An entertaining day at the lab, and I even remembered to bring my camera.  Lucky you!

The scene: a pile of blue nitrile gloves, a compound microscope, a dissecting microscope, various containers and tools.  Silence at first, but soon the horrorshow begins.

…a heap of bloated corpses, red eyes bulging, the tattered remains of females with abdomens torn asunder, tiny white ovaries littered about…

Take a closer look.

Hours later, the rent ovaries hacked apart and stained, the prize: one gorgeous, perfectly-formed late-stage oocyte.

Finally, a glimpse of what might have been - two live (but not for long) embryos.  The first, barely 2 hours old, is beginning the process of forming germ cells, the basis of the next generation.  The second is perhaps a sibling, older and more developed, with little baby Drosophila guts already forming.

Too bad about that whole drowning thing.  Sorry, fruit flies.

A trichinosis larva and a botfly maggot walk into a bar. The botfly maggot turns to the trichinosis larva and says “hey buddy, I heard you like pork.”

The trichonosis larva looks the the botfly maggot right in the spiracles and says “indeed, I encyst upon it.”

(Shamelessly stolen from bash.org)

Dragged the Reluctant Husband to a family BBQ this weekend.  Over-ate, made small talk, harassed the family doctor, watched the kids be kids, and discussed parthenogenesis in phasmids.  You know, the usual.

Highlight of the day was the noisy and prolonged destruction of the pinata:

There was also some excitement over the discovery of two spiders on neighbouring leaves of a bush.  I wasn’t able to get a good look at their backs without disturbing them, but they look to be the exceedingly common Araneus diadematus (cross spider, if you prefer) found in gardens throughout Europe and North America.

So much of what goes on in the insect world would make brilliant fodder for bad horror movies.

These incredibly tiny parasitic wasps

emerge from the mummified remains of a caterpillar.

That’s right, they all wiggle out of those little holes.  Sam Raimi’s got nothing on evolution.

Since all of the Gypsy moth caterpillars from the greenhouse experiment are now dead or pupated, I’ve been organizing things.  First I took all of the emerged moths out of the freezer and put them into little glass vials.

Obviously they’re all dead - the ones that say “dead” are the ones that didn’t make it to adulthood, but died along the way.  Now I’m working on organizing the lab’s parasitoid collection (hence the horror movie intro).  I’m taking this

and turning it into this

which entails dividing into species and then subdividing into gender, and finally subdividing once more into host groups. A large part of this work had previously been done, and then partially undone in the effort to identify species and subspecies, so it’s not as though I just have a jumble of random wasps to work with.  I’d have offed myself by now.

All of this seems particularly appropriate right now with the wasp bloom we’re experiencing in Toronto this summer.