Entomology 108 - Fall 2009
Final Exam – Take Home
100 points

Due: by 11:59 pm, Monday, Dec. 14, 2009, emailed to me!!!
I will be out of town at the annual Entomological Society of America meetings all of finals week, so ALL final exams must be e-mailed (I will be grading them at the meeting). Use either lhigley1@unl.edu or lhigley@drshigley.com, to send your exams, and feel free to e-mail early (but not often).

Answer 10 of the following 11 questions (each worth 10 points).  You may answer an 11th question for up to 5 bonus points (this is optional); indicate which answer is bonus otherwise we will assume the bonus is the last answer.  Your answers should be written on a separate sheet of paper and should be sufficiently long to provide a thoughtful discussion of the question (I expect that about a paragraph to a half page would be appropriate for most questions).  Write in complete sentences, paragraphs, etc.  Because this is a take home exam you may use outside sources, such as your notes or other references, but do not discuss the questions with your classmates, don't use old exam answers (I mostly changed the questions anyway), and do call me with questions. I am most interested in your own thoughts and opinions (supported by evidence). Call me if you have questions (560-6684).

Hiring evil minions was fine as a theme for the midterm, but perhaps that was putting the cart before the horse. How do evil scientists, maniacal geniuses, and disaffected professors of entomology get the money to build their secret laboratories, hire minions, etc. Clearly, they need some start-up enterprise to support their evil schemes. So, this job application is not for evil minion, henchman, or beautiful girl in bikini who lies around until Bond convinces her to betray her benefactors for the good of civilization and Bond's libido. Instead, I am looking for a special kind of employee:

There are Ghostbusters, Dustbusters, Mythbusters, bronco busters, and Buster Browns (a brand of shoe, right?), but I'm looking for a BUG BUSTER. I'm not sure I know exactly what a Bug Buster is, but I'm sure it involves wearing a goofy jumpsuit, using weird equipment, charging large fees for dubious services, and saving mankind from all sorts of insect-related mayhem. In writing the exam, I tried to find a tenuous link between the quotes from Ghostbusters I or II and the question at hand. I'd also like to point out, before I get lots of complaints that it is not easy to get accurate quotes because the actors adlibbed and changed lines so much that the final shooting script is only an approximation. And if you haven't seen the Ghostbusters films, what are you waiting for?

(By the way, after watching the films 5 or 6 times with your kids, I encourage you to take every opportunity to have conversations with your children consisting of nothing but quotes from the films, until Phyllis, uh, I mean your spouse, tells you to knock it off before she goes absolutely out of her mind. Also, the Higley guys' favorite quote isn't listed below. Here's a hint, Dan Ackroyd says it in the first movie, in the NY Public Library stacks scene. And it involves sense organs. Cracks me up every time.)
Now on to the exam:

The Bug Busters Exam

I just realized something. We've never had a completely successful test with any of the equipment.
I blame myself.
So do I.
No sense worrying about it now.
Sure. Each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on our back. No problem.

1. Hey, if you are going to be wandering about killing insects, you should know what you are doing. So, what are the 5 key "principles" of toxicology I discussed with you in class?

There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
What?
Don't cross the streams.
Why?
It would be bad.
I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing.
What do you mean, "bad"?
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Total protonic reversal.
Right.
That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

2. As a practical application of question #1, the death (murder) of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko from polonium poisoning illustrates many important issues we discussed in lecture. Polonium must occur inside the victim to present a hazard, and much of the investigation involved how the poison was administered to Mr. Litvinenko. From a public health standpoint, one of the potential routes of entry is vastly more important than the other. Which route of entry is of greatest public health importance and why?

This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
What do you mean, "biblical"?
What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff.
Exactly.
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling.
Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...
The dead rising from the grave.
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.

3. Bug Busters should probably be prepared for large scale emergencies. Having spent so long talking about plague, why don't you give me your insights on deadly epidemics in a modern context. If the current H1N1 epidemic involved a strain of H1N1 with a higher mortality rate (let's say 5% with treatment and 25% without), how might the individual and societal responses to the epidemic be similar to and different from "The Great Mortality" (the Black Death of 1348-1350)?

What are you supposed to be, some kind of a cosmonaut?
No, we're exterminators. Someone saw a cockroach up on twelve.
That's gotta be some cockroach.
Bite your head off, man.

4. Your "friend" has cockroaches in their kitchen, bedbugs in their bedroom, and head lice in their hair. (Not to freak you out, but various former Ent 108 students have had "friends" with all of these problems). Outline a course of action to solve the problems.

You think there's a connection between this Vigo character and the... slime?
Is the atomic weight of cobalt 58.9?

5. Like Ghostbusters, shouldn't Bug Busters be able to make connections between current events and future risks? In class I made some dire predictions about what will happen as the global population heads toward and above 10 billion (if you missed that lecture, just think about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse). Besides war, disease, etc., we can also anticipate substantial increases in global temperatures over your lifetime. So, what do you think are likely to be the most important impacts of global warming on insects, and how are these likely to affect humans?

Vigo the Carpathian. Born 1505, died 1610.
105 years old, he hung in there, didn't he?
He didn't die of old age, either. He was poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disemboweled, drawn and quartered.
Ouch.
Guess he wasn't too popular at the end, huh?
No, not exactly a man of the people. Also known as Vigo the Cruel, Vigo the Torturer, Vigo the Despised, and Vigo the Unholy.
Wasn't he also Vigo the Butch?

6. I am a product of a liberal education, in fact my undergraduate degree is a BA, not BS. As a Bug Buster you never know when a knowledge of art, literature, or made-up eastern European history may be useful (assuming you haven't got a copy of Tobin's Spirit Guide, whatever that is). So a liberal education question is certainly in order. As we discussed in more than one lecture, the visual depiction of insects in western art has greatly changed through time. How would you compare current insect images and how they are used to those from the past? (And if you say modern insect images are more accurate, how are you going to explain those four-legged ants in Disney movies?)

What was it?  Will there be any more of them?
Sir, what you had there was what we refer to as a focused, non-terminal repeating phantasm or a Class Five Full Roaming Vapor... A real nasty one, too.

7. In the Bug Busting business you need to know your enemy. Let's start with some medical pests. The poor mosquito, it only wants to drink your blood so it can make babies, and yet we hate it so. Ticks also like to drink human blood (well, they drink it, I don't know about the "liking" part, that's sounds too anthropomorphic). Both ticks and mosquitoes can transmit dozens of deadly human diseases, however, we spend vastly more money on mosquito research and mosquito management than we do on comparable activities for ticks. Why?

According to my source, the end of the world will be on February 14th, in the year two thousand and sixteen.
Valentine's day. Bummer. Where'd you get your date, Elaine?
I received this information from an alien. I was sitting at the bar, alone and this alien approached me. He started talking to me, he bought me a drink. And then he must have used some kind of a ray or a mind control device because he forced me to follow him to his room and that's where he told me about the end of the world.
So your alien had a room at the Holiday Inn, Paramus?
It could have been a room on the spaceship made to look like the hotel. I can't be sure about that, Peter.

8. My suspicion is that Devo ("Are we not men -- We are Devo") got it right with their notion of de-evolution, as evidenced by the rise of television and Fox "News". Let's see if you can sort television fiction from science fact, as represented by this dialog from my unpublished attempt at a noir tv show: It was a Dark and Overcast with a 65% Chance of Thunderstorms Night.

"It started as a sunny summer day but got dark quickly when I got the call on the radio. Some uniform had found a decomp in the park, and Smith from mid-town was already headed to the scene. Which would be worse, working on a stinking decaying body or working with Smith? I was putting my money on Smith as I pulled into the park. The body was under some trees.  "Hey don't bother, I've got it covered," Smith said, as I worked my way towards the body. He'd had the uniforms put up a tape barrier 10 feet around the body. And I could see he'd been pawing over the stiff, before the techs started working the scene. The body looked like a Halloween nightmare -- bare skull on top of a swollen, yellowed body with maggots all over the shoulders and in the middle of the chest. Smith started in on me right away. "I guess we don't need you college kids from homicide on this one. Yeah, looks like we got some freak killer who likes to take his victim's faces off. I figure the killer strangled this guy or maybe doped him up before working on the poor sap's head. I suppose the body's been out a couple months before it started stinking enough to attract any attention and the bugs found it." He paused for a moment, and looked at me with a smirk "Look at them maggots go." Smith wouldn't know maggots from macaroni."

There are at least six errors involving forensic entomology that Smith made in working the case and in his analysis; please identify at least three of these errors (and yes, I suppose I'll give you a bonus point for each correct answer beyond the first three).
 

Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say "YES"!

9. When Phyllis taught at Doan she became frustrated with the attitudes of some of her students regarding towards evolution (some were fascinated and intellectually in awe of Darwin's accomplishments and an equal number seemed to reflect the views of one student who wrote "I don't care what you say, nothing will make me believe it"). Well, I'm not going ask your views on evolution, but I am asking a practical evolutionary question that you should be able to answer correctly (given that your life may literally depend on it). How does the overuse of antibiotics (or insecticides if we were talking about insects) lead to the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens? (Yes Virginia, antibiotic-resistance and insecticide-resistance are both proof that evolution, if not Santa Claus, does exist.)

You mean this stuff actually feeds on 'bad vibes'?
Like a cop in a donut shop.
We're running tests to see if we can get an equally strong positive reaction.
What kind of tests?
Well, we sing to it, we talk to it, we say supportive, nurturing things --
You're not sleeping with this stuff, are you?
...
Oh you dog.
It's always the quiet ones.

10. Phyllis gave me another cool idea for a question that touches on issues in entomophagy (you know, eating insects). She says that in Islam insects are regarded as unclean and their consumption is forbidden; however, it is perfectly acceptable to eat honey (= bee vomit). I think similar restrictions occur in other religions. I wonder why it is bad to eat insects but ok to eat insect vomit? (And is the accidental consumption of insects sinful, given that it's unavoidable?) Actually, I don't want a theological treatise on dietary restrictions, so don't answer those questions. What I really want to know, in a general way, is why you think different societies view eating insects or insect products so differently?

Alice, I'm going to ask you a couple of standard questions, okay? Have you or any of your family been diagnosed schizophrenic? Mentally incompetent?
My uncle thought he was Saint Jerome.
I'd call that a big yes. Uh, are you habitually using drugs? Stimulants? Alcohol?
No.
No, no. Just asking. Are you, Alice, menstruating right now?
What's has that got to do with it?
Back off, man. I'm a scientist.

11. Here is a total, absolute freebie. I very much want to know what you regard as the most important thing you learned in this course and why? I suppose if you provide a ridiculous answer or no justification I'll have to take points off, but I'd rather you regard this question as seriously as the others, because I intend to.

That's it, the end of the exam and (after the Friday, Dec.11th lecture) the course. And if you are feeling down...
Well you're probably feeling what Vigo's feeling..."Carpathian Kitten Loss" He misses his kitty! Well we'll just place one in here right by the castle
Don't go 'round altering valuable art Dr. Venkman... go... yes, I think; go... the joyfulness is over!

The Dragnet Version of the Final: Just the facts ma'am.

1. What are the 5 key "principles" of toxicology I discussed with you in class?

2. As a practical application of question #1, the death (murder) of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko from polonium poisoning illustrates many important issues we discussed in lecture. Polonium must occur inside the victim to present a hazard, and much of the investigation involved how the poison was administered to Mr. Litvinenko. From a public health standpoint, one of the potential routes of entry is vastly more important than the other. Which route of entry is of greatest public health importance and why?

3. If the current H1N1 epidemic involved a strain of H1N1 with a higher mortality rate (let's say 5% with treatment and 25% without), how might the individual and societal responses to the epidemic be similar to and different from "The Great Mortality" (the Black Death of 1348-1350)?

4. Your "friend" has cockroaches in their kitchen, bed bugs in their bedroom, and head lice in their hair. (Not to freak you out, but various former Ent 108 students have had "friends" with all of these problems). Outline a course of action to solve the problems.

5. What do you think are likely to be the most important impacts of global warming on insects, and how are these likely to affect humans?

6. As we discussed in more than one lecture, the visual depiction of insects in western art has greatly changed through time. How would you compare current insect images and how they are used to those from the past? (And if you say modern insect images are more accurate, how are you going to explain those four-legged ants in Disney movies?)

7. Both ticks and mosquitoes can transmit dozens of deadly human diseases, however, we spend vastly more money on mosquito research and mosquito management than we do on comparable activities for ticks. Why?

8. "It started as a sunny summer day but got dark quickly when I got the call on the radio. Some uniform had found a decomp in the park, and Smith from mid-town was already headed to the scene. Which would be worse, working on a stinking decaying body or working with Smith? I was putting my money on Smith as I pulled into the park. The body was under some trees.  "Hey don't bother, I've got it covered," Smith said, as I worked my way towards the body. He'd had the uniforms put up a tape barrier 10 feet around the body. And I could see he'd been pawing over the stiff, before the techs started working the scene. The body looked like a Halloween nightmare -- bare skull on top of a swollen, yellowed body with maggots all over the shoulders and in the middle of the chest. Smith started in on me right away. "I guess we don't need you college kids from homicide on this one. Yeah, looks like we got some freak killer who likes to take his victim's faces off. I figure the killer strangled this guy or maybe doped him up before working on the poor sap's head. I suppose the body's been out a couple months before it started stinking enough to attract any attention and the bugs found it." He paused for a moment, and looked at me with a smirk "Look at them maggots go." Smith wouldn't know maggots from macaroni."

There are at least six errors involving forensic entomology that Smith made in working the case and in his analysis; please identify at least three of these errors (and yes, I suppose I'll give you a bonus point for each correct answer beyond the first three).

9. How does the overuse of antibiotics (or insecticides if we were talking about insects) lead to the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens?

10. Why you think different societies view eating insects or insect products so differently?

11. Here is a total, absolute freebie. I very much want to know what you regard as the most important thing you learned in this course and why? I suppose if you provide a ridiculous answer or no justification I'll have to take points off, but I'd rather you regard this question as seriously as the others, because I intend to.

These beetles (from ca. 1887) bring you holiday wishes and so do I (but don't ask me what's in that basket the beetles are carrying, I don't want to know).

Have a great semester break!

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