Agrosoma placetis is one of the most remarkable sharpshooters I have ever met. #cicadellidae #insects #arthropods #CostaRica #CentralAmerica #leafhopper #sharpshooter #rainforest #biodiversity #critter #insectagram #insectsofinstagram #insectsofig #leaf #colors #abstractart #evolution
The six spotted tiger beetles are having a great spring. They are frantic little predators. #cicindela #arthropods #arthropodsanonymous #tigerbeetle #nature #spring #iridescent #coleoptera #illinois #forest #biodiversity #predator #insects #insectagram #insectsofinstagram
I now know why they call these insects “hanging thieves.” After they catch their prey, these flies perch by one or two of their legs and using the rest to manipulate the meal. Their larvae live in the soil, feeding on grubs. No insect is safe with these predators around. #inthegarden #diptera #arthropods #damselfly #hangingthief #odonate #beneficialbugs #nativeplants #garden #gardener #gardenersworld #predatorandprey #predator #hunting #biodiversity #ecology
I’m not the biggest fan of spiders (to my shame), but I just can’t help but smile at the happy face spider. Endemic to the Hawaiian archipelago, these cheerful arachnids were named for the markings on their abdomens, bearing semblance to a smiling human face. The name can be a bit misleading though as the species has several morphs across the archipelago, some of which look very different to their namesake.
During the trip to southeast Queensland, Australia, taken by the University of California (Berkeley) grad student and a friend, the brilliant sparklemuffin(Maratus jactatus) wasn’t the only new peacock spider they discovered (and subsequently shamed named), so allow me to present to you skeletorus! Given the name for the males’ eerily bonelike white-on-black markings, the almost entirely (save for the fetching flecks of blue on the abdomen) monochrome skeletorus is an anomaly among peacock spiders (Maratus), which were named for the males’ colourful patterning and courtship displays, resembling those of male peafowl.
If you’re not a fan of arachnids, then you obviously haven’t seen sparklemuffinbefore! For reasons you can figure out yourself, sparklemuffin was the nickname created Madeline Girard (a graduate student at the University of California), who also discovered the species.
I’m not actually sure why the more-modest plump bush-cricket (I swear that sounds even more ridiculous every time I write it) was given the name, but you can have a guess by checking out the other members Isophyagenus. Commonly known as the plump bush-crickets (possibly because of their rather short and rotund morphology compared to other bush-crickets), the genus currently contains 39 species according to the IUCN, including the modest plump bush-cricket (Isophya modesta). Since it’s pretty unlikely that these two species are just particularly polite, we can assume that they were probably named for their relative inconspicuousness; especially to the showy plump bush-cricket (Isophya speciosa) which (as you can see for yourself) certainly has a lot more going on, but I think both our modest plump-bush crickets look lovely just as they are.
Fun Fact: They are called hangingflies because they often hang from surfaces by their front legs. The scorpion-tail-like appendage is actually the male reproductive organ.
tarantula hawk wasps when they see a tarantula: omg… hii… would you be mad if i paralyzed you using my venom and laid my eggs inside u would u still like me if my newborn spawn hatched inside your living body and slowly ate their way out? just wondering…
Mantis shrimp (which aren’t a shrimp but a “stomatopod” which are more closely related to krill) have 12 types of color receptors in their eyes compared to our measly 3 receptors. We used to think this meant they could see a whole range of dazzling colors beyond our comprehension.
Some people were (rightfully) jealous.
However, it turns out that mantis shrimp probably have so many color receptors because they don’t blend colors the way we do. When you look at something purple, your red and blue receptors are strongly stimulated while your green receptors are not and your brain synthesizes this information into purple. When a mantis shrimp looks at something purple, they have a specific purple receptor that is stimulated.
Why this weird system? Probably because it is faster and more efficient. Mantis shrimp need to distinguish between prey species and react extremely quickly (some species can punch 50x faster than the blink of an eye), so they don’t have time to do the mental calculations to blend colors.
Not only is the Forbidden Shrimp Color Knowledge a sham, but mantis shrimp can actually see fewer colors than we can because they can’t distinguish as many shades between colors. They also can’t see those cursed Imaginary Colors.
A lot of people reblogging this seem to think I’m somehow denigrating the mantis shrimp. Not so!
Although the “hundreds of colors humans couldn’t even imagine because they have 12 types of color receptors” thing isn’t really true, mantis shrimp do have incredible visual systems and they can see some kinds of light that are inaccessible to us lowly primates (like ultraviolet and polarized light–including circularly polarized light which no other animal can see).
Mantis shrimp also have “hexnocular vision” which means their eyes can calculate depth perception independently of each other with three points of comparison each (compared to our binocular vision with requires both eyes to get any depth perception).
In fact, the visual system of mantis shrimp is so unique and complex that scientists have used it as inspiration to improve upon technologies like satellites and tools to diagnose cancer. Here’s a clip from the lab involved in “debunking” the Forbidden Shrimp Colors (spoiler: they are clearly still supremely impressed with mantis shrimp vision).
Further information if you’re a stomatopod nerd like me: (1) (2)
“Conservation-induced extinction” is certainly a strange term. Isn’t the entire point of conservation to preventextinction?
Let’s start with the venerated conservation success story of the California condor. In 1987 there were only 22 California condors left in existence, and all 22 birds were brought into human care for the purpose of starting a captive breeding program that would eventually save the species from extinction.
As part of bringing the last California condors into human care, all 22 birds underwent anti-parasitic treatment. As a direct result, in the spring of 1987, Colpocephalum californici–a unique species of louse known to only host on the California condor–was driven to extinction.
It bears mentioning that this extinction was a result of negligence, not intentional destruction; it simply did not occur to the people running the California Condor Recovery Plan to account for parasite conservation. There is no evidence that the California condor louse was harmful to its host or that driving it to extinction was in any way helpful to the captive breeding program.
Now at this point you may be thinking, “Oh, well it was only a parasite, I don’t really care if they go extinct”. However, if you subscribe to the ecological notion that every scrap of biodiversity is precious, why is the California condor louse any less valuable than the California condor?
Beyond the intrinsic value of a species, parasites make up an inextricable part of a host species’ biology. Without them, part of the host’s ecological context is lost forever. For example, scientists estimate that less than half of the cells in a human body are actual human cells; the rest are part of our microbiome. To cleanse ourselves of those other organisms would be to remove half of what makes up the human organism–we would be killing off vital co-passengers that contribute to our immune systems, digestion, and other critical functions.
For thousands of years the louse and the condor–and their evolutionary predecessors before them–impacted each others’ evolutionary trajectories like comets caught in each others’ orbit. The California condor would not be the species it is today without the influence of its now extinct louse. Its future trajectory may be more wobbly and unstable as a result of the louse’s extinction.
Some scientists estimate that nearly half of all species on Earth could be parasites in at least one stage of their lives. Failing to conserve parasites would cost us a huge amount of biodiversity. We would also lose scientific knowledge on the evolutionary history of both parasite and host, we would have less healthy ecosystems, and we would see genetic diversity and fitness atrophy in host species (which is of particular relevance to critically endangered species).
Already, conservation-induced extinction has cost us at least four high profile species other than the California condor louse; these were host-specific parasites from the Guam rail, little spotted kiwi, scimitar horned oryx, and Iberian lynx. As more and more species require the help of captive breeding programs, this will only become a larger issue.
We may not like parasites–they may annoy us or make our skin crawl–but they are an important part of our ecosystems and a vital aspect of biodiversity. They deserve to be conserved alongside their hosts, both for their benefit and for the benefit of their hosts.
“The conservation of parasites might well be an essential part of the conservation of their hosts. Thus, if the goal of conservation is to maintain biodiversity, as well as the ecological and evolutionary processes that generate and sustain it, then parasites must also be conserved for their host’s sake.“ (Spencer, H., Zuk, M., 2016, For Host’s Sake: The Pluses of Parasite Preservation)
Hi, sorry I haven’t been posting much lately. Have this pixel art I made today. It’s a trio of asian beetles, alongside the year an established population was identified in the United States. The style is very purposefully reminiscent of a pinned insect collection. I originally intended to add pins, in fact, but these species are small enough that accurately sized pins obscured them more than I wanted. Regardless, I hope you enjoy!
PHOBIA SAFE (no real creatures shown in post itself) with clickable source links for every single fact!
Arthropods are wonderful amazing living things, but often poorly appreciated. This post dispels some common arthropod myths, but also collects some generally cool, fun or surprising facts!
Some people don’t like looking at arthropods, and I won’t pretend to get it, but they still deserve cool and (to the best of my ability) accurate facts, so there will be no real photos in this post. It’s also extremely long, so I’ve put a cut after the first few items! I apologize if any links change or go down, and will fix them when possible.
First: “Bugs” ARE animals. An animal can really be as simple as a jellyfish or a sea sponge, but Arthropods are on the more complex side of the animal kingdom with such familiar adaptations as legs, eyes, muscle tissue, neural cells, egg-laying and more. Possibly only rivaled by nematode worms, they may also represent the majority of animal life in terms of both species and actual biomass, making arthropods the foremost representatives of what constitutes an animal.
Wasps are at least as important as bees. Wasps can pollinate almost all the same flowers, even if it’s with slightly less efficiency, but many plants also attract wasps alone for pollination, and wasps pull additional duty regulating every food web that involves insects at all.
Mosquitoes are also necessary, sorry. The viral claim that “scientists” have “proven” them to be useless is a misunderstanding of one researcher’s opinion that it would be safe to eradicate one variety of mosquito from a limited area. All over the world, mosquitoes are a massive part of the nutrient cycle, and little else could multiply as rapidly in the same range of conditions if they were to go missing.
Ants and bees are effectively just specialized wasps themselves, together forming the order Hymenoptera along with the less famous “sawflies.” You can think of ants as super-social, super-successful subterranean wasps for having evolved from the same ancestors.
Fireflies are carnivorous beetles, which feed primarily on slugs and snails during their larval stages. In some species, adult female fireflies also prey on the males of other fireflies, imitating their light signals as a lure.
Termites are cockroaches. Totally unrelated to ants despite their very similar lifestyles, termites were always considered closely related to roaches but were more recently proven to actually just be very oddball roaches themselves. There are even some highly social wood-eating cockroaches that bridge the evolutionary gap, still alive today.
If you like paleontology and zoology etc. like and reblog this post for a a chance to win one of these packs! Each pack comes with 5 individual cards with 24 different animals/ plant designs! I will select winners using a randomizer. Good luck!
I will only be shipping out to US, CA, UK, AUS, EU, SA.
If you like paleontology and zoology etc. like and reblog this post for a a chance to win one of these packs! Each pack comes with 5 individual cards with 24 different animals/ plant designs! I will select winners using a randomizer. Good luck!
I will only be shipping out to US, CA, UK, AUS, EU, SA.
Today, we’re going back to the Carboniferous period! If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might remember Westlothiana, a little amphibian and/or reptile* that looked a little like a lizard. As I said back then, vertebrates were only just getting started on land. They were mostly small, skittering animals. Arthropods, though, were a different case. They first arrived on land in the Silurian period, almost 60 million years before fish took their first soggy, awkward steps onto land. Arthropods were the first animals in earth’s history to fly, and had set up shop pretty firmly by the Carboniferous period.
The earth was wetter and covered in rainforests back then. There was also a lot more oxygen in the air. Insects and other arthropods have very simple respiratory systems. Air flows into their bodies through openings in their exoskeletons called spiracles, then makes its way into the air sacs and distributed accordingly. This is all I know about arthropod breathing. But, this system is much less efficient than the one seen in vertebrates. It puts a size cap on terrestrial arthropods. If they get too big, the air can’t flow through their bodies, and they can’t breathe. But, in the Carboniferous, arthropods were able to get HUGE, thanks to the increased oxygen content of the air. And Eophrynus is… not one of them.
No,Eophrynus is around an inch long (2.5cm, for you non-yanks). It’s a little arachnid from the late Carboniferous. It’s is a Trigonotarbid, an order of arachnids that lived from the late Silurian until the early Permian. They were closely-related to spiders, but slightly more archaic. They were shaped similarly, but didn’t make silk, and their front pair of limbs—called pedipalps—weren’t modified into claws or pincers. Also, there’s no evidence they used them to deliver sperm into females, which is apparently something spiders have been doing for a while.
It’s a little hard to say exactly how closely or distantly they were related. Arachnids are hard to sort phylogenetically, partially because they all share a very similar body plan. We can usually say if they’re closer to spiders or scorpions, but we haven’t quite figured out much beyond that. We have theories, sure, but it’s not quite set in stone. Well, it’s the fossil record, so, it’s… You know what I mean.
Anyway, like most arachnids, Eophrynus was a predator. It lived on the forest floor, and used its long legs to chase down other, smaller arthropods. But, of course, being a tiny arthropod, it was probably eaten by small amphibians and reptiles. Its abdomen was lined with protective spikes in an attempt to keep this from happening, but let’s be real, if something wants to eat you badly enough, it will. Look at Koalas and Eucalyptus, or Mongooses and venomous snakes. Animals are buckwild.
That’s our animal for today! I’ve talked about invertebrates a few times on this blog, but they’ve always been marine. Marine invertebrates are my favorite group of animals, and I think my bias has been a little clear here.
And, I’ll talk about giant Carboniferous insects soon, I promise. I like them, too. I just want to give the lesser-known, more mundane animals their time to shine, too.
*Mspaleoart drinking game: take a shot every time I mention how wack taxonomy is
i used to work at a used bookstore and there was an insect anatomy book for sale that was over $8000 im not even kidding. and i just found it at my school library. its mine for the month.
It’s page after page of the most detailed illustration on insect morphology I’ve ever seen
External anatomy only I’m afraid, but an absolutely invaluable resource nonetheless
It’s called An Atlas of Insect Morphology by Steinmann and Zombori. Looks like there are some much cheaper options now than when I last looked. When I saw it in the bookstore’s system I thought it was a pricing error but I remember looking it up and seeing one for sale that was over $10,000 so I was like okay then. I could only find pdfs from university libraries I don’t have access too. So I’m glad my school has a physical copy.
Idk if I can describe how useful this book is. It’s all illustration. The only text is the labels. I have a really nice book on insect anatomy but it’s like your classic textbook
Like very useful but it is still a pain to flip through a thousand page book looking for images but it’s mostly text. There aren’t nearly as many diagrams. It doesn’t show you nearly as many angles. It doesn’t show or label even close to level of detail the one above does.
In case anyone hasn’t read my tags: I’m going to scan this whole book and make it into a pdf. You all can have it for free. It will take a while. Bear with me.
