Next Gen Scientist

Next Gen Scientist I'm curious about the future of scientists and science communication.

In spirit of , I’d like to answer a question that I get fairly often: what exactly is the difference between a butterfl...
07/19/2020

In spirit of , I’d like to answer a question that I get fairly often: what exactly is the difference between a butterfly and a moth? The answer is a little more complex than you might think.

In 2019, Akito Kawahara’s lab (at the University of Florida) sequenced hundreds of butterfly and moth species and added fossil data to infer the evolutionary history of .

Their dated nicely indicates that the ancestor of butterflies was likely nocturnal, and butterflies became a day-flying lineage sometime in the late Cretaceous (around 98 million years ago). Essentially butterflies are just day flying moths, sister to “macro-moth” groups that include silk and owlet moths.

Overall I still find the best quick and dirty way to tell a butterfly from a moth is to check out the antennae - thin and ‘clubbed’ antennae typically belong to butterflies, while ‘feathery’ antennae typically belong to moths (although there are exceptions).

Many butterflies and moths possess “ears” that allow them to listen out for and evade bat predators. Another interesting and counterintuitive finding from this study was that butterfly and moth “ears” evolved long before the origin of - it’s still a mystery as to what they were “listening for” before bats evolved.

07/18/2020

Tomorrow marks the first day of !

National Moth Week celebrates the beauty, life cycles, and habitats of moths - it’s a citizen science effort to encouraged people to learn about, observe, and document moths in their backyards, parks, and neighborhoods.

In my hand is Hyalophora cecropia that I raised, the largest native moth in North America. Such a beautiful pattern and wing span! Remarkably these big moths have no functional mouth parts, they simply live for one week in which they have to find a mate and reproduce for the next generation.

Which nocturnal scaly Lepidoptera are your favorite?

06/04/2020

Ever wanted to be invisible?

Crystal blue scales of the Morpho peleides butterfly. Each scale is about 200 microns long and the surface of each one i...
12/01/2019

Crystal blue scales of the Morpho peleides butterfly. Each scale is about 200 microns long and the surface of each one is covered in nano-sized ridges that generate the blue wavelength. Love the details produced by the light microscope, images are around 200 to 500 times magnification.

@ Marine Biological Laboratory

Real life s**g carpet: wing patterns in the Owl Butterfly 🦉 (Caligo memnon)
11/27/2019

Real life s**g carpet: wing patterns in the Owl Butterfly 🦉 (Caligo memnon)

10/31/2019

Nobody:
Entomologist: hey wanna stare at the diversity of butterfly scales up close until the heat death of the universe?

10/18/2019

Can’t get over the beautiful scales of the Emerald Swallowtail Butterfly. See the tiny dimples on the surface of the scales? The architecture of these nanostructures bend light to produce the green-blue colors. 🔬 Imaged with a VHX 7000 microscope

Picking a favorite butterfly would be hard, if it weren’t for the ‘Phantoms’. Cithaerias, Haetera, and Dulcedo are membe...
09/15/2019

Picking a favorite butterfly would be hard, if it weren’t for the ‘Phantoms’. Cithaerias, Haetera, and Dulcedo are members of the Satyrinae, and are commonly called the ‘Blushing Phantoms’ as they glide through the dark understory in jungles, like little ghosts 👻

There’s nothing in the world quite like them, and they’re one of the trickiest butterflies I’ve tracked in South America. The bright spots on their hind wings are only on the dorsal side, so when they close their wings, they pretty much vanish. There’s not a whole lot known about their natural history, and even less about how they evolved to be the beautifully transparent lineage that exists today.

The first genome-edited reptiles have arrived. 🦎 Using CRISPR-Cas9, a group of researchers took on the task of creating ...
09/09/2019

The first genome-edited reptiles have arrived. 🦎 Using CRISPR-Cas9, a group of researchers took on the task of creating mutant anole lizards in order to establish new functional genetics methods in this group of animals

This was no small task - the reason genome editing hadn’t been conducted in reptiles until now has to do with their reproductive biology. You see, in order to introduce CRISPR-Cas9 reagents into an organism, scientists usually inject single cell eggs. This is what we do with butterflies in order to create gene knockouts, and it works really well as long as we collect and inject freshly laid fertilized eggs

The challenge with lizards is that they fertilize their eggs internally and by the time the egg is laid, it has already gone through numerous rounds of cell division. As a workaround, the scientists injected the reagents into unfertilized eggs held in anole lizards’ ovaries to knock out the gene for the enzyme tyrosinase, which resulted in offspring becoming

This study helps to pave the way for studying gene function in reptiles, which can greatly expand our ability to learn more about the evolution and development in this diverse group of animals

If you’d like to read further, be sure to check out the original paper:
A.M. Rasys et al., “CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in lizards through microinjection of unfertilized oocytes,” Cell Rep, 2019.

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