While environmentalists are concerned about preserving the spider's natural habitat, many residents are vexed about what the discovery means for the future of the underpass, which was intended to ease traffic in a heavily congested area.
Take a look at the dime-size spider that's causing all the ruckus:
An enormous, new, leggy arachnid with a leg span is just over 13 inches (33 centimeters) has been found lurking in the caves of the Southeast Asian nation of Laos.
The creature is a type of harvestmen, a group of arachnids colloquially called "daddy longlegs" and frequently mistaken for spiders. (The two animals are related, as both are types of arachnids.) The species hasn't previously been described, according to a release describing the finding.
The arachnid's super-long legs make it one of the largest harvestmen ever found. The record-holding species, from South America, has a leg span of 13.4 inches (34 cm), according to the statement.
The creature was discovered by Peter Jäger, an arachnologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. Jäger found the creature recently while in Laos to film a TV show, collecting spiders and arachnids in between shots.
After failing to identify the species himself, Jäger enlisted the help of a harvestmen expert who couldn't find any published description of the animal. The researchers haven't named the new species yet, and hope to conduct a study of the animal to pinpoint its place in the harvestmen's evolutionary family tree.
Dung beetles can use balls of poo much like air-conditioning units to cool themselves, researchers say.
Dung beetles roll up nutritious balls of excrement up to 50 times heavier than their own bodies to feed their young. They roll the balls walking backward, with their heads near the ground. The ancient Egyptians envisioned that the sun was rolled around the sky in much the same way, making the dung (or scarab) beetle an important symbol in ancient Egyptian religion.
Past research showed these insects routinely dance in circles on top of their feasts of dung to help navigate away from rival beetles as quickly as possible. As scientists looked for this dancing, they noticed the beetles climbed onto the excrement balls most often during the midday heat.
Now researchers find that dung beetles might also use excrement to keep themselves cool.
"Dung beetles are the first example of an insect using a mobile, thermal refuge to move across hot soil," researcher Jochen Smolka, a neuroethologist at Lund University in Sweden, told LiveScience. "Insects, once thought to be at the mercy of environmental temperatures, use sophisticated behavioral strategies to regulate their body temperature[s]."
Scientists used thermal vision cameras to watch the Scarabaeus (Kheper) lamarcki dung beetle in its natural habitat in the South African savanna, where ground temperatures at noon can exceed a searing 140 degrees F (60 degrees C). The scientists prepared two sandy, circular arenas 10 feet wide (3 meters). They kept one shaded in the morning so that it only reached a relatively cool 124.3 degrees F (51.3 degrees C), and left the other exposed to full sunlight so it heated up to about 135 degrees F (57.2 degrees C).
The researchers discovered that beetles on hot soil climbed onto their excrement balls seven times more often than when on cooler ground. When the researchers painted rubbery boots made of silicone onto the legs of the insects to protect them from the heat, "beetles with boots on climbed their balls less often," Smolka said. The scientists think the insects get on top of dung when it gets hot to give themselves a respite from scorching sands and help protect their brains from overheating. The researchers found the front legs of the beetles cooled by about 12 degrees F (7 degrees C) on average within 10 seconds of climbing on their excrement balls. [Video and Photos of Dancing Dung Beetles]
"Like an air-conditioning unit, the moist ball is cooled by evaporative cooling," Smolka said.
Once on top of the balls, the insects were often seen "wiping their faces," preening gestures the investigators think spread regurgitated liquid onto their legs and heads, behavior never seen at other times of day.
"We'd really like to continue looking at the preening behavior," Smolka said. "Do the beetles actually regurgitate liquid in order to cool their heads?"
The scientists detailed their findings in the Oct. 23 issue of the journal Current Biology.
The ancient bug seen below had some awesome camouflage. Like wearing a ghillie suit, it carried around a bundle of leaves and twigs on its body to hide it from predators.
De la Fuente called it Hallucinochrysa diogenesi, a name that is both evocative and cheekily descriptive. The first part comes from the Latin “hallucinatus” and references “the bizarreness of the insect”. The second comes from Diogenes the Greek philosopher, whose name is associated with a disorder where people compulsively hoard trash.
The amber-fossilized insect turned out to be 110 million years old and shows this crazy trash-collecting habit that it used as protection — the bristles covering its body would collect detritus from the forest floor, like fern hairs. It's similar to modern lacewing larvae, which use the same behavior to hide from predators.
The plant matter that was stuck in the insects bristles was actually a type of fern that dominated recently-burned forests, indicating that a forest fire had recently swept through the area, causing trees to weep sap, in which the weird hoarder got trapped.
It's well-known that the world's rainforests contain an enormous variety of arthropods, the group of animals that includes insects and spiders.
But a new study shows that this variety is simply mind-blowing.
The study, published today (Dec. 13) in the journal Science, estimates that a small region of tropical forest in Panama about the size of Manhattan contains 25,000 species of insects, spiders and other arthropods.
The study involved 102 researchers from 21 different countries who attacked every part of the rainforest in Panama to look for all types of arthropods. They sifted through soil, leaf litter, dug into tree bark and rotting wood and climbed into the forest's massive canopy using ropes and cranes. It's the first study to sample arthropods from every part of a tropical rainforest.
Up to 70 percent of the creatures collected in the survey belong to new, unidentified species, said Frode Ødegaard, a co-author and researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in a teleconference.
Searching the forest
It wasn't practical for the scientists to search the entire forest, so they did intensive sampling at a total of 12 sites and extrapolated their findings to get information about the rest of the jungle.
Their results suggest that the diversity within a relatively small area can give them a good idea about diversity across a wider swathe, as long as the sample sites are well-selected and thoroughly searched. (This is very difficult, which is why it hasn't been done before, the researchers said.)
The results also showed that the diversity of arthropod life is closely correlated with the diversity of plants in the area, and this is true even for the creatures that don't eat plants, according to the study.
That means diversity may be measured more easily than previously thought, said co-author Tomas Roslin from Finland's University of Helsinki. [Dazzling Photos of Dew-Covered Insects]
"Not every study will have the access to 100 arthropod experts that we did, but they might have access to one or two botanists," he said.
Arthropod importance
Arthropods, which are defined by their hard exoskeletons and segmented bodies, are vital for the functioning of the forest, so it's important to understand and preserve them, the scientists said.
In fact, most multicellular life forms on Earth are in fact arthropods in tropical forests, said Yves Basset, a co-author at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City. "Of course, if we want to understand and conserve life on Earth, we have to understand and conserve arthropods in the rainforest," he said.
"Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse."
Er, not quite.
Get a magnifying glass and take a close look at your Christmas tree, says a scientist.
In all likelihood, it is harbouring thousands of bugs.
Bark lice, mites, moths and the odd spider are among the tiny creatures that live on pine trees and find themselves dragged into homes when Christmas comes around, says Bjarte Jordal at Norway's University Museum of Bergen.
Stimulated by the lights and warmth, they emerge from hibernation in your living room.
"In research on Christmas trees there have been found as many as 25,000 individual (insects)... in some of the trees," says Jordal.
He adds, though: "As they cannot feed on the limited plants found in most households, the bugs will quickly dry out and die.
"These insects and bugs do not constitute any risk or danger to people or furniture. And if anyone is worried about allergic reactions, I don't think there's any danger of that."
Some species of viruses, fungi, protozoans, wasps, and tapeworms take over the brains and actions of the animals and insects they infect — making them do whatever their new master wants.
A recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology was completely dedicated to these parasites, which turn their hosts into zombies.
This is usually controlled by special biochemistry. The parasites release chemicals or manipulate the genes of their host, changing their behaviors. Most them them do this by changing the brain's chemicals, or by inducing "sickness behaviors" by messing with the host's immune system.
"The fact that parasites can so efficiently alter host behavior is fascinating," guest editor of the journal, Michael Dickinson, from the University of Washington, said in an article in the issue. "There is something horrifying and wondrous about a tiny 'implant' being able to control such a large animal machine."
Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga – These wasps live in the spider Plesiometa argyra. The wasp injects chemicals into the spider that make it abandon its web and build a completely different one, with a thick sheet to protect the wasp's offspring's cocoons, which they build after chewing threw the spider's body.
Baculovirus – This virus infects Gypsy moth caterpillars and releases an enzyme that stops their natural molting cycle, makes them eat continually, and forces them to climb to the top of trees and clamp onto the leaves until it dies and liquefies, raining down viruses across the forest to infect other caterpillars.
Toxoplasma gondii – Picked up from cat poop, this tiny (one-celled) parasite infects the brains of rats, causing them to make extra dopamine and testosterone, which makes them fearless. When they aren't afraid of cat smells, they venture out into the animals' presence, and get eaten, spreading the parasite to the cat. They also mate more, spreading the parasite to other rats.
Pubic lice, the crab-shaped insects that have dwelled in human groins since the beginning of history, are disappearing. Doctors say bikini waxing may be the reason.
Waning infestations of the bloodsuckers have been linked by doctors to pubic depilation, especially a technique popularized in the 1990s by a Manhattan salon run by seven Brazilian sisters. More than 80 percent of college students in the U.S. remove all or some of their pubic hair -- part of a trend that’s increasing in western countries. In Australia, Sydney’s main sexual health clinic hasn’t seen a woman with pubic lice since 2008 and male cases have fallen 80 percent from about 100 a decade ago.
There's one big problem with their report, though. The Australian data above is just about all the information they have to support their theory that pubic waxing is leading to the decline, and possible extermination of, pubic lice.
The article starts by saying crabs are disappearing, a fact its authors never get around to corroborating. They provide interesting data about one Australian clinic that hasn’t seen a case of pubic lice since 2008 but get data from no other clinics. Later they note that crabs can be self-treated with insecticide yet fail to provide further information...
... a letter in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections written in 2006 that suggests there may exist a correlation between decrease of body lice and increasing popularity of genital waxing among patients at the General Infirmary in Leeds, England. But, as we know, correlation does not equal causation.
Although waxing may be widespread in certain sections of society, there are huge swaths of the world and cultures that can't afford a $50/month personal pube-grooming ritual.
Maybe we will have a bit more detail when the researchers publish their study in May.
Apple has had a few problems with its latest iPhone and iPad software update.
Released just last month, iOS 6.1 was meant to be a relatively significant update bringing enhanced Siri capabilities, LTE support to more countries, and more iTunes Match features.
But it seems as if the update is doing more harm than good.
The Verge reports that a new bug, "lets anyone bypass your iPhone password lock and access your phone app, view or modify contacts, check your voicemail, and look through your photos (by attempting to add a photo to a contact)."
Besides allowing anyone access to your phone, Apple's latest software update also drains your battery much faster than usual, and Microsoft recommended users not upgrade because of an Exchange bug, which causes iPhones to continuously loop when syncing a recurring calendar meeting invitation to Microsoft Exchange.
Apple has not issued a statement on this latest bug but here is a video of it in action:
Fruit flies may seem like pests to us, but they have parasites of their own. A tiny wasp known as Leptopilina heterotoma, infects their larvae (a life-stage right after birth) and will devour and kill them.
Interestingly, fruit flies have ways to avoid this wasp: They change their behavior.
New research, which will be published in the journal Science on Friday, Feb. 22, showed that when female fruit flies see the wasps, they are more likely to lay their eggs in food that contains alcohol.
The parasitic wasps like to lay their eggs inside the fruit fly larvae. The eggs grow inside the larvae, eventually consuming and killing them — bad news for the mommy-to-be.
Because the flies feed on the yeast that live on decomposing fruit, they have a high tolerance for booze, which the yeast makes as a byproduct. Compared to the flies, the parasitic wasps don't handle their booze well.
Previous studies have shown that when fruit flies are infected with these parasites, they get wasted by eating foods high in alcohol to kill them off. The baby wasps can't survive as high levels of alcohol as the fly can, and they die.
In the new study, Balint Kacsoh and colleagues at Emory University found that when parasitic wasps are nearby, female fruit flies lay their larvae in alcohol-infused environments. (Usually they prefer alcohol-free environments, because in high concentrations booze can be toxic to the insects). When infected larvae are grown in alcohol, the parasites can't survive.
They only laid their larvae in alcoholic substances when the wasp nearby was specifically threatening to the life-stage of their offspring. They didn't lay their larvae in alcohol when the wasp nearby was either male or immature because those are not a threat to the offspring.
The researchers found that one single molecule — called neuropeptide F — controls whether the female fruit fly lays her larvae in an alcoholic or non-alcoholic substance.
We often think of cities as dampening zones for wildlife, with bustling human activity and inhospitable concrete surfaces keeping many critters at a distance. But in reality the opposite might be the case, at least for insects: They seem to love basking in the toasty air of the urban heat island.
That's the take-away of a new study out of Raleigh conducted by Emily Meineke at North Carolina State University and entomology enthusiasts around the state. Meineke and friends wanted to know if urban pest outbreaks had anything to do with the warm air wafting off of cities. So they set their sights on Parthenolecanium quercifex, or the oak lecanium, a type of scale insect whose extreme slothfulness makes it the Al Bundy of the bug world.
Many people have probably seen the creatures without even realizing they're there. They look like small, unmoving bumps, coated in wax or cottony fluff, sucking plant juices and pooping out sweet nectar that's sometimes farmed by opportunistic ants. Meineke's posse tromped through Raleigh examining street oak trees to establish where the arthropods lived. They then compared population numbers between cooler and warmer neighborhoods while eliminating factors like the presence of natural predators. Their conclusion: The insects really prefer to hang out in the warmer 'hoods, with infestations as much as 13 times larger than those in chillier nabes.
This is a thermal map they made showing scale-insect populations scattered throughout the warmer areas of Raleigh. The black dots represent bug abundance per 30.5 centimeters of plant stem:
The study is kind of a groundbreaking effort in the research niche where insects, cities and weather intersect. As the scientists note:
Urbanization of an area changes the species that dwell in it. Previous studies have analyzed these effects in terms of loss of resources or changes to habitat, but this is the first research to focus on the effects of "heat islands" created in cities. Meineke explains that, "Urban warming can lead to higher insect pest abundance, a result of pest acclimation or adaptation to higher temperatures."
The study concludes that since current urban warming is similar in magnitude to the higher temperatures predicted by global warming in the next fifty years, their results may indicate potential changes in pest abundance as natural forests also grow warmer.
That doesn't sound too bad until you start wondering if the heat island influences the multitudes of other pests – mosquitoes, obviously, and <shudder> bed bugs. Get on that follow-up study immediately, guys. (Here's the full paper in PLOS ONE.)
If you go outside on a quiet day, you might just hear the grass making a slight rustle as if it was sentient.
That's the sign of a vast birth taking place underground, as millions of cicadas crawl their way to the surface for a weeks-long Rumspringa of molting, noisemaking, and gettin' it on.
This year's Cicadomorpha (on the East Coast, at least) is the notorious Brood II, black-bodied, crimson-eyed specimens that emerge in huge numbers every 17 years.
A relative of the delightful spittlebug, the insects are harmless but extremely loud and a pain to walk or bike through, seeing as how they can number in the hundreds of thousands in just one square acre.
While not of the 17-year variety, this 2011 footage of a cicada swarm in Nashville might give you an idea of what the East Coast will look like soon:
Cicada nymphs have been quietly feeding off of tree-root xylem fluids since 1996 and are just now beginning to dig upward. The key to their animation is ground temperature: They won't "wake up" until the soil 8 inches down is 64 degrees or above, the spoiled little pests. This fact allows us to track where they will appear, as New York Public Radio is doing with this nifty map of ground warmth in America.
Here's the situation from April 30. If you want to participate in the monitoring project, the station has put up instructions on how to build your own temperature sensor for about $80:
As you can see, it looks like Lower Manhattan, Queens, Chapel Hill, Newburgh in New York and South Orange in New Jersey are ripe for a bugging, whereas hovering on the precipice are places like Trenton, Baltimore, Annapolis, Durham and Washington, D.C. That fits right in with Brood II's historical range from North Carolina to Connecticut.
However, this network must have a few blind spots, because people have reported seeing cicadas elsewhere. According to the National Geographic-supported Magicicada Mapping Project, nymphs or teneral adults have been spotted in Pennsylvania, Georgia and all along the I-95 corridor. Here's the latest from the project's sightings map, which makes it seem like gigantic bugs are clinging to the face of North America. Agh!
If you've noticed one of these creatures roaming your 'hood, submit a sighting here. This is a rough mug shot of what to look for, in both nymph and young-adult forms:
The insects, which spend nearly two decades underground, emerge by the millions every 17 years to mate and reproduce. The adult cicadas will die after about six weeks, subsequently sprinkling the ground with their crunchy, lifeless bodies. Meanwhile, the eggs will hatch, drop to the ground, and bury under the soil to begin the 17-year cycle all over again.
A new 200-page report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations suggests that if more people incorporate insects into their diet, we could reduce world hunger, food shortages, and food insecurity.
"Insects are not harmful to eat, quite the contrary. They are nutritious, they have a lot of protein and are considered a delicacy in many countries," said Eva Muller, the Director of FAO’s Forest Economics, Policy and Products Division, in a press release. But, we haven't learned how to farm them yet, she said: "If we think about edible insects, there’s a huge potential that has essentially not been tapped yet."
Edible insects include beetles, wasps, caterpillars, grasshoppers, worms, and cicadas. The report says that these insects have high nutritional value.
They also suggest that farming insects is better for the environment than other protein-rich foods, like pigs or cows. Insects are easier to raise, use less water, feed on waste materials, and produce less greenhouse gasses than other livestock.
Insects could not only serve as a food source for humans, but could be a food source for animals that humans raise for food. Insect-farming operations could provide income for people in rural areas, as well.
The problem? People are grossed out by eating insects. You are probably cringing reading this post.
"Consumer disgust remains one of the largest barriers to the adoption of insects as viable sources of protein in many Western countries," Muller said. "Nevertheless, history has shown that dietary patterns can change quickly, particularly in the globalized world."
Even if westerners develop a taste for bugs, there's a long way to go to get everyone eating insects. We need to develop technologies and techniques to grow them in large numbers and explore potential allergies, the report cautions.
Even though we're raised to believe bugs in our food is a bad thing, insects are chock full of protein and nutrients, and could help reduce world hunger and food shortages.
Plus, bugs actually don't taste that bad. Plenty of world cultures eat beetles, wasps, caterpillars, grasshoppers, worms, and cicadas daily and enjoy it.
So get over your mental hurdles and see how people eat bugs around the world.
You can eat ant egg tacos in Mexico — the eggs taste buttery and nutty.
Bun Lai, a sushi restaurant owner in New Haven, is saying that instead of dreading the coming Cicada invasion, we should take advantage of all the tasty protein.
The well-known Connecticut chef is planning on cooking the cicadas for himself and possibly for select customers, The New Haven Register has learned.
“I plan to get a big freezer for them,” said Lai to The New Haven Register. “I’m going to catch a whole bunch of them and preserve them for future eating. I plan on eating a whole bunch of them myself.”
“I’m definitely considering the possibility of including them in some thematic dinners I do,” the chef went on. “Insects are far healthier for our bodies than eating meat.”
The United Nations would agree. It released a 200-page report earlier this week saying insects could be the cure to world hunger and the food crisis.
Lai, however, told The New Haven Register that he will not be deep frying the insects, and instead choosing to steam or boil them with ground herbs and spices.
While we may have only been thinking about cicadas for a few months, with the arrival of the Brood II population, Samuel Orr has been thinking about them for years.
He's been working on a documentary about the amazing insects — which hide underground for 17 years before emerging by the millions for six weeks of sex — since 2007.
The beautiful video below is the result of his self-funded filming trips, but he's hoping to create a full-length documentary about the insects, due in March of 2014, by getting funding from Kickstarter to film this year's massive brood.
The video below will really make you appreciate these incredible insects:
In the ongoing battle between humans and cockroaches, the insects have a leg up. A new study finds that roaches evolved their taste buds to make sweet insecticide baits taste bitter. As a result, the roaches avoid the baits and thrive, to the frustration of homeowners everywhere.
Plenty of insects evolve resistance to pesticides; they gain the ability to break down poisons without dying. German cockroaches, on the other hand, evolved what's known as a behavioral resistance to baits. They simply stopped eating them.
"Our paper is the first to show the sensory mechanism that underlies that behavioral resistance," said study researcher Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University.
The answer, Schal and his colleagues found, is in the taste buds.
Evolving cockroaches
German cockroaches are the small, scuttling roaches frequently seen in human habitats, including homes and restaurants. They grow to be about a half-inch (1.27 centimeters) long and are omnivorous, scavenging everything from grease to starch.
"They'll eat pretty much anything in the kitchen, but they are incredibly good at eating things that are adaptive to them," Schal told LiveScience. "They are really amazingly good at learning to associate smells with specific tastes."
Beginning in the 1980s, many pest control companies switched from using spray insecticides to control cockroaches to using baits. The baits combine sugars with insecticide so that roaches eat them, thinking they are sugary snacks, return to their nests and die. Ideally, the other cockroaches in the nest then cannibalize their dead relative, getting a dose of the poison, too.
This worked beautifully — for a while. But in 1993, NC State entomologist Jules Silverman noticed that several populations of German cockroaches around the world were thriving in spite of the baits. The roaches were refusing to eat the glucose, or sugar, that was supposed to make the bait appealing.
Bitter or sweet?
Pest control companies switched up the sugars in their baits to keep them working, and for years, no one knew how the roaches had developed their glucose aversion. Now, Schal, Silverman and NC State postdoctoral researcher Ayako Wada-Katsumata have the answer.
The first question, Schal said, was whether there was a change in the brains or the sensory systems of the glucose-averse roaches. To find out, Wada-Katsumata conducted a delicate procedure in which she sedated roaches with ice, immobilized them and attached electrodes to the taste hairs on the cockroach mouthparts. These taste hairs act like taste buds on the human tongue, detecting chemical signals and sending them to the insect's central nervous system. [See Video of the Cockroach Experiments]
In normal roaches, some of the cells in the taste hairs respond to bitter tastes and others to sweet tastes. In roaches that avoided glucose, however, there was one change.
"The system was perfectly normal, except for the fact that glucose was being recognized not only by the sweet-responding cell, but also by the bitter-responding cell," Schal said.
In other words, the glucose-averse roaches tasted sweet things as bitter and thus avoided them. (Even cockroaches have standards, it seems.)
Roaches could have evolved this response simply because people started poisoning them with sweet baits, Schal said. It's also possible that the trait goes way back in cockroaches' 350-million-year history. Some plants produce toxic bittersweet compounds that roaches would have needed to avoid before humans came around. Once humans started building dwellings and roaches moved in, they may have lost this sugar-avoidance ability in order to snack on humans' leftovers. When people started developing sugary baits, the preadapted anti-sugar trait may have re-emerged, Schal said.
Either way, Schal said, the finding has implications for pest control. The industry has replaced glucose in baits with another sugar, fructose, but evidence already suggests that roaches are evolving to avoid fructose, too, he said. The industry needs to vary baits frequently and make multiple types at once to stay a step ahead of the roaches, he said.
"If you put out a little dab of bait and see that the cockroach bounces back from it, there's no point of using that bait," Schal said.
The researchers report their findings Friday (May 24) in the journal Science.
There's a new pest invading many American towns, and it's about as menacing as it sounds: the Asian tiger mosquito.
Named for the black-and-white stripes on its body, the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) was first brought to Texas in a shipment of tires (which are notorious for holding the standing water that mosquitoes require for breeding), the Wall Street Journal reports.
The bug is worrisome for several reasons: Unlike other mosquitoes, the aggressive Asian tiger bites all day long, from morning until night. It has a real bloodlust for humans, but also attacks dogs, cats, birds and other animals. [Sting, Bite, Destroy: Nature's 10 Biggest Pests]
"Part of the reason it is called 'tiger' is also because it is very aggressive," Dina Fonseca, associate professor of entomology at Rutgers University, told the Journal. "You can try and swat it all you want, but once it's on you, it doesn't let go."
The Asian tiger mosquito joins other insects now threatening U.S. residents. Gallinippers (Psorophora ciliata), for example, are a type of shaggy-haired mosquito whose bite reportedly feels like being stabbed; they're currently found throughout much of Florida.
But few insects are as effective at spreading illness as the Asian tiger mosquito. The pest transmits more than 20 diseases, according to the Cornell Chronicle, including West Nile fever, dengue fever, yellow fever and two types of encephalitis.
Additionally, the mosquitoes transmit the chikungunya virus, the Chronicle reports. Though the disease is rarely fatal, chikungunya causes debilitating symptoms, including severe joint pain, fever, achiness, headache, nausea, vomiting, rash and fatigue.
There's no vaccine to prevent chikungunya and no treatment; people usually recover in a few weeks. But while they're infected with the virus, they can be bitten again by another mosquito, which could then spread the disease to someone else, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Since its introduction to the United States in the 1980s, the Asian tiger mosquito has spread to 26 states, primarily in the eastern United States, the CDC reports. The bug is also established in South and Central America, southern Europe and several Pacific islands.
Part of its success at spreading throughout the world is due to a warming climate, but the Asian tiger mosquito has one other pesky adaptation: Its eggs are tough enough to survive a cold winter, according to Science News.
If there's a silver lining to this story, it might be this: The Asian tiger mosquito is displacing another disease-carrying mosquito species, Aedes aegypti. Every time a male Asian tiger mosquito mates with a female A. aegypti, chemicals in his semen make her sterile, Science News reports.
But this also means Asian tiger mosquitoes are expanding their territory. Experts recommend removing all sources of standing water, wearing insect repellent and covering up with long sleeves and pants to avoid the bloodthirsty mosquitoes — and the diseases they spread.
The amber-fossilized insect turned out to be 110 million years old and shows this crazy trash-collecting habit that it used as protection — the bristles covering its body would collect detritus from the forest floor, like fern hairs. It's similar to modern lacewing larvae, which use the same behavior to hide from predators.
Arthropod importance
A new 
