An ornate lineart of an ice crawler bug Grylloblatta, which resembles a long cricket. It lacks the jumping legs and wings, so it visibly gets around by walking on rocks.

#InsertAnInvert2024
Motion - Scuttler

Many insects never evolved flight, while others lost their wings to fit their ground-dwelling lifestyle better.

Ice crawlers live in extreme places like mountaintops or glaciers. They don't travel far and get easily overheated outside their comfort zone. 🎨 🐡

We've just published some brand new insect migration research in iScience!

We found that Marmalade hoverfly migrants are marathoners, not sprinters.

Led by Richard Massy of @uniofexeter.bsky.social

Full Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Press release: news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-e...

OK - 1 of my favourite things that I learned today was that a #Triassic #dinosaur liked eating #staphylinid beetles & that researchers inferred the dinosaur's, "...beak-like jaws ...were used to efficiently peck small insects off the ground, a feeding behaviour analogous 2 some extant #birds."

We do insect news, if you're into that kinda thing.

a flat bug with a black back and bright barbie pink sides. The end is yellow instead of pink. It has a teeny tiny face. It's walking on a knit shirt

Good morning, please have a nice bug*.
#invertebrates #BugADay

*a lady lightning bug

Louse - Chelopistes meleagridis An online resource devoted to North American insects, spiders and their kin, offering identification, images, and information.

It is that magical time of the year when we entomologists make everyone else aware of the Large Turkey Louse.

Ideal to bring up during awkward pauses in conversation today.

NYAS Publications Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) cases in the notorious Bitterroot Valley outbreak of the early 20th century were peculiarly distributed, with virtually all reported from the west side of the vall....

Source acknowledgement:

www.jstor.org/tc/accept?or...

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles...

nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Either way, the current idea is that the habitat on the West side of the river does something to help out RMSF while the environment on the East side of the river benefits R. peacockii.

Since R. peacockii outcompetes RMSF, you get a separation between two close environments.

This is, of course, a pretty simplistic way to look at it.

What hosts the ticks have access to, even the chemicals in the environment from plants, the bacteria the ticks are exposed to, etc can have significant effects on the bacteria inside the ticks.

Ticks are cold-blooded, so their body temperature is always the same as the environment.

Anything living inside of them will be exposed to similar environments.

If the tick is cold, so is the bacteria.

If the tick is hot, so is the bacteria.

These are older pictures, so we can just look at Google Earth.

The difference between the two habitats is still pretty obvious.

If we look at a topographical map, we can see that the two sides of the river are VERY different.

On the West side, there's a lot of mountains.

The East side is flatter, less mountainous, and is just a completely different habitat.

Getting outcompeted for the next generation of hosts explains why some tick populations don't get RMSF.

So, if there’s a stronger competitor, why does RMSF even exist if these ticks can easily cross the river on their hosts?

This question hasn't recieved as much attention.

RMSF has a harder time maintaining it’s foothold in the cycle, and R. peacockii takes advantage of a natural ‘choke point’.

Eggs can’t maintain both bacteria at the same time.

R. peacockii tends to win this fight and outcompetes RMSF when they’re in a shared habitat.

R. rickettsiae is pretty adept at getting into the ticks through their mouths, but R. peacockii is really good at passing on through the ovaries.

R. rickettsiae makes the ticks really sick, while R. peacockii is less hard on the host.

R. rickettsiae is the one we know as RMSF.

The other, lesser known bacteria, is R. peacockii, or what’s called the East Side Agent

Both of these bacteria compete for space in the next generation of tick, but they do so in very different ways.

We want to understand how these bacteria work…and over the years, the Bitterroot valley has turned into a kind of laboratory for how bacteria compete inside ticks.

You see, in the Bitterroot valley, there are two different bacteria circulating in these ticks.

However, ticks can also pass germs onto their eggs through their ovaries.

This is called horizontal, or transovarial transmission.

Both of these are important to RMSF’s survival, because dual transmission increases the chance of completing another cycle in the wild.

There’s two ways that a tickborne disease can be transmitted.

The first one is the one that everyone’s familiar with.

An infected tick bites a host, and passes the germ onto a new generation of ticks when new individuals feed.

This is horizontal transmission.

To really understand this, we need to explore how tick-borne diseases navigate their world.

Parasites don’t live in an environment free of competition.

Sure, they’re competing with their hosts for nutrients.

They’re ALSO competing with things inside the hosts.

So this all begs the question...why was the East side of the Bitterroot river safe from RMSF?

We still don't actually know.

Let me explain...

He named this bacteria after himself, Rickettsia rickettsii.

The disease would go on to be well studied, and go by a few other names. However, over time, the scientific community settled on a name originally published in 1903.

Rocky Mountian Spotted Fever

So he drew blood from William Langdon, stained it with a chemical called Eosin, and found bacteria.

He dissected ticks in the area, found the bacteria.

He also found that he could pass the disease among guinea pigs.

He also found bacteria in tick eggs.

web.archive.org/web/20110722...

t didn't take too long before he met a local family living in black measles territory. Their son, William, 10 years old, had caught the disease.

When Ricketts came to visit he found...ticks.

Lots of ticks. Everyone in the family had been bitten by them.

At the same time as this was going on, a young microbiologist by the name of Howard Taylor Ricketts set up shop in the area.

With few laboratory supplies-all of his experiments were done in a tent-he began to look for the cause of this perplexing disease.

So they took the tick, and allowed it to bite another healthy person.

They got the disease.

So they fed a tick on that person, and THAT person got the disease as well.

Unfortunately, they didn't publish these results until much later.

The disease remained mysterious, until two doctors L.P. Macalla and H.A. Bereton had a patient who was bitten by a tick.

One which looked a lot like the one below.

That patient later developed the symptoms described in the post above.

The more these early researchers found out about it, the more mysterious it became.

People became really sore, and developed a fever. A rash of purple spots dotted the body. Some would go blind or deaf. Loss of balance was pretty common.

It didn't appear to be contagious.

At the same time, a few other doctors were sent to investigate along with Williams and Chowning.

Together they found out:

It was caught in springtime
It was caught outdoors
The Salish rarely got the disease

Not much was known about this disease until the early 1800s, when the state board of health brought in Louis Wilson and William Chowning to investigate.

They did a lot of research on the disease, eventually creating the map below.