Ice day

The crickets have taken me hostage again. I am determined to finish this experiment before I leave for Baltimore, but it has been an incredible hassle. I have been working long hours all week in preparation for the main event, which was scheduled to take place today. And what else was scheduled for today? A massive ice storm, of course. One bizarre aspect to living in the flyover region is that weather forecasts are dead-on accurate. An ice storm was predicted for 8 pm last night, and darned if it didn't start raining at exactly 8:00.

School was called off for both kids. We had 1.5 inches of ice accumulate in the night, and I was awakened at 6am by the sound of a massive tree limb rolling down the roof and crushing our fence. Surprisingly, the electric fence wiring that we had woven through the chain link was intact, so Argos can still go out without escaping.

In the morning I strapped on my crampons and hiked to work. And bizarrely enough, the place was hopping. I usually get to work @ 8:30 and I see no one. However, today there were tons of people around, each vying for the "Look at Me--I Risked My Life to Get Here and I Am a Martyr for Science" award. Eventually ISU issued a statement saying that only "essential employees" should come to work today, so perhaps we all harbor feelings of self-importance.

The experiment went reasonably well, but now I am stuck here waiting for the last few stragglers to do their thing...

Sledding on Jersey Hill before the ice storm

Lab fairy tale #1

One upon a time, there was a curly-haired researcher who wanted to use serial dilutions to discover the dose of infectious bacteria that was not too strong and not too weak to kill 50% of affected crickets. She tried the strongest solution, but it was too strong, and killed all of the crickets. She tried the medium solution, but it was also too strong and killed almost all of the crickets. So she tried the weak solution, which was too weak and killed none of the crickets. Sadly, she did not find a dose that was just right.
The next week, she repeated this experiment using two medium-weak solutions. The first solution was too strong, and killed all of the crickets, the second solution was just right for females, yet killed all of the males.
The researcher was was all out of crickets, and after swearing and drinking some beer decided that she would have to repeat the experiment with only males and an even weaker series of solutions.

Manual extrusion

Of course you have always wondered what it looks like when you manually extrude the spermatophylax from a male Gryllodes sigillatus decorated cricket. Well, here it is.

Male G. sigillatus produce both a capsule filled with sperm (ampulla) and a large gelatinous structure called a spermatophylax. After mating, the spermatophylax covers the ampulla. The female removes the spermatophylax and eats it, which prevents her from removing the ampulla before all of the male's sperm has been transferred.

What does Susan do all day?

It occurs to me that it's been a while since I discussed my secret other life as a biologist. From outward appearances, I am either sitting in my office with crickets in boxes and the light off, or sitting in my office doing something at my computer with the light on. So what am I up to?
1) getting my dissertation chapters published. So far, the first chapter has been published (Ethology), the second and third have been accepted and are in press (Evolutionary Ecology Research; Behavioral Ecology), the fourth has been submitted (Evolution), and the fifth is in prep. Every time that I think that one of these bastards is gone for good, I get another letter saying that my figures are either too low or high in resolution, or the publisher has lost the previous two copies of the publishing agreement that I faxed (yes, faxed).
2) writing up my first paper from my post-doc work. I think that it is pretty close to being ready for submission. It is about how males do not prefer novel partners. Woo-hoo!
3) doing experiments. I am currently working four experiments at the same time and I am about to start a fifth. I have one experiment each with three grad students, one with a postdoc and one random experiment on my own. Some of the experiments deal with how females are able to distinguish novel from familiar males, and some deal with immunity. One experiment uses sagebrush crickets, and the rest use outbred and inbred decorated crickets. For some experiments, I am doing the actual work. For other experiments, I am training the grad students and hopefully they will be able to take over soon. For each experiment, there is a cloud of minutiae to do like ordering equipment, taking care of hundreds of hungry little animals, washing dishes, etc.
4) random human interactions. You know: going to meetings about stuff and junk. I am also on master's student's committee, which is pretty exciting.

More cricket porn

My departmental seminar is tomorrow, so I cleaned up my "cricket porn" clip for mass viewing. Here it is:

Cricket porn

I am giving a seminar in a week, so I've been taking pictures and videos of Gryllodes sigillatus crickets. I have been trying to film crickets doing different things, but my camera is a little fidgety. So far, my mating footage is still pretty blurry and dim. I made my best mating video into a movie, so that even if it doesn't look so good, at least it has some humor value as cricket porn. Uploading to Blogspot seems to have made the video all choppy, which perhaps makes it either more arty or more porny?

Inbred

My current research project is getting me down. For the last month, I have been doing experiments involving artificially perfuming crickets with each others' cuticular hydrocarbons. It is a simple experimental design, and all the crickets have to do to make this experiment work is mate normally. However, the crickets are from inbred lines, and they seem to be having trouble remembering how to mate.
Consequently, I have had inbreeding on my mind lately. I love horror movies, but movies about inbreeding creep me out. I taught Human Genetics for several years, and I always found the parts about disorders in inbred human populations to be morbidly fascinating. And I can't be alone in this interest--there is a whole genre of horror that draws from our revulsion for inbreeding.

The classic 1970 film, El Topo includes an subterranean community of inbred wretches.

The only episode of the X-Files that I can't watch is "Home" about the family of deformed inbreeding pig farmers. Apparently, this was the only episode of the series to warrant a parental advisory.

The recently remade "The Hills and Eyes," 1 and 2 are about being captured by inbred mutants.


Various other horror movies about the consequences of inbreeding:


Why all these movies about inbreeding? My guess is that on some level we all know that we have those four recessive lethal alleles just waiting to be expressed, so we have reasonable anxiety about genetic abnormality. However, to put a positive spin on it, inbreeding makes horror attainable for anyone. You don't have to be a mad scientist, alien abductee, or possessed by the devil--all you need is a little inbreeding to make your own homemade monsters. Also, from the viewpoint of Hollywood, a supposedly real person with a cyclops eye is way scarier and much cheaper than a convincing cyclops alien monster.

Help--I'm being held hostage by crickets

Somehow I decided to do this experiment that is 8 hours long, with scan samples every 5 minutes. Basically, I sit here in the dark quietly waiting for crickets to mate, and if they do, I have to quickly snatch up the spermatophore before the female eats it, and weigh it. This is day 2 of a possible 4-5 days. I feel like Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron who had headphones that played an earsplitting noise every 5 minutes to prevent him from having any meaningful thoughts. I think that my brain is actually shrinking. (Maybe more like Flowers for Algernon?)
On the plus side, I am listening to a decent Spoon concert on npr and someone must be cooking breakfast in the lab, because it smells like whole grain toast in here. I am also teaching myself the code to do repeated measures on SPSS, but that all is going rather slowly, what with the damn crickets and all.

How's the research going?

People keep asking me how the research is going. It's going decently well. I have been doing a series of experiments to determine whether or not male crickets have a preference for novel versus previous partners. If males have a preference, I would like to determine whether they use the same type of self-referential cuticular hydrocarbon cues as females, or perhaps use other cues entirely. I just finished an experiment to determine whether males preferentially court novel versus previous partners in a 2-choice design with dead females (to prevent the females from contributing their opinion--we know that females prefer novel males). The answer is no, males do not devote more courtship to novel females.
I am also looking at whether males allocate more resources to spermatophores (nutritive gifts and/or sperm capsules) when females are novel. I have already completed a version of this experiment, but I was not entirely happy with it, so I am changing the protocols and trying again.
If nothing pans out with the males, I have another series of experiments on the back burner.
This week one of my manuscripts came out in Ethology, however, I still have three (or four) more manuscripts that I have to get published somewhere. I spend most of my days watching crickets having sex or working on manuscripts. I am enjoying being focussed on research rather than splitting my time among a dozen different obligations.

The crickets

The question that I am most frequently asked is: why did you move to Normal? People usually ask this question with this uncomfortable kind of a cautiousness, as if they are expecting me to overshare some tragic personal event that led to my appearance here. When I say that I am here to do research, they perk up a little. However, when I tell them that I do behavioral research on crickets, they generally look at me as if I were crazy. Perhaps they assume that nothing short of research to solve the energy crisis/stop world hunger/cure cancer would justify moving from California to Normal. So what is my research about, anyway? Here's the short version:

It is usually assumed that males benefit more from mating with many females than females benefit from mating with many males. However, we now know that females that mate with different males can gain benefits from doing so, including having offspring that are more genetically diverse. In one part of my PhD research, I found that female field crickets prefer to mate with new males rather than previous partners. Further, females bias sperm use to favor novel males over previous partners.
I am now working at ISU in a lab that uses decorated crickets to address similar questions. Previous work in Scott Sakaluk's lab found that female decorated crickets identify and avoid previous partners by marking the males with their own scent. I will be investigating the female scent cues, as well as whether males use similar scent cues to identify previous female partners. So, no, my research will not save the world (unless the earth is overrun my giant alien cricket overlords), but it will provide info about the evolution of behavior.

Grylllodes sigillatus mating; hypothetical giant alien insect overlords