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Miniature Tags Track Dragonflies
celardore writes "BBC News reports about the epic journeys taken by dragonflies searching for warmer climates have been revealed by scientists in the US.
The team, led by researchers from Princeton University, found that the insects are capable of flying up to 85 miles (137 km) in a day.
Each transmitter weighed about a third of a gram and had enough battery life to track an individual for 10 days; but tagging such small creatures is far from easy.
"The challenge is first catching the dragonfly," said Professor Wilcove.
Once caught, each transmitter was attached with a couple of drops of superglue and some eye-lash adhesive."
The same transmitters attached to mosquitos lead to a surprising result: each tagged mosquito stayed in the exact same meter squared for all 10 days of the experiment. Scientists are baffled because previous theories postulated that mosquitos were able to travel much longer distances.
As I began setting up camp late in the afternoon I began to notice first a couple then dozens of giant neon blue and black dragonflies. After I had set up camp I walked a bit closer to the rock bluff above the lake and sat down. There were untold numbers of dragonflies all around me. Most were quite large but there were also smaller ones. After I settled on an outcropping of Canadian Sheild the dragonflies began to settle on rock and plants everywhere. I sat still and watched what was a surreal dance of hovering and slow moving dragonflies move lazily in the late afternoon summer heat.
Needless to say there wasn't a mosquito to be seen or heard. I'd never before seen so many dargonflies and haven't since. Perhaps it was a hatching site, but the numbers were unestimatable. It was more a work of imagination than reality.
Anyone had a similar experience?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I wonder how far these insects can fly when not burdened with an electronic tag. Or a coconut. African dragonflies, I mean.
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
Science. Love it.
Still, 1/3 of a gram transmitter. That 100 gram cellphone ain't all that hot now is it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think that's inevitable. We already have millions of cameras controlling traffic. They have started with OCR for automatic reading of car license plates which reportedly works in real time. Next step will be face recognition software, I guess in the next ten years that will be very easy.
No more privacy in public places, which, despite being an oxymoron, we have come to take for granted in big cities. Well, I guess it's not so bad, anyone who grew up in a small village, like I did, is used to the notion that everybody knows where you went and what you did in the street.
I think there is something much worse than surveillance cameras everwhere, it's surveillance cameras controlled by public authorities. What I fear most is not having my picture taken, I fear having my picture under control of a faceless person somewhere who responds to an unknown agency. If all the surveillance cameras were accessible by anyone at anytime and all the archived images were made public, I could accept that. Under such a system there would be accountability by the authorities. I would be able to demonstrate that my image had been manipulated, if I needed to. And I would also be able to track the politicians and their agents, I would have an equal footing to protect myself.
Isaac Asimov in 1957 wrote a short story about a world without privacy, "The Dead Past". In that story, there existed a technology to view the past, called "chronoscopy", which was under strict control by the government. The hero, a professor of history, was frustrated because he could never get to use chronoscopy in his work, so he contacted a physics researcher to do illegally some independent research on chronoscopy. The physics guy manages to recreate the chronoscopy theory and they publish the schematics for a chronoscope, today we would say they "open-sourced" it.
In the end, it turns out that the chronoscope was useless for history research, because it couldn't reach back into the past further than a week or so. But it was perfect for seeing anything that happened in the world in the very recent past. That's why it was so strictly controlled. If you see anything in the last millisecond, are you seeing the past or the present? The story ends with the government agent who went to arrest them saying, "Happy goldfish to you, to me, to everyone, and may each of you fry in hell forever. Arrest rescinded".