Jurassic World: What do the paleontologists think?

Explaining the concept of this review is like explaining a dream. "I went to go see 'Jurassic World' before the film was in theaters, but instead of my friends, I brought two top paleontologists."

Based on a small sample size, the "Jurassic Park" film franchise has a special place in the heart of paleontologists. This is probably why I was able to convince the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History Director Kirk Johnson and Curator of Dinosauria Matthew Carrano, both paleontologists, to come to a screening of "Jurassic World."

The tl;dr of their reaction? "Jurassic World" is super entertaining — but it could have used more herbivores.

Here is the paleontologists' review, in the form of a condensed and edited conversation. There are, as you would imagine, mild — but not devastating — spoilers.

KJ: I did enjoy the addition of the Pterosaurs and the Mesosaur.

MC: Right, a few non-dinosaurs. That's true, having more than just peripheral role.

KJ: They definitely supercharged the Mesosaur and made the Pterosaurs way stronger than they would have been in real life.

MC: Yeah. Pterosours could do you damage, but it's hard to believe a Pterosaur could lift a person. They're not that strong. Their bones are like paper. It's hard to imagine not being able to get away from a Pterosaur. You could crush one, probably.

KJ: And their claws aren't like that.

MC: They're not eagles. That's the other thing, too. They're not actually animals that run around and grab things with their claws the way raptors do today. They're mouth predators. If they can't pick you up with their mouth, they're not going to eatyou. And a lot of Pterosaurs, their neck bones are not thick. They probably can't pick up a person. Their feet are not — I wouldn't imagine it to be the equivalent of an eagle. They basically are flat footed.

KJ: They're fishing.

MC: Bug eating. The average Pterosaur is much smaller. It's the same thing as the Velociraptor. And the Mesosaur is substantially larger than most Mesosaurs.

KJ: Twice-ish.

MC: Nice to see some marine things. Although I'd love to know how you get [a Mesosaur] out of a mosquito. How do you get the blood out of a sea creature out of a mosquito?

What's changed in dinosaur science between "Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic World"?

KJ: The number of dinosaurs we know has just, like, skyrocketed.

MC: Every six or seven weeks, you get a new dinosaur. And that pace has been going up for 20 years.

KJ: If you drive a direct connection between places putting value in dinosaurs and hiring dinosaur scientists, and then dinosaur science finding new dinosaurs, there's almost something like a direct cause and effect between something like "Jurassic Park" and this incredible number of new dinosaurs.

The new Jurassic World dinosaur is 'a little shy', apparently

Of all those newly discovered dinosaurs since the last installment of the series, which one should have been in "Jurassic World"?

KJ: Deinocheirus. A gigantic clawed duck thing. A lot of the cool weird ones are herbivores.

MC: Every single kind of carnivore is in there, right? With the herbivores, it's "we've got our horns one, we have our armor one, we have our longneck one, and we don't really care how many."

We've probably discovered about 4 percent of all the dinosaurs that ever existed. They should be just making these dinosaurs like "holy cow, what's that?" And they would all be dinosaurs you've never heard of. They could say, "Well it's kind of like a stegosaurus, but it's got all this other junk on it. I guess it's a ... " And they could just start naming new dinosaurs.

On the Indominus Rex, the made-up hybrid villain "dinosaur."

KJ: It basically looks like a supercharged Allosaurus. But it had bird raptor claws. Did you notice that? Those are eagle claws, they weren't dinosaur claws.

MC: And then it had sort of like a Bellusaur head with all these knobs on it.

KJ: It looks like a dinosaur, basically. It looked like you could easily find that.

MC: In the technical details no, but there are giant long-armed predatory dinosaurs. So you don't even need to get that weird about it. Interestingly, the color changing, that was in the book, the first book. There's a dinosaur in the first book called Carnotaurus. Which of course we don't know what color it was. But in the first "Jurassic Park" book, it was a color-changing dinosaur, which they only found out after they made it. It just turned out to be a camouflaged dinosaur. They got rid of it in the first movie originally, but they brought the concept back now.

On the film's choice to explain away the accuracy of "Jurassic World's" dinosaurs by saying that none of the park's creatures are "natural."

MC: I loved that, right? It was the "scientist, shut up" moment. B.D. Wong's character says something like: "You always wanted more teeth and more this, if we did it the way they were supposed to be they would look completely different." So the idea is, they don't have feathers on purpose. At least he provides an answer, right?

On the portrayal of scientists in the film.

KJ: This was the first one with no paleontologists in it?

MC: Yeah.

KJ: In the first (movie), there's the famous line, "I need the opinion of a paleobotanist." Which is the first and only time the word "paleobotany" has ever been uttered in a movie. As a paleobotanist I was —

MC: It was a high-water mark.

KJ: This one, there was, like, the tough guy who was the dinosaur trainer.

MC: But he was like an ex-Navy dude.

KJ: So that might be the big thing, is that they've matured past needing us.

What about the Jurassic plants?

KJ : My big pet peeve is of course, everybody short-shrifts the vegetation in the landscape. Everybody puts dinosaurs in modern landscapes. It's even worse if you call it "Jurassic World." All the implications are that you're going to build this entire world. But really it's not; it's Hawaii with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs didn't really live in the rain forest, because there weren't really rain forests to live in when dinosaurs were around.

MC: And actually if you had an island like that, if you assume that the dinosaurs could have adjusted to eating these things they've never eaten before, etc. It would have take no time at all for those dinosaurs to totally have remade that landscape, like elephants today. Elephants hate trees; they just start pulling them down. Elephants are engineering the landscape, and the big dinosaurs certainly would have done that. It wouldn't have been a dense rain forest for very long. They would have trashed the place.

What did you think about Chris Pratt's trained Velociraptors?

MC: Deeply unlikely, for a whole bunch of reasons. A lot of dinosaurs live in groups, it seems like. I'm sure there are ways of communicating, crocodiles do that today. But the raptors are engaging in wolf-like behavior. Even in mammals that stuff shows up late. It's a pretty new thing.

We want our predators to be as dramatic as possible, right? That whole notion actually came out of science, that they were pack hunters. That's not a movie invention. And it's based on the fact that the very first examples of these raptors that were found, there were several of them that were found together, and a plant eater that was much bigger. The idea was that it was a pack scenario. But that has not really held up in later years for a variety of reasons. But it's been a very catchy thing. The more likely thing is that they were running around eating lizards.

Copyright: Washington Post 

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/jurassic-world-what-do-the-paleontologists-think-10316292.html

he's probably thinking about forams

marathon and curry hammock state park, florida

marathon sunset

osprey in curry hammock state park

at sombrero beach

curry hammock state park

iguanas everywhere

curry hammock state park

indian key, florida

launched from Robbies

parrot fish

key west, florida

It's Spawning Season: Are Horseshoe Crabs Down For the Count?

Migratory birds and humans have long relied on the odd creatures; biomedical companies even harvest their blue blood to create a clotting agent. But scientists fear they're on the decline and are now working on ways to set harvest limits.

Walk along Mid-Atlantic beaches right now and you may see odd creatures that look like they belong in the dinosaur age. They're horseshoe crabs, and scientists worry their numbers are declining.

To gather more information about what's happening to the crabs, volunteers are dispatched along the coast each year at this time for an annual count.

It's getting dark, and these sea creatures are lined up for miles on Kitts Hummock Beach near Dover, Del., where they come ashore to spawn.

Horseshoe crabs are sometimes called living fossils because they've been around for millions of years and survived when other species didn't. The females are larger than males, some as big as a dinner plate. The shell has a horseshoe shape and from a few steps back they look like shallow green Army helmets.

Horseshoe crabs spawning on Kitts Hummock Beach near Dover, Del. Most of the year they live out in the ocean but in late spring and early summer they migrate toward shore where females bury eggs in the sand and males fertilize them. Typically there are many more males than females. The males gather around the females and those closest to the females are more likely to fertilize the eggs.

Drexel Siok, environmental scientist at Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve, holds a horseshoe crab that's been tagged on Kitts Hummock Beach near Dover, Del. During the annual count volunteers make a note if they find a tagged crab. Researchers then use the information to learn where crabs are moving over time.

Faith Hewes learned about horseshoe crabs from her father, Jim Hewes, a seventh-grade science teacher. He volunteers with Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve to lead counting teams.

"You can tell when they're old," Faith says. "Because they have a lot of stuff on their backs and a lot of barnacles."

As the high tide recedes, Hewes instructs a half-dozen volunteers. They hold meter-wide white squares made of plastic pipe.

"When you put in your square, go right to the water's edge, OK? Drop it in," Hewes says.

Then he reminds them, "You're counting the crabs that are only within the square itself."

Two teams do this 50 times each along a mile of beach. Hewes says if a crab walks out of the square, count that one too.

"All right, guys, let's have fun and let's count crabs," he says.

With rubber boots and headlamps, the volunteers dig through the many males to find the few females laying eggs in the sand.

Volunteer Tom Huber and his daughter Melanie bend down and dig in while his son Benson stands with a clipboard.

"They count them. I just write it down," Benson says. "If they have tags I have to record those as well."

Some crabs are tagged so researchers can track where they go.

Tom Huber, a volunteer counter, uses a one meter square of plastic pipe to mark the boundary of where they are reporting. They lay down the square 50 times along a mile of beach to get a sample of how many are there. If a crab comes into the boundary or leaves it while the pipe is down it can be counted.

There are plenty of crabs tonight, but overall there's still concern.

The fishing industry uses horseshoe crabs for bait. Migratory birds eat their eggs. And biomedical companies use their blue blood to make a special clotting agent.

Kirby Rootes-Murdy with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission says here in the Delaware Bay region numbers are stable. And south of here the population is increasing.

"What we are seeing, in terms of concerning evidence, is a decrease in abundance for the New York and, kind of, New England regions," he says.

And Rootes-Murdy points out another important thing about horseshoe crabs: It turns out they aren't really crabs.

"It's pretty nuts that they have the name horseshoe crab but they're much more closely related to spiders and scorpions than they are to actual blue crabs that people are familiar with," he says.

Back at the shore, Maggie Pletta with the estuarine reserve says don't let that spider-scorpion thing worry you.

"They can't sting you; they're not venomous. They're not using their tail as a spear," Pletta says. "So if you see them on the beach and they're stuck upside down, flip 'em over. Return them the favor — just flip 'em — and let them get back to doing their business."

Volunteers will be out here on the beach at night through June 18 this year counting the horseshoe crabs. npr

locust vs grasshopper

In a 2010 article on locusts that was published in the Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, Alexandre Vsevolo Latchininsky, Extension Entomologist for the State of Wyoming, explains that "all locusts are grasshoppers but not all grasshoppers are locusts." He defines locusts as "short-horned grasshoppers (Orthoptera: Acrididae), distinguished by their density-dependent behavioral, physiological, and phenotypic polymorphism."

The phenotype mutability refers to the fact that for some subspecies of locusts, the different stages of life are marked by different colors and even body shapes. However, it is the behavioral aspect—the mass grouping together—that is most notable. The act of swarming, or exhibiting a so-called "gregarious phase," is the most obvious characteristic that identifies a subspecies of grasshopper as a locust.

Latchininsky explains in his paper that "out of more than 12,000 described grasshopper species in the world, only about a dozen exhibit pronounced behavioral and/or morphological differences between phases of both nymphs and adults, and should be considered locusts." And in fact, the tendency to swarm together is a relatively recent phenomenon in grasshopper evolution.

It's Raining Nitrogen In A Colorado Park. Farmers Can Help Make It Stop

It's May in Rocky Mountain National Park, but on a mountainside 10,829 feet above sea level, snow is falling. It's pelting Jim Cheatham, a biologist with the National Park Service. Shrugging off the cold, Cheatham seizes a teachable moment. This snow, he says, holds more than just water.

"Chances are it's carrying the excess nitrogen we're talking about," says Cheatham.

For the past eight years, the biologist has spent most of his time thinking about how nitrogen pollution is changing the park's forests, wildflowers and alpine lakes. He's also been looking for a way to stop it.

As Cheatham explains, it's not that nitrogen is bad in and of itself. It's that there's too much of it in the park. Think about putting fertilizer, which is basically nitrogen, on your lawn or garden, he said.

"What if you applied that fertilizer — and that's exactly what it is — at that rate — 15 times what's on the label," he says. "Weird things are going to happen."

Weird things are happening in the park's alpine meadows and in the lakes nestled beneath its craggy peaks. Cheatgrass, an invasive weed, is making its way higher and higher into the park, buoyed by extra fertilizer, as are other weeds. Native trees are weakened by the extra nitrogen. Rivers are becoming more acidic.

Cheatham recalled a moment one day when he was driving through the park with his family, in what should have been a relatively pristine alpine environment.

"And I happened to catch what I thought was Canada thistle, you know catch sight of that while driving," said Cheatham. "I stopped, and I panicked."

Those spiky, purple flowers are a highly invasive weed. That thistle isn't supposed to be there. When it is, that means it is crowding out native plants, like wildflowers.

And it gets weirder.

"This past year, for the first time we saw an algal bloom in one of our high mountain lakes," said Cheatham. "Never been seen before, never been documented before."

Scientists are still investigating the links between the algae bloom and nitrogen, said Cheatham. Regardless of if the link is direct, they are sure of one thing: Too much nitrogen is throwing off the park's ecological balance. If nitrogen levels stay high, the park could look completely different in just a few decades.

After he saw that invasive thistle, Cheatham called out what he called a "SWAT team" of biologists who attacked and removed the weed. A better solution, though, would be to stop the extra nitrogen from getting to the park in the first place.

That's where Jon Slutsky comes in. He's a dairy farmer in Wellington, Colo., about 50 miles east of Rocky Mountain National Park.

Slutsky admits that at first it's hard to make a connection between a dairy farm on Colorado's Eastern Plains and biological weirding in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Yet strange as it might seem, farmers on the plains are responsible for a significant amount of the extra nitrogen that's falling in the park, as rain, or snow.

Other sources include automobiles, oil and gas operations, and other industrial activities from within Colorado. Some nitrogen comes from as far away as California, Nevada, Nebraska and Iowa, according to a 2009 report. Spurred by a 2004 petition from Trout Unlimited and the Environmental Defense Fund, the Park Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment began to focus on reducing nitrogen in the park.

Pointing at a corral where a few of his 1,500 dairy cows were chowing down, Slutsky says this is where the problem starts.

"Ammonia is created out in the corrals — the cows are designed so perfectly, they provide everything — so the urine hits the ground and it creates ammonia," Slutsky says.

Ammonia, which contains nitrogen, can come from a cow urine and manure reacting with the air. Ammonia is a gas, and it can be transformed into another type of particle, ammonium nitrate, that is small and easily carried on the wind.

Normally, wind comes from the west. So most of the nitrogen created at dairies like Slutsky's, and other farms, is carried to places like Nebraska. A few times a year, though, the winds change.

"Not real often. But on occasion they do. Maybe a dozen times a year," says Slutsky.

When that happens, the nitrogen gets carried up into the park. If it rains or snows, it falls on the park, providing fertilizer for weeds like Canada thistle and stressing out the park's ecosystem.

Neither Cheatham nor cattle feedlot owners want this to happen. That's why the Park Service and other federal agencies are partnering with groups of Front Range farmers to use a novel alert system.

Slutsky and around 50 other farmers signed up for a voluntary program where they get an alert when the winds are blowing the wrong way, from the east, and a system is likely to move in and rain nitrogen down on the park.

The alert tells them how long the weather system will last, often two days or less. In response, the farmers can implement conservation practices that keep nitrogen out of the air. Slutsky might decide to move manure another day. Another farmer might postpone a fertilizer application.

Texas A&M University professor Brock Faulkner is a consultant for the project, which went through a trial run in 2014, sending out 10 warnings to Eastern Plains farmers.

"If we could shift the timing of those practices so that those emissions occur at a time when they're less likely to cause detrimental environmental impacts, that would be fantastic," says Faulkner.

Participants ironed out the kinks and showed that the alert system functioned. Faulkner said during the trial run, at least 60 percent of the farmers notified were willing to change their practices to avoid releasing more nitrogen.

While nitrogen levels haven't started declining in the park, Cheatham says they have stopped increasing.

Farmers hope it works. As Slutsky says, they're doing it because they want to, but also to avoid future regulations: "We all either have either the hammer over or our conscience or both."

It's not just Rocky Mountain National Park that could benefit.

If this type of voluntary program works, it could be a model for other places where pollution from agriculture has caused problems, like the Gulf of Mexico or Lake Erie. npr

bruce is now caitlyn jenner

The revelation was made in Vanity Fair, which tweeted an image of Jenner on the cover of its July issue.

"If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and never ever did anything about it, I would be lying there saying, 'You just blew your entire life,' " Jenner tellsthe magazine's Buzz Bissinger.

Jenner, 65, described to ABC's Diane Sawyer in April a lifelong struggle with gender identity.

As NPR's Christopher Dean Hopkins reported at the time: "Jenner told Sawyer that he hoped that being public with his identity and struggle might help change perceptions and increase acceptance of transgender individuals."

As ABC's Sawyer noted at that time, the prime-time interview was Jenner's last as Bruce, but Jenner was still most comfortable with male pronouns. That appears to have now changed — as Vanity Fair referred to Jenner using the female pronouns "she" and "her." And, the magazine notes, Jenner says: "I don't really get hung up" about it.

Here's more from Vanity Fair:

"Jenner tells Bissinger about how she suffered a panic attack the day after undergoing 10-hour facial-feminization surgery on March 15 — a procedure she believed would take 5 hours. (Bissinger reveals that Jenner has not had genital surgery.) She recalls thinking, 'What did I just do? What did I just do to myself?' A counselor from the Los Angeles Gender Center came to the house so Jenner could talk to a professional, and assured her that such reactions were often induced by pain medication, and that second-guessing was human and temporary."

Fossil shows Prehistoric Reptile Gave Birth in Open Ocean

A case of mistaken identity turned out to be the key for proving that a prehistoric aquatic reptile did not lay eggs, but rather gave birth to live young in the warm seas of the Mesozoic.

Former Smithsonian pre-doctoral fellow and prehistoric bird expert Daniel Field, now a researcher at Yale University, was combing through the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History’s collections of fossilized toothed birds. Coming to a box containing an unknown bird species, Field immediately recognized the bones had been misfiled.

Field saw the tiny jawbone pieces in the box—complete with teeth—and realized they very clearly belonged to a baby-sized version of a swimming reptile known as a mosasaur. Field had worked with adult mosasaur specimens during a paleontological dig earlier in his career.

What’s more, these specimens were collected from deposits from the prehistoric Bear Paw Sea, which once stretched from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico. That  gives strong credence to two previous proposals: that mosasaurs lived in the open ocean, not lurking exclusively near coastlines, as previously believed; and that they gave birth to live young.

“It really speaks to the value of the fossil record, that only the fossil record can provide direct evidence of the history of life,” Field says. “It helps us understand what these long-extinct animals would have been like as living, breathing creatures.”

Field added that the marine lizard’s reproductive strategy raises the question of whether mosasaurs and their like were truly cold-blooded in the classic sense. Giving birth to ready-to-swim young in the ocean doesn’t translate to being slow and sluggish like modern reptiles, Field notes.

Collected in Kansas in the late 1800s from the famous Niobrara Formation, the baby mosasaur bones strongly resemble the jaws of unrelated toothed birds in size and shape, and were found in an area where other fossilized birds had been collected. They’d probably been mistaken as bird bones simply due to their size.

Field’s expertise with birds and prior experience with mosasaurs enabled him to identify a distinguishing bulge on the jawbone samples, a structure absent in prehistoric toothed birds. The jawbones belong to a species of mosasaur called Clidastes. Adult specimens have been found 9 feet in length, but these jawbones came from babies no more than 12 inches long. 

Fossils of baby mosasaurs have been found before, but all were etched and pitted as if by acid, indicating they’d been transported to their final resting places in the belly of a predator. The Yale bones showed no such evidence, meaning they’d died of other causes. Field’s discovery fills a puzzling gap in the fossil record.

“Direct evidence of baby mosasaurs in an open marine setting had not yet been found, which is surprising because they had turned up for other groups of marine reptiles,” Field says.

Because of their body structure, researchers had suspected that mosasaurs did not haul themselves out onto a beach to lay eggs, similar to how sea turtles reproduce. Fossilized remains of other prehistoric swimmers, the ichthyosaurs, have been found in the process of giving birth. Some modern relatives of mosasaurs, including monitor lizards and some species of snakes, also skip the eggs.

Why are baby mosasaur fossils rare? Fields points to a variety of likely reasons, including collection bias. Turn-of-the-century fossil hunters were more interested in large, fearsome skeletons for their museums’ collections. They possibly disregarded smaller bones as uninteresting. Also, small-bodied organisms often aren’t preserved as well in the fossil record, due to factors including predation, scavenging, or the bones being smashed and scattered before they can fossilize.

“These fossils have basically waited in the bowels of the Yale Peabody museum for their time to shine,” Field laughed. “People talk about the second round of fossil hunting—everybody knows that paleontologists go into field to dig stuff up, but fossil hunting in museum collections can lead to new insights, too.”  smithsonianscience.si.edu

Field reported his findings in a recent issue of the journal Palaeontology.

ET is a jedi

Lethal Interpersonal Violence in the Middle Pleistocene

Evidence of interpersonal violence has been documented previously in Pleistocene members of the genus Homo, but only very rarely has this been posited as the possible manner of death. Here we report the earliest evidence of lethal interpersonal violence in the hominin fossil record. Cranium 17 recovered from the Sima de los Huesos Middle Pleistocene site shows two clear perimortem depression fractures on the frontal bone, interpreted as being produced by two episodes of localized blunt force trauma. The type of injuries, their location, the strong similarity of the fractures in shape and size, and the different orientations and implied trajectories of the two fractures suggest they were produced with the same object in face-to-face interpersonal conflict. Given that either of the two traumatic events was likely lethal, the presence of multiple blows implies an intention to kill. This finding shows that the lethal interpersonal violence is an ancient human behavior and has important implications for the accumulation of bodies at the site, supporting an anthropic origin. PLOS

Fig 1. Stratigraphy of the Sima de los Huesos site (modified from Arsuaga et al. [21]).

The hominin bones were recovered in Lithostratigraphic Unit 6 (LU-6) dated to c. 430ka [21]. This unit is composed of pure red clays, filtering into the conduit system from overlying soils with little or no lateral transport, and very low velocity of sedimentation (decantation by dripping water) [23]. The figure also shows a detailed image of Cr-17 during its excavation at the site. Note the pure red clay that covers the cranial bones (partially cleaned in situ to enhance visualization) and the typical in situ postmortem (fossil diagenetic) fractures of the cranial vault. Photo credit: Javier Trueba (Madrid Scientific Films).

The skull in question was found at a site in Spain called Sima de los Huesos, or the Pit of the Bones, and it contained remains of 28 individuals. Quam said their presence there was intentional. "The only explanation that we have that can not be rejected is the idea that the human bodies arrived at this place by other humans," Quam told NPR. npr

bugs for dinner- more sustainable than meat

In the last couple of years, we've detected a faint buzz about crispy crickets and crunchy mealworms. Companies pedaling scorpion lollipops and peanut butter-and-jelly protein bars made with cricket flour have thrust their wares into our hands and mailboxes.

It's truly gotten easier to snack on bugs, should you want to do so. And everyone from the earnest eco-entrepreneurs in towns like Austin and Boulder, to international luminaries like Kofi Annan to the Food and Agriculture Organization are raving about how sustainable bugs are compared to meat.

But that doesn't mean the Western world, which doesn't have much of a history of entomophagy, is biting. Much.

Ophelia Deroy, a British researcher, tells The Salt most Westerners she has surveyed in randomized studies say they've hardly ever eaten insects in their life. And in a short column published Wednesday in Nature, she explains her hunch as to why the call to eat insects for nutritional and environmental reasons isn't being widely heeded yet.

Policymakers and the media have assumed that Westerners are disgusted by bugs because we associate them with contamination and disease. So the focus has been on trying to convert the uninitiated by making an environmental case for insect cuisine, and by noting that 2 billion people in around 100 countries (like Thailand) already enjoy many different insects in a range of dishes, Deroy writes.

Instead, Deroy argues, "We should think less about combating disgust and more about appealing to taste."

Sushi entrepreneur Peter Yung makes an Insectopia Roll at the Future Food Salon in Austin, Texas, in February 2014. A British researcher writes that chefs and others must "make insect dishes appeal as food, not just a way to save the planet."

So what does that mean? Well, Deroy, who's at the Centre for the Study of the Senses at the University of London, thinks it's about making the experience of eating them more enjoyable and less scary. For her, that happened when she tried crickets sprayed with a "beautiful golden dust" on the side of a salad.

It's true that many insects may not be especially enticing at a sensory level, at least at first: They're dry, and their wings and legs may crumble strangely in your mouth.

But there are other ways around this that don't involve visual seduction with gold dust. Last summer, we attended an event called the "Pestaurant" that featured turkey burgers with ground-up and whole grasshoppers. As we reported, the burgers were juicy and full of flavor, thanks, in part, to a brilliant secret ingredient: duck fat. We watched as many skeptics gobbled the burgers, clearly happy to accept the unfamiliar addition to the succulent dish.

Entomophagists agree that bugs will need some culinary champions to really go big.

"Chefs (and their celebrity diners) will have to play a leading role in making crickets (or any other edible insects) attractive and desirable, in the same way that California chefs turned dangerous and disgusting raw fish into sushi, the dish of Hollywood elites," Robert Nathan Allen, founder of Little Herds, a group that's working to grow the market for edible bugs, tells The Salt in an email.

Deroy thinks some insects could also stand to be re-named, a la the Chilean sea bass (formerly Patagonian toothfish). And indeed, there have been efforts to rename locusts "sky prawns" to make them more appetizing.

"And we should not forget those with a sweet tooth: many insects lend themselves naturally to desserts," she writes.

Bee ice cream, maybe? There's got to be more to insect sweets than those scorpion lollipops, which are not going to be for everyone.

"Appealing to logic and morality only gets you so far," says Allen. "We need to make it desirable and affordable before we can hope to change the minds (and tastebuds) of the average American. "