Michiel de Groot
Evolutionary biologist | PhD candidate at UGent & INBO working on weird parasitic fungi on ladybirds🐞🍄 | Endless freeform jazz most beautiful
- Slow traffic this morning in Ghent 🐑
- New paper! We looked at how temperature and humidity affect a fungal parasite on a ladybird in an article in @royentsoc.bsky.social's Ecological Entomology. 🐞🍄 You can find the full journal highlight here: www.royensoc.co.uk/news/tempera...
- Why did we use a hot dog roller for this? Did the ladybirds just enjoy it like a fairground ride? I explain here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=46JW...
- New paper! Featuring state-of-the-art technology!
- Why might one use a hotdog roller in research? Have a read of this new #OpenAccess research in #RESEcolEnt and find out! Effects of #temperature & #humidity on the presence & prevalence of a common fungal #parasite on an invasive ladybird doi.org/10.1111/een.70014 Video courtesy of article authors
- Gentse Feesten
- Back in 2022, @dhaelewa.bsky.social, Iva Njunjić (@taxonexpeditions.bsky.social), Warre van Caenegem and I went to the Synchrotron in Grenoble to image very small fossil beetles in very small pieces of amber. The resulting paper is now out! (With more to come) subtbiol.pensoft.net/article/1542...
- It's a massive complex with a big particle accelerator, which takes a long time to get around - many people had little mopeds or bikes. Particle accelerators produce extremely bright, focused, and tunable X-ray beams, which can be used to "see through" objects and reconstruct the details inside.
- The technique to create 3D image out of the microscopy is called micro-tomography, which was what we spent most our time doing. It is useful if you want to look at fragile fossil beetles trapped in amber! Michel Perreau, a French beetle and fossil expert, asked us to image them for him.
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View full threadWe made a few terabytes of images, which were reconstructed to create 3D images over the past couple of years by Michel back in Paris, resulting in this paper! Doesn't it still look like he has the ~99 million year old wind blowing through his antennae?
- Leie at dusk
- Practice pool
- The great escape
- Two- and seven-spot ladybirds, cinnabar moth caterpillar (munching on poisonous ragwort to make itself inedible), and a funky long-necked small snakefly
- Harlequin ladybird pupas *everywhere* at the moment, with some stray seven- and two-spots.
- Very pretty horseshoe ladybirds in the malaise trap in the botanical garden. Look at their little horseshoe patterns! Small ladybirds are often hairy, as you can see. Their real size is around the size of a dot --> .
- Ladybird lab at the Cryptic Fungi workshop going swimmingly! We were looking for Hesperomyces, a small fungus on ladybirds we caught yesterday. #VisegradFund #TeamLaboul
- Found some more again!
- Now for talks by @dhaelewa.bsky.social, @ukladybirds.bsky.social and @robin-hutchinson.bsky.social on knowledge and knowledge gaps of citizen science and @pomscheme.bsky.social
- A very successful ladybird gathering with the #VisegradFund citizen science workshop here in Ceske Budejovice - fridged for now, checking them for miceofungi tomorrow!
- Found some more!
- Arrived in the ghost hotel 👻 Let's see if I get haunted
- Survived the ghosts Next: vampires
- Time to look for Marienkäfer (🐞) in Marienbad (🇨🇿)
- quadruples
- Trying to make plants work on the balcony which finally is bearing fruit (flowers?)
- Little ecosystem: a beetlehanger fungus on a harlequin ladybird eating an aphid that was eating a rose, all on the side of the river on a sunny day in Ghent (Hesperomyces harmonise, Harmonia axyridis, Macrophisum rosae, Rosa sp.)
- Bluebells in bloom!
- Sshh... make your nest quietly
- Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) on the statue of the Scheldt and Lexie rivers anthropomorphized (the man and woman) and all the little streams that cross between them (the children)
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