Harris County STEAMers

Mathematician Monday ➕✖️➖➗ Hypatia came up with conics: the basic ways a graph can be drawn. She used a cone to make things like parabolas and ellipses

Insect of the day! Meet the larvae to the American Carrion Beetle, Necrophila americana. Carrion is a science term for dead animals. This guy gets his name from feeding on decaying animal tissue during its larval and adult stages. Because of this, they play an incredibly important role in the ecosystem, returning nutrients from dead animals back into the food web to be absorbed by plants from the soil. We call organisms that play this role decomposers. The adult carrion beetle looks like a smashed firefly from the top and has wings to fly. Sometimes in flight it's mistaken for a bumblebee. One of the coolest adaptations of this guy is its ability to smell. Carrion beetles can smell rotting flesh from far away. They fly to the food and usually eat it from underneath. They lay their eggs in or near the carcass so the larvae have a tasty, nutritious treat waiting when they hatch out. It takes about 3 months for the larvae to mature into an adult. Crime scene investigators even use carrion beetles to help them solve crimes! They can use the life cycle of the beetle to help them set a timeline or determine the time of death. If you come in close contact with one, you might find another special trait of carrion beetles; they smell like what they eat! This is an adaptation to scare away predators.