Trematode! So what is a trematode you ask and how is it related to ants? Trematodes include two groups of parasitic flatworms known as flukes. They are parasites of molluscs and vertebrates. Most trematodes have a complex life cycle with at least two hosts. The flukes reproduce in the vertebrate while the intermediate host is the agent of dispersal that continues or completes the life cycle.

So where are the ants? Interestingly enough, two entomologists Krull and Mapes discovered in 1952 that some ants are a second intermediate host in the trematode life cycle. That means after they travel through the first intermediate host, a snail, they go to an ant and finally they return to the main vertebrate to complete their life cycle. An interesting trematode to learn about, in my opinion, is Dicrocoelium dendriticum. This is a liver fluke whose main host is a sheep, its next host is a snail, and the last an ant.

Basically, how this cycle works is the D. dentriticum spends its adult life in the liver of the sheep, and when they mate the eggs are excreted in the feces. The snails then consume the sheep poop and get infected with the D. dendriticum larvae. The larvae drill through the wall of the snail’s gut and settle in its digestive tract where they develop into a juvenile stage. The snail defends itself by walling the parasites off in cysts, which it then excretes and leaves behind in the trail of slime it leaves on the grass. Next, the ants use the slime as a source of moisture and eat the slime along with the cysts filled with juvenile D. dendriticum. The parasites go into the gut of the ant and stay in its body until they form into metacercariae (the stage between larvae and adult). However, one moves to the brain, more specifically the sub-esophageal ganglion. Once there, the D. dendriticum can change the ant’s behavior by controlling and manipulating the nerves in the ganglion. As the air cools and night approaches, the D. dendriticum make the ant leave the colony and climb up to the top of a blade of grass. Once on the grass the parasite causes muscle contractions in the ant that force it to bite onto the grass and stay there paralyzed until the temperature warms. However, in the early morning while the air is still cool, many sheep graze on the grass. The sheep eat the D. dendriticum-infected ants that are stuck to the grass and this is how the cycle continues.

This parasite is so interesting because it actually changes the behavior of the ant! Any normal ant would have a fully functioning body and hide or run away from a grazing sheep. However, by making the ant be paralyzed on the grass, D. dendriticum forces the life cycle to continue. So why is this important to humans? D. dendriticum cause the sheep to get sick. The sheep infected with D. dendriticum have liver problems, experience weight loss, and decreased milk production. I don’t know about you, but I love learning about this stuff it is so interesting! I hope you thought it was interesting too because I have many more examples of parasites that change an ant’s behavior and I may mention them in the upcoming weeks.

picture from: http://www.dicyt.com/noticia/melhorias-no-tratamento-das-doencas-parasitarias

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGJ2jMZ-gaI

If you watched the video found at the link above, good for you! Wasn’t it cool?! For those who didn’t watch the video: it was of an artist who poured molten aluminum into a carpenter ant hill then waited for it to cool, dug it out of the ground, cleaned the dirt off of it, and voila! They made a beautiful sculpture! I bet many of you have already seen this but for me it never ceases to amaze me. Give ants a plot of dirt and a week and they will transform it into an underground maze of tunnels and living space. Ants are so cool and in the spirit of my art blog from last semester I wanted to include this video. The only thing I dislike about the video is all of the ants have to die and that makes me sad. But then I remember, ants can’t even really think and there are millions more in the world so killing one or two colonies will not do much harm in the long run.

Taxonomically, most social insects are found in the order Hymenoptera, this is the ants, bees, and wasps. Ants specifically are eusocial which means they follow a caste system. The basic caste system includes a queen at the base who is fertilized by a male ant once, and lays eggs all her life. As the larvae grow they go through stages until they are an adult ant when they become either a nurse, forager, garbage ant, or soldier, just to name a few. Each colony has different jobs, and different ways of deciding which ant gets assigned which job. In some colonies it is decided by age, while in others it is decided by natural body size. Note that all working ants are female ants. They are related to each other more than normal human sisters who share 50% of their DNA. The sister ants share 75% of their DNA and due to this they want to protect each other and the queen so that their progeny have a chance of survival. Many scientists believe that this is the reason ants are eusocial. As with the diversity of the castes in ant colonies also comes a wide variety of nesting habits. Some nests are open (army ants) some are underground like the one we saw in the video. Some ant colonies can grow to be very large. For example, the Anomma wilverthi have about 20,000,000 worker ants in each colony. Some colonies live a very long time, some for decades. Their survival depends on the environment, for example, the presence of food, water, and other nearby colonies. Ants are very territorial and secrete pheromones wherever they go. The pheromones help the foragers in one colony stay on their established foraging paths, and they can be used in other forms of communication like a warning signal to outside colonies to not come any closer. Ant colonies will fight and kill each other, some ants even eat the dead of the opposing colony, but this is rare. On this creepy note, is where I will leave you until next week. I am sorry to any ant enthusiasts if any of this information is offensively wrong, I am new to all this! Thanks for reading!

This week I am going to talk about one of my favorite forms of art: glassblowing. I don’t know about you, but I get so excited about art that is made by heat, like pottery, enameling, glassblowing, metal working, etc.; I just love all of it. Anyway, glassblowing for those who don’t exactly know is, it is a glass forming technique that involves inflating molten glass into a bubble with the aid of a blowpipe, and then making things with it.

Last year when I was taking an art major class, we had an independent project that we had to do outside of class. This technically meant that we had to use time outside of class to do a self-guided project. However, I told my mom it meant that we had to do a project outside of the classroom in order to finally convince her to let me try glassblowing. I had wanted to try it for a while but it was expensive and the closest place to go was about 40 minutes away. Therefore, I thought that this project was the perfect opportunity to let me try glassblowing because once I told my mom that is was for school she was okay with me doing it. A few days later I signed up for a beginner’s class at Goggleworks in Reading, PA. A few weeks later I drove there and took the class; we were making birdfeeders, I was so excited! I decided to make my birdfeeder green because I thought that it would blend in with nature and birds would like that. After a bunch of steps (that I don’t exactly remember because it was an hour class that I took like a year ago) but it basically went like: heat up your glass in the fire-kiln thing to melt it. Then you had to keep spinning the pole because the glass on the end was molten and if you let it stay still for too long it would drop off the end of the pole. Next when it was nice and hot and symmetrical we rolled it into the little colored glass chips to make our bird feeder the color that we wanted. Next we put it back into the fire and melted and spun it again. Then we took it out of the fire and had to blow down the tube to make a big bubble at the end (this is the glass blowing part). Then we poked a hole in the end of the bubble and stretched it out so that it was the flat bottom of the birdfeeder where the food would sit. Meanwhile, the glass still above the bubble got stretched out (it had been out of the heat long enough that it was hard enough that it wasn’t drooping anywhere). Then, we shaped the bottom of it to the way we thought it would look nice and pretty. By that time it was cold enough (but still really hot) that we could break it off of the pole. Finally the guy who was teaching the class took some hot glass and put it on top of the bird feeder in a little loop so that we could hang it. Then, we put our birdfeeders into this place that was like an oven so that our glass could slowly cool so as not to crack and we could pick it up a few days later. Overall the experience was so fun and I really wanted to do it again but it was expensive and all of the intermediate long term classes weren’t on the weekends but during the week when I had a lot to do after school. On a slightly more depressing note, I talked to the guy who ran the class after class because I wanted to ask him about his work and stuff. He ended up telling me about all of the cool art he makes but that not many people buy expensive glass-blown pieces so he has to teach these classes, but he still barely makes enough money for his family. This conversation made me realize that I didn’t want to be an artist. I was torn between doing art because it makes me happy and being a doctor because helping people makes me happy too. Then, I realized if I was an artist and could barely support my family I probably wouldn’t be happy so I realized that a doctor was the way to go, and I could do art in my free time. It was a little more complicated of a decision than that but that is a pretty good idea of what I was thinking. I guess that is why the time I went glassblowing is so important to me, and I am glad I could share it with some of my classmates. Also, sorry that this post was not as educational as my posts normally are, because I don’t know any of the correct glassblowing terms. Here is a picture of my finished birdfeeder:

Today I am going to talk about self-portraiture. A self-portrait is a huge undertaking for any artist. The most important thing is they have to decide is how they want to capture themselves, beyond just representing their physical appearance. Self-portraits show an artist’s style, vocation, and even their place in society, or just how they view themselves. Self-portraits became more popular in the mid-15^th century when mirrors became cheaper. Many artists create portraits of themselves spread out over their entire careers showing how their style may have grown or changed. The first artist to do this is Albrecht Durer, who created his first self-portrait at the age of 13 in 1484. He went on to create a portrait of himself at what he considered were the important chapters of his life.

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/PictDisplay/Durer.html

Similarly, Rembrandt, a Bourgeoisie Baroque painter used self-portraits as a window into the themes and events of his life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-portraits_by_Rembrandt#mediaviewer/File:Rembrant_Self-Portrait,_1660.jpg

Many artists used their self-portraits to promote themselves, for example, David, in 1794, during the Neoclassicism movement portrayed himself as a dashing, young painter leaving out his flaws like the tumor he had on his face.

http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/neocl_dav_self1794.html

Post-impressionist artists like Van Gogh, used their self-portraits as windows into the inner turmoil of their mind. Many paintings were of vibrant, or non-natural colors with harsh swirls that seem to represent brooding emotions. One of his paintings is more straightforward with his emotions, the one where he painted himself with the bandage over his ear shows that his thoughts were so crazy that he felt the need to cut off his own ear. Some artists used self-portraits as a form of practice, because who will sit as a model for you longer than you will sit for yourself? No one. For example, Van Gogh once said, “I purposely bought a mirror good enough to enable me to work from my image in default of a model, because if I can manage to paint the coloring of my own head, which is not to be done without some difficulty, I shall likewise be able to paint the heads of other good souls, men and women”.

http://www.wikiart.org/en/vincent-van-gogh/self-portrait-with-bandaged-ear-1889-1

During the Cubism period, Picasso painted very simplistic self-portraits that portrayed simplicity and energy.

http://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-picasso/self-portrait-1907

Other artists, like Frida Kahlo, created 55 self-portraits (although most don’t make this many). She said that she made so many self-portraits “because I am so often alone… because I am the subject I know best”. She used her paintings to deal with the physical and emotional pain from her turbulent relationship with Diego. She mainly portrayed herself as a god-like entity surrounded by symbolic creatures and flora. Her style was one of the first to be more surreal and reflect the inner id.

http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/portraits/frida_kahlo.htm

In the mid-20th century, artists like Andy Warhol created pop-art self-portraits which were often very vibrant and eye-catching while also creating an ironic statement about himself.

http://www.queerty.com/13-most-wanted-men-andy-warhol-created-a-scandal-at-the-1964-worlds-fair-20140908/11-andy-warhol-self-portrait-1986-awf-300-dpi

Around the same time, realist/caricature portraits were becoming more popular with artists like Norman Rockwell. Although interesting and funny, these types of portraits normally don’t contain a deep meaning.

http://www.wikiart.org/en/norman-rockwell/self-portrait

One of the most famous modern day artist to do self-portraits in completely new way is Chuck Close. I could talk forever about him, but I will keep it brief. He used to be famous for his photorealism, through his massive-scale portraits (most are about 8’x9’). Then in 1988, a catastrophic spinal artery collapse left him severely paralyzed, but through the regained use of his right arm with a brace (and a paintbrush taped to his arm) he has continued to paint and produce work that is still amazing. He still creates the same style using cells and large canvases, but now he overlaps blocked colors in each cell so that they look like one coherent image. Even more interesting is why he started portraiture in the first place. He has prosopagnosia, otherwise known as “face-blindness”. He cannot recognize faces and therefore always made portraits of his family and friends to help remember and recognize their faces.

http://www.mosaicartnow.com/2010/07/prosopagnosia-portraitist-chuck-close/

There are so many more famous artists and their self-portraits that I have failed to mention in my broad overview of the history of self-portraits. Sorry for leaving them out, but if you want to check out more self-portraits here are the names of some more interesting artists: Paul Klee, Mary Cassat, Da Vinci, Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, M.C. Escher, Kathe Kollwitz, Basquiat, Romero Britto, and that is all I can really think of right now.

I hoped you enjoyed my post this week, as much as I enjoyed writing it! Sorry it went a little long. Here is a self-portrait that I made. What do you think I am trying to say about myself??