Back in the mid 1970s, we were living in Austin. I was an undergrad and husband was getting his Phd in the study of sexual behavior of the Texas Field Cricket. Since I was a bug nut since I was fourteen, it was easy to help him with his field work. We spent a life time watching them in the lab, in nature and in controlled outdoor experiments in field labs.
One evening we needed to collect more crickets for an experiments, so we turned on a reel to reel tape recorder and then spliced a long piece of audiotape end to end and looped it around a ring stand to make it taunt. Recorded on this was the song of that particular cricket. That way it could run without stopping. So we were blasting the cricket song at night having a beer in the backyard grabbing the crickets as they flew in. But then we noticed something different! A yellow fly kept buzzing around the speaker. It was pale yellow with red eyes. Bill smashed it so it wouldn't get away. We wondered, "Hmmmm, what is this?"
We caught a few more and then husband sent the flies to DC for identification. Turns out that this fly was in the collection but nothing known about it.
So we devised some traps made of styrofoam and screen to collect more. Well, We would catch 30 at a time! But only at night after the sun had gone down.
Most collectors of insects work in the day so we know the most about critters that are out in the day and much less than the critters that are out at night.
So in fact we discovered, this fly, it's habitat, it's prey, it locations around the world. So basically, a life time of work in the dark with the creatures of the night. But all in all a quiet story.
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I was surfing around this morning, hiding in the back room, as we have some workers doing some indoor painting.
I was delighted to see that the news about Ormia ochracea"s nifty ear and how to use it as a model for new hearing aids. I knew this was coming down the pipe but now here is the story.
So I share this news with you.
This is the NPR Story
http://www.npr.org/...
Here is the News Release from the University of Texas.
http://www.engr.utexas.edu/...