is the last of the taxa within the ectoisone the last of the it's kind of a it's not a resolved group but it's a wellsupported group and you remember from our discussions of the dunadolf fogyny what that means these are things these are taxa that are related but who is related to whom is not certain and what that looks like we will unpack when we get there all of this journey sits under these learning outcomes that we're going to think about how you sociality affects insect success how insects feed and are in turn fed upon and adaptations that they have to prevent being fed upon and then we'll think about how um insects communicate with each other and when we think about communication we think we're pretty darn good at it and in fact they have some just incredible ways of doing it that kind of blow us out of the water shall we start i think we should so you know these usual taxa there's so there's nine groups nine taxa in which you sociality has evolved eight of them are terrestrial most of them are arthropods termites ants bees and wasps are all youocial and there's a group of laz here uh that are in the dairy bush and that you can see taking uh part in one of the principal characteristics one of the defining characteristics of being a uocial animal in that they have these overlapping generation generations so the three principal characteristics of the sociality is that we have members of a society that cooperate in caring for the juveniles so we have oh I I don't think they look disturbingly like jelly beans that's I think those look like jelly beans they could be quite delicious i mean the vanilla jelly bean that that little white bland it's a pretty bland thing perhaps this is a very tasty delicious laziest flavored what was the thing in the in the Harry Potter the birdies bots baked not baked beans that would be just weird anyhow we best not to think too much about the potter so I digress members of the society cooperate in caring for juveniles that's one of the characteristics and then there is a reproductive division of labor so there are sterile non-reproductive individuals that perform physical labor of the society while reproduction is left to uh fertile individuals so think in this case think about I will encourage you to think about ants cuz I think about ants a lot and with the ants when you see workers any ant that looks like an ant that's a female uh but she is not a reproductive female so these are the the the workers are doing the physical labor while reproduction is left to these winged males or winged queens and then finally the third of these conditions there are the overlap of at least two generations oh sorry I'm looking down I'm seeing now can I just get a quick survey some of you are not having a uh can't hear me can the rest of you hear me survey quickly um and I will let Lily through this door cuz she wants to say hello come here hi hi hello Lily you remember Lily she is the non Dougbased dog or near dog this is Lily the miniature dashant who is 14 years bananas and she like a lot of dashins lives life to lick don't you there we go how many animals we have two dog two two ducks no ducks at all uh Lily and Doug two dogs um Caramel and Kevin two cats and two fish whose names you'll have to ask my two children so a small zoo in twos now what I'm going to do uh is show you when we're going to talk about you sociality we're going to talk about termites and termites in GE and this video I'm giving the brief intro here because if you're attending in the future asynchronously this might have to get cut out because this is the property of the British Broadcasting Corporation the BB BBC and they don't like it when it's included in our videos so we will watch it together and if you see a strange edit in the future scan the QR code or go to the link and you'll be able to watch uh the maleifuous tones of Attenboroough talking about [Music] termites the queen lives in a special chamber about a meter below the surface of the ground by her side a single fertile male her king look at that the father of the colony there he is and there she [Music] is her pale fleshy abdomen is distended with eggs her tiny head dwarfed by her huge body soldiers guard the royal chamber their pinces raised ready to tackle intruders oh Smith she's so huge she can't move by herself and has to be tended by specialist workers who continually groom her i love the undilations as she's producing these eggs she produces eggs almost continuously attendant workers take them away as soon as they arrive she can lay thousands a day 165 million over her 15-year life so isn't that amazing so welcome back if you're asynchronously and I've had to trim this out so welcome back uh isn't that amazing do go and look at it there's just some gorgeous footage of these uh of termites of the overlap of generations of the sterile individuals performing the labor of the fertile individuals performing um the fertility part of the job uh showed this we watched this um with our boys the other day and in preparing for this lecture and they both they're like "Oh yeah termites blah blah blah we've seen you talk about them blah blah blah." and they watch and then the video kind of scoops out on that view of the queen and they're both like which I hope is at least for some of you the response if you hadn't seen um a termite queen before the queen she be so reticular flevies this is the Alex Wild's picture of the termite that is a problem across a lot of eastern North America associated with structures and the degradation of structures however we have it We exist well above the northern edge of range for this species however if you've poked around the downtown you may have seen these signs littering uh some parts of the river and this is because in some parts of the downtown this is because we have termites in G that's amazing we should do a field trip so the city of Gulf termites this is a a grab from um a newspaper article of several years ago that talked about the huge strides that the city was making in the war on termites but let's back up for a second we're at war with termites in G how'd this happen well Goldie Mill you may have seen Goldie Mill if you've come into the downtown and headed upstream along the Speed River and seen this tall tower that is surrounded by this abandoned kind of uh stone structure along the river so on the northeast corner of Cardigan and Nor Streets on the west bank of the Speed River so as you're looking upstream it's on the left hand side there is this threestory limestone building that is now uh a ruin owned by the city and maintained as a ruin that you can rent for wedding and uh receptions and that kind of thing and it hasn't it was constructed like uh more than 100 years ago there's been no milling there for nearly a hundred years and the mill itself so it was um it was taking advantage of the hydro power of the of the water powered of the speed river over the early years of the incorporated city of G in um in the 1930s coincident with the depression and there was no milling and it became uh it was owned by subsequent families uh not the Goldie family any longer but it became a warehouse where there was wood shipped in and stored wood shipped in not from the local area as it would have been historically but from all over eastern North America and kind of the coming indust um internationalization of of the trade of of these kinds of products and so wood from across not just Canada but across the northern and northeastern and southern United States was brought here and stored and as you might imagine with that kind of a strategy when you ship product you there are un unanticipated passengers along with that product and the termites were that kind of thing that arrived in G in around the 1970s now researchers have done some genetics these are microatellite data that I'm not going to delve into too much that'll come up in a second but the reason we've done some physiology on them as well as some genetics let's unpack the physiology first so why do we exist above the northern edge of range of this termite species well historically it's because of the coldness of the winter now if you take a look at the table up at the top there you can see that people have estimated the CT max the critical maximum temperature that they can live at for different casts for soldiers uh and workers and then the CT min so the minimum temperature that they can survive at and you can see their CT min is actually uh not I mean today would exceed it right it's it's not so uh cold and so the critical lowest temperature that they can survive is around 12° and the lowest lethal temperature uh which is over here this is another measure so this is a reduction in phys like that leads to death and this is a temperature that causes death right away around minus3 so like the temperatures of today they would be uh too much for that termite species however yet the termite they p they persist they're still here they've been here since the 70s when temperatures as you know were colder how do they do that well they burrow themselves beneath the frost line and they exist in structures that where we work actively to lift the temperature well above these temperatures the the lower the CT min or the lowest lethal limit and we're not alone but there are we're in a number of small places a small number of places in southern and southwestern Ontario so there are termites in and around in Dundas in Allora and Fergus uh York Toronto Scarbor Concardan and Dundas and then some other populations down at the southern extremity of the province in Windsor Point Peely and on Peely Island so multiple locations that are existing because they can avoid these temperatures that should um reduce the efficacy with which they live now in GE we see termite active management of the termites in within this city so there are five designated man or there were five designated management areas and there is a PhD holding termite control officer employed by the city of G so you can see so you're in this map the university is down here so there's um the start of the um like the covered bridge and where you can buy ice cream that kind of and the the the lawn bowling and all that kind of stuff is right here and then we're going upstream along the Speed River here and out of G so there's Aramosa branching off to the east and so Goldie Mill is right around here so these management areas have changed through time and you could actually you used to be able to go on the city and read the reports and look at the number of the exact uh sites around town that had reported that the termite officer where trapping had produced termites or the properties that had transitioned from blue to red where they weren't then they were or from red to blue where they were then they weren't and so you could take a look and you could actually give yourself kind of a walking tour and this QR code I don't believe it works anymore but you since you have this data you could give yourself a walking tour uh right later on this week with some of these properties down here if you're downtown so as we're looking at this how why is the distribution I want to see some ideas in the in the in the chat how are they moving around or maybe you can phrase it or answer it in the p from the perspective of why are they so why aren't they everywhere once they're here why are they so restricted in distribution to these two or three spots and how are they moving amongst them and I'm just scrolling through i like this so the blue areas to the red blue areas represent an area where they were but had not been captured in 3 years subsequent to that documentation so it's a way for the management uh officer in the city to track uh the improvement of areas so through time they would be interested in areas that are transitioning from red to blue to not documented for more than say 5 years all right so we've got some ideas uh underground tunnels secret tunnels with the aates yes so with the winged individuals moving with objects and people moving with furniture secret tunnels through the mountain so yes elates should be I mean that's that's if they were if we were within the the kind of the the realized niche of this species it would be theates via by which they would move predominantly but because these things nest inside of wood and inside of the like mulch material the woody mulch that often we apply in our gardens the easiest way for these things to move around and to take up population for example away over here in the eastern part of the city is to be is to have someone from their garden share some gardening material with from downtown from with with someone over here so that's really how it's happening and so we see this transition the number of termites trapped per year excluding this eastern area here uh up until the start of the pandemic drop dramatically you can see that this the termite trapping that they were doing and the restriction of mulch moving of mulch and of woody debris that kind of thing in and amongst uh neighborhoods in the city was actually working and the numbers were going down from millions to do to very small numbers very small numbers of properties as you saw in one of the last news reports where there was only 11 and people were very excited but if they throw in you see that graph very explicitly excluded East View if you threw in um where we would move them and then not look for them for example you see they explode again so they're here and we are having a challenging time getting rid of them because as soon as we move them and we stop looking for them because their historic distribution is so localized to that downtown corridor along the river even along one side of the river like take a look at that like if it was alates we would expect at least these properties here uh by this is Homewood up here they that those properties would also have them but we only see them on the western side of the Speed River so it's really not the alates it's us that's moving them and like I mentioned that we've done some of the genetics when we move them we've actually seen we can demonstrate by the via the genetics of the termites that have been sampled inside of our city that they have been uh introduced at least twice and so you see here uh this this is a principal component analysis up up in the top with these three circles representing genetic variation within the three three kind of clumps of genetic variability within uh the Ontario the advent like the the the the populations in Ontario where we have moved this species of termite and you can see GE which I've shown here in this little red triangle appears in two so we don't have any we don't share likely an inoculation with Peely with Windsor but Toronto and G Fergus Allora like we have been inoculated via probably the same shipment multiple so multiple times now I've used the past tense a couple of time when I've talked about the management strategy because as of 2023 the city actually discontinued its active management and I'm pretty sure although I can't find an announcement of it but I'm pretty my guess is that this coincides with the retirement of the termite control officer and the city not replacing that position and so now they just they have suggestions and my guess is watching what happened with remember with east view back here if we look at that blue bar of abundance where where we where we're not looking and where we're not actively trying to prevent if they get moved there they can really explode in abundance and so what's going to happen to the population in say 60 years so my initial thought is if we stop looking at this it's going to increase all else remaining equal if we start moving like stop monitoring and stop reducing the frequency with which we move mulch and other woody material around neighborhoods in G the numbers will go up and they will go up in places where we're not even looking so that's one thing but the other thing that's going to happen is that in 60 years the temperatures the abiotic conditions will have changed dramatically and I'm going to show you a map of this in a second but I see that there's a whole bunch of lumber transport yeah I I'm just kind of scrolling through the chat here yeah Kayla you're totally right so that area right along the western bank of the speed there's lots of old houses like the I'm I'm in that area right now and this house is 125 years old ant oh my god if we had anteaters I would give up this job and I would be the termite control officer that would be fantastic so 60 years what is the temperature going to look like there's actually a paper that uh Rob Dunn and colleague Fitzpacker came up with in 2019 that estimated based on some climate models what 60 years later across various urban centers in North America what they would look like and so they basically gave you a comparative method to say if you're for instance in 2019 there's like so if you're living today in Washington DC in 60 years what you ought to anticipate is a uh an abiotic conditions that are more reminiscent of North Carolina of Greenwood North Carolina and we can do this not with GE in their database that you can scan and and use as an applet there under the QR code but uh the prediction is that Kener so relatively the same conditions as we experience here will look much more will be more reminiscent of Missouri in 60 years missouri where there are termites and where they live quite healthfully so even though we have gotten rid of the termite control officer and we've essentially done like to to pull back a um a long ago political reference when there was the uh a conflict was declared over because it was convenient to declare it over i think we might have declared this war over without actually having won it so multiple introductions uh it was actively managed that has been discontinued at most places the numbers were declining but they were not zero and now that we're not looking and now that we anticipate temperature humidity predicting to rise um my guess is that this problem is also not done and that if you stay here or if you continue to be so like if you stay in the city of G or if this is where you are from within your lifetime you will hear about the termites again cuz we've declared them gone and they're not so uh this is my this is this is Caramel reminding me with her 18-year-old gaze of uh intelligence here to take a look at the chat so I'm going to change horses here we're going to talk a little bit about uh insects as predators insects as prey and ways that they have to stop themselves the encourage them to be one and prevent themselves from being the other and when we talk about um being a predator as an arthropod or as an insect in this case there's a whole bunch of varied ways we're not just talking lions and analopee here right so one of the there's some amazing ways where you as a predator can prey on a single prey item in your life now this can be as a paricettoid which we'll unpack in a second or as a parasite like a botfly now some of you might know not know about botflies we're going to focus in on a couple of himoptrin and these are diprins botflies if you've traveled in Central America you've probably run into them before they lay their eggs on a mosquito or a stable fly and then the eggs hatch into a first instar and when that mosquito or stable fly bites a warm-blooded animal like you the maggots the developing larvae of the botfly drop off and enter the host via the hole that the stable fly or the mosquito has made and then they grow two more instars and so we see here this is the adult then onto the vector the vector and then we've get this larvae now you're interested perhaps uh perhaps not how big does this larvae get Smith I hear you say well here's Mark Moffett showing you rest assured no flies were harmed in the making of this movie but prepare yourself because it might make you feel a little squeamish he's not dramatic at all so this is the back of his hand uh-oh look at this everybody wait is this coming out now I would show you that kind of a video of myself so Kyle hold on hold on i would show you that video of myself if I had successfully reared now I've been infected with numerous botfly larvae in working in in Costa Rica and unfortunately I've killed them all i appear to be a barren wasteland not a very hospitable environment and so I don't have that video so I aspire to being able to show you something like that here's another video from a uh used to have a G connection because this was this video has been seen more than 19 million times it's about 4 and a half minutes long so we're not going to watch the whole thing this is a researcher who had been working in the tropics and had gone to the Arctic several weeks later and while he was working there his botflies decided to emerge and so on his back you can see these small wounds and then all of the botflies that they encouraged to come out now I don't know if you remember from the last one but there are spikes this is This is hurt this is hurting Kyle right here by pulling them out because those spikes are pulling against him they are trying not to be pulled out if you go to McGill and you study ornithology uh you might meet Kyle he's a lovely person and is a Canada research chair um in Northern Studies at McGill on the McDonald campus on the West Island now so that's being a parasite that's so that's a predator being uh and so I see the question yeah is the infected person okay in both cases yes totally fine it's dramatic now parasicettoids so that's having a parasite a parasicettoid is a different kind of predator because it aim is to consume you if we got them this is a an artist's rendition of a paricettoid that is going to lay itself in our brain and paricettoids have garnished our um pop culture artistic they they've inspired us in numerous ways uh least of all or maybe one of the most impressive um times is with the Alien movie that bursting that chest bursting thing and the laying of the eggs the face hugger laying the eggs this is all um set designers and cinematographers and writers and directors bringing to a story of space uh the biology of an insect paricettoid so to an insect paricettoid if you are this caterpillar chewing on a leaf living your best life being the herbivore that's defoliating one quarter of the forests of the tropics you are doing you're a diverse you're a rich muscley thing and probably you're sequestering some toxins so birds are probably not interested in you that much and hopefully or if if things are going to go well for you you're going to ignore or not see this fly perching right here that's a provisionally named species of Belvosia a tax a tekkinid paricettoid so this is another kind of diprin and what it's doing there is ovapositing it's laying tiny eggs on the leaf it's been attracted to the leaf because it has smelled the fact that this caterpillar is chewing on this leaf and the plant the tree is letting out uh chemical signals into the environment of distress the fly flies up those signals of distress and is furring is inferring and this is a very testy kind of a thing that it's going to that there is this species of caterpillar laying its eggs there so it lays its eggs and then the caterpillar keeps eating the egg it eats the leaf part of that leaf that it eats includes the egg of the tekkinid the tkinid egg wakes up inside the cal caterpillar it begins to develop it develops and it eats the caterpillar from within and then as the caterpillar continues to live its life it continues to pupate but it has these spiracles that are evident on the outside of that pupa those spiracles have nothing to do with the caterpillar that's the essentially the breathing straw the breathing straw for the developing fly inside so this fly is consuming the entirety of this caterpillar and so hypo h the hypothesis amongst those of us who study parasettoids was that flies because they have this indirect infection they're phys and because they have these spiracles that physically avoid the host immune system which should be trying to knock down this invader this parasettoid these are probably host generalists what we found as we use genetics to explore these tropical paracettoids is that being a host generalist being able to eat many species of caterpillar is actually quite rare now himoptrins are also paricettoids you maybe heard of gall wasps on oaks for example uh here is atenboroough again so again if you're attending from the future you might have to scan this and go and watch yourself this is a shorter clip but it's also atro she carefully selects a site for her operations and takes [Music] aim she flits away the drilled sheath and starts work her aim has to be very accurate if she's to strike her target the lava at the goal center the tip of her drill has a sharp cutting edge of metallic zinc which pierces the gall tissues with ease when she detects that she's reached the central chamber a microscopic egg travels down the center of the drill and into the lava is that amazing so we've actually adapted there's a bunch of different Her offspring will now hatch in the gold center consume the flesh of the resident lava and move on so there's a bunch of biomimetic solutions that we've derived from that kind of cutting edge the ovapos the ovapositor that can in many of these himanoprine paracettoids can cut through not just like uh the small tissue of an acorn but but into the stump there are stump stabber wasps that you might have seen before that are doing the same thing that search with the ovapositor within looking for the larvae in which it will lay its eggs this is incredible and when you get a chance to see it it's incredible to think about the likelihood of this being successful is just so small so here's one on a little seed that we found on the leaf litter in Costa Rica where she approaches lifts up the abdomen inserts the ovapositor and so we now know that there is a tiny developing beetle larvae inside that seed that that parasettoid has shown us because she knows it's there because she's investing the time and the energy to insert the avoitor and look around so parasicettoids combine aspects of being of a parasite or a predator but essentially I'd say it's closer to being a predator so it's a single individual that predates and kills a single prey item and it's one of the cases that from a um life history perspective it's a rare case where the predator is much smaller than the prey um all hexopods have at least one paricettoid and so thinking back to when I told you about the diversity of the expected versus the named diversity of insects and how we're probably if we've got a million named there's probably maybe 99 million more to go a lot of that unnamed diversity has to do with this kind of compounding feature here at least one perhaps three perhaps four paricettoids specific to each species so if there's a whole bunch of species that we haven't described behind that name there are it's going to multiply three or four different times because of the paracettoids that we also do not know yet exist and then there are things called hyperaricettoids which are going to fly around and find the same relationship that the say the beetle inside of that little seed on the floor of the forest floor of the coastline of Guanacaste province in Costa Rica they're going to smell not that there's a beetle but it's been parasetized and they want to lay their egg not in the beetle but in the himanoptrin that had already parasetized it so it's the paricettoid of the paricettoid this is incredible and like I said we think historically we have vastly underestimated the their diversity these are all pictures of what we would have called 20 years ago a single species of bconed wasp called aantilles luccoigmas and it would have been found from the mid mid latitudes of the US down to Brazil and it ate a whole bunch of things it was a generalist paricettoid what we found by sequencing and looking at the evolutionary history and the ecology of who was eating whom in Costa Rica just within this protected area where I work in the northwestern corner of the country an area about the size of the GTA but hosting perhaps 3% of the species of the planet we found that each one of these morphologically nearly identical animals was derived from a very different caterpillar different families of caterpillar very different biologies very different host plants very different abiotic environments and genetically quite distinct and so our underestimate of insects in particular is intimately tied to our estimation of the importance of parasettoids so parasettoids being a very successful evolutionarily ecologically important kind of predator but if we dial back our impression of being a predator and we think okay we've thought about predators like since kindergarten right as in your training as a as the your lifetime as being a biologist generally when we think about successful predators um I would say more often than not if if not you those of you that you're sharing a bus home with might think of something like lions lions and tires and bears oh my right the predators now how successful are lions as predators this example lions are going to be our our kind of exemplar vertebrate a successful lion hunts in big groups and about 40% of the time 30 to 40% of the time it's successful in consuming something so there's its success rate is very low it aspires to half the time and it very rarely gets there but consider dragonflies predators that are much more widely distributed thankfully where we live 90% of the time if they're working with small prey they have more than 90% success rates so when you think of successful predators voracious predators terrifying predators to their prey please forget the vertebrates think about the insects now that's just them eating so let's think about uh the predators as they're trying to avoid being eaten and there's all sorts of famous examples about all the defenses that they have to do that and we're not going to have time to jump into all of these we've dived into some of them already in terms of camouflage and the batula uh the carbonifera versus batula papifa in uh associated changes in abundance with industrialization across uh northern England that's camouflage right we've talked and you know about uh monarchs sequestering toxic compounds from milkweeds to advertise to their potential bird their aven predators that we are a toxic thing we're bright orange and you do not want to eat us there's startle responses think about these the eyes again these are uh caterpillars from Costa Rica but the where the eyes of the caterpillar are essentially designed to jump out and to give just a moment of of doubt to a potential predator the eye spots on wings are often uh to do with that then there's also animals again with the lepodoprins and the moth uh this hawkmoth the sphingida this death's head that has this very um skull looking like um patterning on its back that cries out if it's being predated again to startle and to send the predator away and then there's of course flying away running away uh and there are thermal or and other kinds of chemical ways of defending the thermal way that you may or may not have heard about and we're going to take a little bit of time to talk about this because you have the opportunity to continue your career in invertebrate biology uh taking some very bepecific courses here at the University of G there are species of bee uh particularly uh Asian species of apus that engage in this kind of defensive behavior one of the major predators of bees are other social himanoptra like wasps so if there's a hornet or a wasp that approaches the nest the colony of apus of a of the Asian honeybee there are there's an immediate kind of pheromone response to the from the discoverer to the rest of the colony where a massive number of worker bees are recruited and they swarm the hornet making this tight ball and that they generate heat they reduce oxygen they increase carbon dioxide which kills the hornet and so in the chat if those of you who know about this strategy tell me about where the heat would come from for an ectotherm to kill another ectotherm via heat where is that going to come from yeah you guys know this story good wing movement yep you're exactly right so they're they're vibrating their flight muscles and they're creating heat that way and basically um catastrophically ending that potential predator's life now there's all sorts of other chemical ways one of since we talked about himoprine and dipter for a little while we're going to go to a beetle example here and think about the bombardier beetle which keeps in two separate reservoirs in its abdomen hydroquinine and hydrogen peroxide and they're mixed in the presence of a catalase when it's predated that then produces this explosive mixture and you can see the mantis then recovering from this hot this burning hot reaction um where which can bring the that catal with the two initial compon components stored separately and safely in the beetle's abdomen raise the temperature to nearly 100° so they're Ow you can make a meme about that mantis later on and there's a famous story about Darwin um being having collecting eyes too big for his his his eyes are too big for his stomach or in this case his eyes are too big for his hands so he was collecting beetles when a student at Cambridge and nothing gave him as much these are from his letters so these are his words as collecting beetles and it was not just a mere passion he just was zealous about it so one day after tearing off some old bark he saw two rare beetles and he seized one in each hand and then he saw a third and it was a new kind and I couldn't bear to lose it so he popped the one from his right hand into his mouth and alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out which I lost as well as the third one so if you're collecting have a plan not just a lot of zeal but this was a bombard beetle that he had tried to collect that made him lose his other collections alas yes the song that's awesome yeah you're right Brooke there are there are uh vertebrates so I've I've seized on the iconic one but there are certainly vertebrate examples where their their success rate is higher higher than the lion but rarely or never as high as the dragonfly now let's talk in the last few minutes about uh two examples let's talk about some examples of communicating arthropods communicating insects communicating ants that are using tactile running bees we'll go through that one quickly because you're probably based on your bee knowledge so far you're familiar with the waggle dance and the fireflies with their species specific flashing in uh and then acoustic stridulating ants so these two ant examples to bookend the communication section this is tandem running that you're watching happen here so these are two teenthorax ants two small acorn style ants um where one of them has found a food source it's gone back to the colony and recruited a follower so one of her sisters and it's leading her back and so it's not based on following trails the the one the first one is trying to remember using step counts in a bunch of different ways its way back to the source but the follower and the leader have to maintain so close contact and they're touching each other you can watch the ab the antenna touch the abdomen so they're basically leading them along to this new novel food source and then there's so that's tactile communication um what if their love language is based on light well you think about fireflies that are using precisely timed bioluminescent patterns to identify mates and in this kind of view of a meadow in eastern North America what this artist had tried to draw nearly 70 years ago was the fact that different species were flying at different heights and they were sending out their light signals they were flashing that that signal at different rates and that was a species specific rate so they're advertising to the females that are staying nice and sensibly cryptically hidden here their vigor and their uh utility as a mate and so here's a more contemporary drawing derived uh from cameras that have been set up in this forest but you can see very different um in this case male patterns that are that are being used to identify mates this makes them especially vulnerable though to light pollution and so we've seen even in just my admittedly long but in my lifetime we've seen a great reduction in the in the number of fireflies there's the waggle dance right and you know about the waggle dance so the honeybee finds a source comes back to the colony and this is a colony you're looking at it it is actually a vertical right so it's coming in and it's setting up and it performs this waggle run at an angle to the sun so the sun would be straight up and it goes at an angle that angle from vertical to the direction of that first run tells the followers where to head out in relation to the sun to find their new f food source so then it circles back and it does a bit of a waggle again and then it turns to the other side it continues and the better the food source the more waggles that she provides and the followers touch uh the dancer directly with their antenna during the dance and so they're watching it they're feeling it and there's even some chemical so there's airborne sounds air flows vibrations and chemical release so they're using a whole poperri of signals to communicate here speaking of a poperri did you know that ants call like you could buy a call book in the same way that you can buy CDs and use the uh like apps on your phone uh to identify birds you could do the same with ants if we knew more about how and what sounds they make and how many ants possess on the edges of their abdominal segments this little Vshape is what's called a stridulatory organ there's an SEM where you can see some of the the fine grained comb and when they move their abdominal segments in and out of each other they make sounds now that last ant that you saw there is an ant that is um a taxonom taxonomic of a nightmare but it is a common ant in low elevation rainforest in Costa Rica and it's one if you came with me that we can identify standing up that we don't have to use a microscope or a lens that you just look at it and go "Wow bright yellow antenna that's um neopona apicalis but researchers who were listening and looking at the distribution and doing some of the genetics of presumably neopona apicalis found out that they have not just some slightly distinct morphologies they also make different sounds and I hope listen lean in so there's the amorph tighter B morph then we've got the C morph so different periodicity different base these are species specific calls where they're talking to each other and of course because many species take advantage of ants there are species that are imitating those calls this is a crazy story where for a different uh genus of ant this is a phidoli so a mermicine ant its call changes whether or not you're uh a worker or a reproductive or what kind of work you do so they have cast differentiation where they have big soldiers with big heads and muscles and they do different kinds of jobs than the smaller workers and then they have the queen and they all speak differently this is a worker that's an ant isn't that amazing so come on Caramel there are beetles that live inside that colony that make these sounds the beetles actually predate the ants how do they live in the colony how do they not immediately identify it some of that will be their scent but researchers have discovered that these beetles also possess a stridulatory organ and they are not just representing they're not just imitating the call they're not like arriving on a new shore and trying to speak like the locals they're speaking like the royalty they try they assume a sound that sounds less like a worker and more like a queen and so they run around this colony trying to sound like the queen and speaking in a very refined accent and then the workers take care of them this is amazing uh it doesn't impress Caramel let me just scroll through here oh yeah firefly talk yes that's really And unfortunately you do have to leave the city generally now hold on how old are you old like I'm sometimes people have referred to me as middle middleaged and it's like oh my god that would be aspirational if I live to twice this age I've blown away age records so old this is us kind of wrapping up the hexopods we got like a minute and a half left and I'm going to talk about this another group and it's going to be three fila in one minute like 20 seconds each okay and this is the scaladopherins so these are a group of ectoizoans so they're unified in that they mol they are not very diverse as you can see here dozens of species they tend to live in they live in marine environments and they are unified by the possession of an introvert with retractor muscles so see each one of these this is a pupil this is a kinorank and this is a luraceraphern so a drawing kind of a section of each one of these taxa they're unified by having what would be also a really good science fiction prop in that they've got these giant retractor muscles you can see in black labeled on each of them and then they stick out this head that can eat now the head has what's called cuticular scalids which are essentially posteriorly directed spines so they're about burrowing or about getting into a host and kind of pulling food into their mouths we'll take a look at them because they're gorgeous these are kind of ranks there's about 230 now described species but many more we are not looking these are small things right we are not looking for these things and so just an unappreciated like dozens of species so far who knows how many species are out there in the abyssal zone let alone in the benthos and nearshore the words here kind derive from the Greek for um for motion and snout and that refers to the one of the synapomorphies for the group so they move through that sediment using their protractable mouth cone and that's what you're looking at here and these are the posteriorly pointing scalids the lucrerins and the root of this name comes from the Latin so we've switched from Greek to Latin meaning corset that's referring to this area here underneath those scalids it was discovered relatively recently and there's only 30 species yet named many many more and in fact these guys have some of incredible attributes that we've only seen in them in Metazoa in that some of them were discovered in a deep and uh anorobic pox pocket a hypers saline pocket at the bottom of the Mediterranean where there is no oxygen they are the only metaone known to be living in permanently anoxic conditions and then the preapulids there's only about 20 species but again they're all over the world some of these so the last two were like millimeters some of these can be like 40 cm they can also be very very small but most are burers and they have so here's the introvert that's extended and there's slightly intended and there's these papillic ribs that have the backward less less ornate scalids but still those reverse uh scalids and that's the that's our view of the ectoones we focused in with a lot of time on the various diverse groups we're going to be switching on Wednesday and Friday to be thinking about dudero and our final kind of taxonomic survey of the invertebrate world so until then uh I'm going to stop recording in a second and I'll keep looking through the chat to see what I've missed but take care of yourself take care of those around you and we'll see you to talk about some ainoderms soon