Showing posts with label bug. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bug. Show all posts

Saturday, March 29, 2025

Nightmare fuel

@eenabobeena

biggest nightmare came true

♬ original sound - kareena
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Friday, December 13, 2024

Disturbingly-long-necked weevils








Bonus uncanny bug shapes:





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Monday, June 24, 2024

Golden veil made of bee wings, sourced from beekeepers who lost their hives due to a harsh winter






Her slide show about the veil. Bonus necklaces (some jewelry is for sale):


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Tuesday, November 7, 2023

Los Angeles will drop millions of sterile fruit flies to try to prevent an infestation

NYT:

“It’s really important to get on top of this fast,” noting that while the department had found just three flies, “there’s probably more.”

To combat what the department called an “infestation,” officials have quarantined a 69-square-mile area surrounding the neighborhood. They’ve also urged gardeners to consume the produce they grow only at home, and told people to double bag any fruit scraps before putting them into the trash. Officials said they planned to drop around 250,000 sterile male flies per square mile each week into the area near where the wild flies were found.

...

The barren males are bred at labs in Hawaii and Guatemala (where the pest is already present), and as pupae are dyed pink or orange to distinguish them from fertile flies. Each week, more than 200 million of the fluorescent insects are shipped to Los Alamitos, Calif., for distribution. After being carefully incubated, and later, fed a diet of sugar, water and an algae derivative, the adult flies are then loaded into planes with “release chutes” that evenly distribute them.

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Thursday, May 4, 2023

When your flight gets massively delayed because there's bees on the wing



A few more from the long thread:

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Monday, March 13, 2023

Cordyceps balloon art



A couple more clever creations:
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Tuesday, January 24, 2023

"Vulture Bees Prefer Rotting Flesh Over Pollen"

From a Smithsonian article aggregating a bunch of other articles:
Most bees also have saddle bag–like structures on their legs for carrying pollen, but vulture bees have much smaller leg baskets, which they use for carrying meat back to their hives. To gather their hauls, vulture bees have a unique set of teeth they use to slice bits of meat. Once in the hive, the vulture bees store the meat chunks in small pods, leave them there for two weeks to cure, and then feed it to their larvae
Wikipedia with a vivid description of the gathering technique:
Vulture bees, much like maggots, usually enter the carcass through the eyes. They will then root around inside gathering the meat suitable for their needs. The vulture bee salivates on the rotting flesh and then consumes it, storing the flesh in its crop

 The image below is from this entry:




And speaking of weird bugs:

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Wednesday, July 27, 2022

Dead spiders are the "perfect architecture" for "necrobotics"

An article summarizing a press release from Rice University:

Spiders differ from humans in that they use hydraulics to move about. Their limbs extend as a result of the internal valves in the spider's hydraulic chamber near their heads contracting to send blood to the limbs and once the pressure is gone, the legs contract.

...

Researchers at Rice University deliver air to reach the legs so it could extend them and grip objects - and turns out that with this manipulation the deceased wolf spiders can pick up objects that outweigh them in what has been described as "necrobotics." 

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Friday, April 15, 2022

Scientists were trying to eradicate the murder hornets, but the owner of the land was trying to sell queens on ebay

NatGeo:

They set up more live traps, catching a total of four insects, and acquired new tracking tags .... On October 22, they affixed one of these tags to a female worker with floss and fed her strawberry jelly. Satiated, she took off.

[The scientists] followed in the general direction that the hornet flew, using radio-transmitters that issued audible pings when aimed at the tag. The noises directed them into thick woods and blackberry brambles.

Soon, they found the hive—not in the ground, as expected, but about eight feet up in an alder tree.

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But [the scientists] soon learned of a snag. [T]he man who owned the land where the nest was found, wanted it and almost all the hornets back. Legally, the state had to oblige. 

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In March 2021, a listing on eBay appeared advertising “murder hornet” queens for sale from the “first ever nest found in Washington State.” When I saw it, I thought it was a scam, but it wasn’t: [The owner of the land] was seeking to make some money from the nest that appeared on his land

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Friday, January 7, 2022

Pollinator hotel; Extreme skateboarders; Good idea for a dating sim







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Wednesday, October 27, 2021

It's cricket fighting season in China, and "elite fighters can end up being worth a small fortune"

NPR on how the best fighters climb the ranks to reach televised glory:

Here's how the game works. Two crickets — always males — are weighed to the closest hundredth of a gram and then paired off by weight class like prizefighters. They are placed in a clear plastic ring nearly the size of a dinner plate, with a dividing wall separating the two insects. A referee signals go time, then slides out the ring divider to let the bugs face off.

The owners poke a special reed in to lightly brush their crickets, which goads them into fighting. The critters lunge and swipe their pincer-like mandibles at each other. A referee closely monitors the tiny combatants, noting the number of attacks and retreats.

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They are precious enough that their owners never let them fight to the death, and injuries are rare.

Vice posted a documentary a few years ago:

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Thursday, August 19, 2021

T-shirt honoring Max Muncy enduring the laser attack; Cloud Storage sculpture; Goth bee









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Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Collaborative sculpture with bees; Shinjuku's giant 3d cat display; An AI illustrates a hacker



(San Francisco is currently hosting the sculpture.)



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Wednesday, June 9, 2021

Meaningful candy spills; Cosmic dung beetle; Lego dragon


(Also, his "placebo."











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