Growing With Science Blog

Just a quick note to let you all know that I’m ramping up the social networking for my blogs just a bit, and now there are two new ways to follow Growing With Science.

First, there’s a new Facebook page called Growing With Science. You can access it through the link in the sidebar to the right, or you can simply type “Growing with Science” into you search bar when you are in Facebook. The idea is that I will share quick links to science-related items that may not merit a post and keep you up to date with items I have posted about in the past. Hopefully we can develop a fun community.

After some consideration, I have also decided to create a new Twitter profile @ScienceAntics for my two science-related blogs, to separate it from my @RobertaGibson, which will now be chiefly for posts about children’s books/literacy.

I would love to hear your feedback about these changes.

Thank you very much to all my loyal readers.

Roberta

The big news was announced today at Arizona State University:  the Top 10 New Species for 2011.

Sometimes it is hard to remember that scientists discover new species all the time. Some of these newly discovered creatures are pretty large, which makes you wonder how they got overlooked. Take, for example, the huge monitor lizard!

Of course, we are most interested in the spiders and insects on the list.

Right on time for the Spiders in Space project, one of the top 10 is an orb weaving spider with a giant web. Sometimes the webs go across entire streams! How does the spider even do that?

In this video, you can watch one that has caught a dragonfly.

When botanists wanted to know what kind of creature pollinated a rare orchid, they set up a camera to watch. Imagine their surprise when a cricket showed up! Not only was this the first example of a cricket pollinating a plant, the cricket was a new species.

Check out the cricket pollinating the orchid in this video.

The final insect is a jumping cockroach, with back legs enlarged like a cricket’s.

Go ahead and investigate the rest of the list on your own. When you are done exploring, come on back and let us know which organism you think is the coolest!

Okay, there are seeds in there somewhere.

Any idea what plant these gleaming red jewels are from?

Edit:  The answer is now posted.