Button to scroll to the top of the page.

Biodiversity Blog

 

All things creepy: parasitism pt 5, crypt keepers

Euderus setThe crypt keeper (Photo from paper by Scott P. Egan, Kelly L. Weinersmith, Sean Liu, Ryan D. Ridenbaugh, Y. Miles Zhang, Andrew A. Forbes. Creative Commons.) Talk about a nightmare of a roommate. Imagine yourself to be a larvae of gall wasp, the species Bassettia pallida more specifically. You are inside the gall of an oak tree, a gall that...

All things creepy: parasitism pt 4, mite pockets

MiteMeetsLizard Photos: Wilfredor (iguana) and Alan R Walker (mite)- Creative Commons Pockets are pretty cool things. We put our belongings in them, warm our hands on cold days in them. Some lizards have them too, but they aren’t storing cell phones in them. Chiggers live in these pockets, although sometimes a tick finds its way in there too. Chiggers are...
All things creepy: parasitism pt 3, the tongue biters

All things creepy: parasitism pt 3, the tongue biters

Peek a boo! (Photo: Elkin Fricke, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International) Cat got your tongue? Not in this case. Something else does. Meet the “tongue biters,” Cymothoa exigua, a species of parasitic isopods in the family Cymothoidae. These things range in size from 0.3-1.1 inches in length for the females, and...
All things creepy: parasitism pt 2, the corpse lily

All things creepy: parasitism pt 2, the corpse lily

Photo: Henrik Ishihara Globaljuggler (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported) Next in our parasitism series is the flowering plant in the parasitic genus Rafflesia, also known by the evocative names of the “corpse lily” or “carrion flower.” Why does it deserve our attention in the Halloween series? Because it t...
All things creepy: parasitism pt 1, mermithids and earwigs

All things creepy: parasitism pt 1, mermithids and earwigs

This is a mermithid found in an Asian Hornet. (Wikicommons photo: PeerJ, 2015) In the spirit of Halloween and all that is spooky, we are doing a series of short blogs on parasitism! In biology, parasitism at its most basic level is where one species benefits at the expense of its host. The parasite does not always kill its host, but when it does...

Meet Stengl-Wyer Scholar: Liming Cai

Cai web400x400Liming Cai is one of our 2021 Stengl-Wyer Scholars. She is a systematic biologist broadly interested in the study of phylogenetics and evolutionary genomics of plants. Her research integrates fieldwork, herbarium collections, and genomic analysis to characterize the patterns and drivers of biodiversity. As part of the Stengl Wyer Endowment, th...

Odd and Wonderful Nature

Bdallophytum americanum IMG 1574   Bdallophytum americanum. Every once in a while, we botanists discover things out in nature that, at first glance, appear to defy classification. The present photograph is a case in point. While botanizing in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, I stumbled upon weird little stout spikes up to four inches tall poking out of the ground. What wer...