Don joined the department in the early s as a doctoral student coming in from Maryland with Wharton. He later on became curator and, at Wharton's retirement in , director. Johnston greatly expanded the collection, with an emphasis on soil mites, especially Mesostigmata. Other OSU faculty interested in acarology included Rodger Mitchell, who was recruited by Wharton in , Glen Needham, a tick physiologist who joined the laboratory in , and Dana Wrensch, a mite geneticist, hired in E-Mail: klompen.
Pavel Klimov presenting in the image above , a research scientist at the University of Michigan and the lead author of Bee Mite ID: Bee-associated Mite Genera of the World , taught a section on stored-product mites.
Due to high demand, OSU has already posted a tentative schedule for the summer program, which includes sessions on medical and veterinary acarology as well as soil acarology. Early registration is encouraged, as workshops tend to fill up early. Klimov, Ochoa, and Welbourn will be among the lecturers for these workshops as well. As an aspiring biologist, I have chosen to study the interactions between arachnids and their environment in the tropical rainforests of Panama for the Tropical Behavioral Evolution and Ecology course.
From the smallest spiderling to the largest tarantula, I am curious to see how these cryptic and intriguing animals interact with their ecosystem. For my project, I am doing an observational study where I am assessing the relationship between leaf litter and arachnid diversity and abundance. I am accomplishing this by creating several 50 meter transects in the Panamanian rainforest, sampling leaf litter with 1 square meter quadrants along each transect.
For each quadrant, I take a measurement of leaf litter depth, and sift through the leaves to extract any organisms out of the area. Back at the lab, I sort through the organisms, first finding any arachnids in the sample, and then any other insect or invertebrate, such as ants, beetles, millipedes, snails, mites and many others. With these data, I hope to make a correlation between leaf litter abundance and arachnid diversity and abundance, as well as a correlation between the diversity of potential prey items and arachnid predators.
Naturally, the majority of the organisms that I have been assessing have been very small, from the size of a thumbnail to not even being visible to the human eye. However, there. One of these includes the huntsman spider, an extremely large nocturnal species that does not rely on a web to capture its prey.
This family of spiders is very poorly researched, and is largely unknown how dangerous the venom is for the majority of species. However, they are quite shy, and often scurry away at the sight or sound of a human. Another fascinating group of organisms I see occasionally are scorpions. The two pictured below are from the genus Tityus, whose venom is very potent. I found the two in the picture below, which we believe to be different species, huddled in close quarters in the water well of a bromeliad.
While potentially dangerous, these are a relatively uncommon sight in the rainforest. Nevertheless, it is always good to be careful where you step. Tityus scorpions photo by A. While many of them are feared, arachnids are some of the most fascinating organisms on the planet. They come in all shapes and sizes, and have a wide array of interesting characteristics that are of great interest to scientists.
Being interested in biology since I was a child, I have always dreamed of coming to the tropics so I could study the vast diversity of organisms, and I could not have picked a better group of organisms to focus on!
Tomorrow, Saturday April 22, from 10 AM — 4 PM we will open our doors and welcome all of you to visit our hidden treasures in the natural history collections of The Ohio State University. Stop by and talk to the curators who meticulously keep these specimens and make them available to students and researchers for study throughout the year. This is your chance each year to see what we do and to support our efforts.
The event is FREE and so is parking. We will have many activities for children including face painting, the very popular bugs-in-goo, a live arthropod zoo … and this year new, for anyone over 15 years, guided sessions on scientific illustration, drawing natural history specimens.
About the Author: Angelika Nelson is curator of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics and coordinates social media and outreach at the museum. Some more about ticks. No, not The Tick comic or the movie Ticks … both may be entertaining, but they feature completely inaccurate depictions of ticks.
To demonstrate this, here is a family portrait:. Family portrait of Ixodes pacificus , California Dept. All members of the family feed on host blood using highly modified mouthparts, but only larvae, nymphs, and females engorge feed to the point where their body truly swells up. Close-up of mouth parts of Amblyomma extraoculatum , U. Here are some nice examples of engorged females. Keep in mind that while engorged ticks are easy to find, they are often difficult to identify.
Most of the ticks we encounter in Ohio have females that feed only once. They engorge, convert all that host blood into a single mass of hundreds to thousands of eggs, and die. Tick with eggs, Univ. Nebraska, Dept. Ticks in general get really bad press. Kind of sad, because ticks are very good at quite a few things, like surviving some can survive hours under water or years without food , or manipulating your immune system using a dizzying array of chemicals often found only in ticks.
On second thought, that may not strike most people as positive, so let me end with a few pictures of beautiful creatures. I already introduced Amblyomma americanum , which occurs in Ohio, the others are African, A. Amblyomma variegatum is the main vector of heartwater, a disease making cattle herding impossible in parts of Africa, but still, very pretty.
See some more of these specimens close-up, but at a safe distance through microscopes at our Annual Open House , April 22, About the Author: Dr. Daffodils are in bloom, students walk around in shorts and T-shirts, so it must be the beginning of tick season. This might be a good time to talk about ticks in Ohio. Ohio is not a major center for tick diversity, but it has some diversity.
Dermacentor variabilis is perhaps the most widespread and common tick in Ohio. Immatures feed on rodents and other small animals, but adults feed on medium opossums, raccoons, dogs to large humans mammals. The main activity period for adults is mid-April — mid-July. Columbus used to be a focal area for RMSF, but the disease is less common now. Dermacentor variabilis American dog tick. Amblyomma americanum used to be uncommon in southern Ohio, but has increased in numbers and range over the last decades.
This is part of a general trend. In the eastern U. All instars, larva, nymph, and adult feed on mid-size to large animals, incl. Like D. These ticks are active in all warm months of the year.
Unlike D. For a long time A. Ixodes scapularis appears to be an even more recent resident. This species was rare or absent in Ohio before , but has now been found in a majority of Ohio counties.
The reason for this sudden expansion is unclear.
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