Rare "headless" ladybug discovered
IDAHO: Sleepy Hollow has its headless horseman and now Montana has a headless ladybug.
The newly discovered insect tucks its head into its throat – making it not only a new species but an entirely new genus, or larger classification of plants and animals.
Ross Winton captured the insect in 2009 in traps he set in a sand dune while an entomology graduate student at Montana State University.
Winton, now a wildlife technician in Idaho, at first thought he had parts of an ant but then discovered the bug can hide its head, much like a turtle ducking into its shell.
Winton sent his discovery to scientists in Australia working on this group of insects and the headless ladybug was formally described in a recent issue of the peer-reviewed journal Systemic Entomology.
Just two specimens of the tan, pinhead-sized ladybugs, also known as ladybird beetles, have ever been collected, a male in Montana and a female in Idaho, scientists said, making it the rarest species in the United States.
Entomologists historically used males to describe beetle species so the credit for the new discovery went to Winton.
However, the new species – Allenius iviei – was named after his former professor and Montana State University entomologist Michael Ivie.
The insect, with the proposed common name “Winton’s Ladybird Beetle,” may prey on aphids and other plant pests.
Ivie said it was rare to discover a new beetle in the United States and rarer still to uncover a completely new genus.
The discovery is no small accomplishment considering the bug is the size and color of a grain of sand, he added.
He said it was unclear why the beetle slips its head into a tube in its midsection.
“It’s a whole new kind of ladybug. Whatever this does, it is very specialized. It’s quite the exciting little beast,” Ivie said.
The fortune cookie was invented in San Francisco in 1909, at the Japanese Tea Garden Restaurant. In 1916, Los Angeles noodle manufacturer David Jung claimed to be the inventor, but a San Francisco court ruled that Makoto Hagiwara, caretaker of Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Garden, was the creator of the cookies, which he served to guests of the gardens.
Chicken tikka masala, the hugely popular Indian curry, is not Indian. It was invented in Glasgow, Scotland. Yes, one of the most loved Indian dishes comes from the home of haggis and hogmanay. It is, according to statistics, the most popular “Indian” dish in Britain.
In Korea, to this day, when a young person is eating with someone older, they must turn their face away from the elder member of the table and shield their lips with their hand when taking a sip of alcohol. This is done as a sign of respect. The importance of respect is found everywhere in Korea: the Korean language has over 600 different word endings to be used in different social situations, depending upon seniority. This makes Korean the hardest language in the world to learn, despite its simple 24 letter alphabet (Hangul).
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Jelly and jam are different things. Jam is cooked crushed fruit (with sugar), jelly is gelatinized fruit juice (with sugar) but is called Jell-o in the United states (US Jelly is jam without the fruit pulp). And to make matters more confusing we have conserve. Conserve is a whole fruit jam made of one or many fruits cooked with sugar. Making conserve is harder than jam or jelly, as the fruits must remain in their whole shape through the cooking process. Oh – and did you know that gelatine is made from the hooves of animals?
