That's not a mantid. - Yeah it is!
- No, that one? - Yeah! - Really?
- No. - Oh, come on!
Hey! We're here with Gracen, today, who's a research assistant
for Corrie Moreau, whom you will remember from the Romantic Ants episode
and today we're going to show you how to pin an insect. - Yeah!
- Do you have any fun stories from collecting out in the field?
- One of the most magical experiences I had was in Sweden
where I was collecting a bunch of dung beetles.
You can find insects anywhere, from digging in rotting logs to just...
mantids will just be hanging out on branches or grass,
but I went out with a friend collecting in horse dung.
We found a bunch of horses in a field and we were digging through their poop,
but the horses were really interested in us, and they wouldn't leave us alone,
and especially me, one just kept sniffing through my hair and wouldn't leave me alone the whole time.
It was kind of awesome. - It's like, "Horse, bug off!" eyyyyy
That was a joke. - That was okay. - All right.
We have all these different kinds of insects today. Cicada and a mantid and a tiger beetle,
but where did they all come from?
- The cicadas came from an orchard in Ohio,
Tiger beetles are mostly—These ones are from Hong Kong, although you can find them all over the place.
The mantids, I think, are from Equatorial Guinea. - Oh wow! - Yeah.
- So we're going to be pinning insects that are coming from jars of alcohol,
so they're already well-hydrated, but what if somebody is walking around their neighborhood or in their backyard
and they find a dead insect that they'd like to pin or preserve, but it's all dried up.
How would they go about doing that?
- Pinning a dried insect is pretty hard because they're pretty brittle,
but you can do a thing called "rehydrating" or "relaxing."
This can happen in any sort of container.
I usually just find a Tupperware,
I find something like a piece of foam to keep the specimen elevated,
and I'll just pour really hot water in there and then shut the lid
and basically it's like a wonderful sauna for the insect
which actually relaxes the tissues and rehydrates them so you can move legs, wings, things around again.
- So maybe a grasshopper could sit in there for a day or two and then it would be ready to go. - Yeah.
And you can keep replenishing the hot water so it stays really warm and steamy in there.
- Okay, so we've talked a little bit about how we get the insects and what's state they are when we're ready to pin them,
but before we can do that, we need to know what supplies we're going to use to do so.
- Well, first off and most importantly, you need something to pin the insect to while it dries.
So here we just have a good old-fashioned piece of foam, which I prefer.
We have insect pins, which are specifically made for insects
and they basically work as a handle, so that when you need to move insects around you don't have to actually have to touch the specimen.
Two pair of forceps; you can probably get away with one.
A little bit of vellum here that we use for pinning out wings if you don't want to stick a hole through the wings.
Some scissors, labels to know where and when the specimen was collected.
You always keep that information with the specimen itself.
- So somebody, hypothetically, who was doing this as an amateur in their backyard,
if they wrote down the date and where they're located,
maybe include some geographic information and maybe the conditions in which the specimen was collected,
that could eventually someday be used for research? - Yeah, absolutely. - That's great!
- Oh, look at him! - Yeah.
- It kind of smells like pancakes. - Really?
- Yeah, I just got a syrupy pancake smell.
No, that's wrong. They don't smell like pancakes.
- The first thing that I do is just use a pair of forceps to straighten out the legs.
With most types of insects, not all, the front set of legs goes forward.
- It's like bench pressing.
- And then the second and third set aim a little bit behind.
The next thing that I do after I get the legs a little settled is I get the pin through it.
All insects are roughly made up of the same sections.
They have the head, the thorax, which is where all the legs come off of,
and then the abdomen.
and, for almost all insects, you want the pin to go through the upper righthand part of the thorax.
Cool. - Like that? - Yeah.
I use a decent amount of pins when I'm trying to pin an insect.
If you really— I mean, certain people are way more particular about the legs being symmetrical.
- What would the benefit of spreading those legs out be? Or the wings?
- The wings? - Yeah. - So that you can see all the wing venation and see all of the morphology of the wings.
So the next step would be spreading the wings.
It's really sturdy, the wing's not going to rip.
But if you don't want to put a hole through it, you can just use your forceps to pull that wing out.
- Like that? - Yep! - Well, there it is! Wow. - Cool.
You can do it without putting a pin through the wing, which uses this vellum.
We use vellum, basically, because you can see through it so you can see what the wings look like underneath,
and then you don't have to stick a hole through the wing.
Be careful when you grab the legs.
This portion of the leg is the tarsi. - Okay. - And it's pretty fragile.
That's the part that usually breaks.
- Good!
Yay! Well, we did it, this one.
I love their chubby little bodies.
- The cicadas? - Yeah, they're wonderful. - Yeah, they're super sturdy little insects.
- I really like cicadas because they were the first insect I ever thought about that had a lifespan
that was longer than a matter of months,
and there are certain species of cicadas that are either on a 13- or 17-year cycle,
so that they spend the first 13 or 17 years of their lives
under the ground, living off of roots of random various trees,
and then they all erupt just for a matter of weeks, like 6-8 weeks,
where they breed and it creates this cacophonous sound.
That's a way to get a lady's attention, right? - Yeah. - Pretty cool.
Well thank you so much, Gracen, for showing me how to pin an insect.
It was my first time, and I had a good time.
- You did a good job! - Thanks! I feel good that I contributed to science today.