DNA

Tomorrow is the big day.

As part of an honors project, this semester, I'm going to attempt to sequence some DNA from one of my pet tarantulas. This is the first time I've ever attempted to directly work with genetics. I'm extremely excited, to say the least.

The spider we're using is one of my 1-year-old Psalmopeus irminia spiderlings that I bred myself. We're going to convince it to drop one of it's #3 legs, and we'll use that to attempt to extract the DNA. I should know by tomorrow night if we have successfully extracted any.

In two weeks, we will be using a primer to try and isolate a portion of DNA for sequencing. If we're successful, we're publishing it to an online database of DNA segments. This would be the first segment published for this species.

Blatellaquinone

I worked on a really fun honors project for my Chemistry class last semester.

Over the course of two seven hour lab sessions, my teacher and I synthesized blatellaquinone, the organic compound that German cockroaches (Blatella germanica) use as a sex pheromone. It was really neat to learn how organic compounds can be altered by breaking off portions of them and attaching new structures. That wasn't the best part, though.

After we finished making the powdery compound, we tested it on male and female B. germanica to ensure we made it properly. As we expected, the female roaches didn't react at all, but the males went absolutely crazy. They were running in circles and even waving their abdomens around in mating displays. It was pretty cute.

Things got even more interesting as we tried the compound on other, very distantly related species of roaches. When we tested it on hissing roaches (G. portentosa), we were surprised to see the males ignore it and the females react strongly. It seems that hissers still use the same blatellaquinone compound to signal for mating, but the gender that uses it has switched somewhere in their evolutionary lineage.

We also tested it on Halloween hissers (E. javanica). The females ignored it, but the males went insane. To our amusement, they even started humping the vial we placed it inside of. Talk about ready for action!

I had tons of fun with this project, but really wish I had more roach species at home to test the compound on. That said, I did save it. So in the future, when I have adults of a new species, I'll probably break it out and see how they react. My curiosity is really piqued thanks to this simple assignment!

Shadow Box

A few years ago, I was doing some volunteer work at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. I did a few different things in my years there: I curated their modern invert collection a little bit, I brought up some of my bugs to show to little kids, and I made a beautiful display that's still being shown.

The display was made from dozens of whole spider molts and a few other critters. It's in a glass cabinet in the Discovery Room, and every time I head to the museum, the dosant working at the time will gush about how popular it is. It feels nice to know that I was able to share this with so many people.