Sleeping Cat and Butterflies (Japanese 19th Century)

A Book of Insects. Written by Charles Paul May. Illustrated by John Crosby. 1972.

A Book of Insects. Written by Charles Paul May. Illustrated by John Crosby. 1972.

I just found out there is a crab that looks like a pancake and now the world seems brighter.

I'm actually gonna cry over these crabs.....

In case anyone was curious what they looked like!

GRABBY PATTIES

an entomologist rates ant emojis

Beautiful big almond eye, realistic and full of expression as she gazes gently at you. Elbowed antennae and delicately segmented legs and body. Gorgeous pearlescent sheen like she is glowing. This ant moisturizes. This ant is round and huggable. This ant is a star. 11/10.

Beautifully detailed, lifelike pose but with an unexpected neck and odd antennae, perhaps scared straight. Her eyes suggest she has seen things. Her expression confirms she has seen too much. She is haunted and I want to know more. 7/10.

Floppy antenna, pointy muppet face, oddly posed legs. What is she? She has no waist. May be she is some kind of bee in disguise? I find her unsettling. 3/10.

This ant has an unexplained, double-jointed thorax, and no evidence of a waist. Her four-footed pose suggests that she a centaur rather than an ant. Centaur ants would be cool. I’m not sure what was intended here. 2/10.

Good first impression, kind of bland in the details. This ant has no particular waist to speak of, floppy rather than elbowed antennae, and an inexpressive face. Her color scheme is soft and hazy. I like the sharp angles of her stylishly sophisticated legs. This ant may not know quite were she is going, but she knows how she is getting there. 6/10.

Were you even trying. 0/10

Gasp! This ant is elegant. This ant has a beautiful tapered thorax, a segmented abdomen, alert, elbowed antennae, and a light-footed pose. This ant’s face suggests curiosity and a desire to explore the world. This ant inspires me. I want to be like her. 10/10

3-legged, waistless centaur-ant with strange, limp antennae and a beak. I don’t know what this is? It kind of reminds me of a Hork-Bajir. 1/10, not an ant.

This ant… makes me sad. All of her legs are broken. The MS Paint art style and gradient abuse convey distress. She has a duck beak. Despite this, her expression suggests perseverance and determined cheerfulness. I want this ant to have a better life. I am rooting for her. 3/10

This ant is a bold and challenging mixture of photorealism and caricature. She is broad and low-built and seems very sturdy. She looks like she would help you move. This ant is a dependable friend. 9/10

A picture of an ant from a children’s book.  She is wearing little boots.  This ant is wrong in every way, and yet I can’t stay mad at her.  7/10

An interesting, top-down view of an ant; her legs are positioned with slightly jarring symmetry.  Nevertheless, her overall impression is that of a graceful, stylized design, like a pictograph.  She is suitable for adorning fine garments and jewelry or perhaps gracing the walls of a tiny ant church.  I like this minimalist ant.  8/10.

This is a termite. -10/10

why are these all marked as “she”? don’t female ants have wings??? why bother adding the pronoun???

Alates (male and female reproductives) have wings. The queens shed their wings after they mate. The males die. The daughter workers do not have wings. If you see an ant without wings, it’s a she.

And honestly—why bother panicking about things being called “she”? It’s not like I need a reason to gender a bug. I do it all the time. It’s fun. It’s humanizing. They don’t care.

I’m calling this spider she right now. 🕷️ her name is delanie. she’s a lesbian.

This post was such a delightful trip from beginning to end.

Callophrys rubi / La Thècle de la ronce / l’Argus vert

Mai 2019.

Causse Méjean, France.

Sometimes when I’m birdwatching

Fifteen months ago the hills above Carpinteria burned. Last Sunday I hiked up the Franklin Trail before dawn; this is what it looked like.

So today started out dumb, but this afternoon was AWESOME.

I’m on the porch attempting to construct a railing for the stairs when I notice a weird noise. Like, a kind of droning or buzzing? And it’s getting loud. So I investigate. It’s coming from the neighbor’s yard. 

It is a metric fuckton of bees. I have never seen so many bees in my life. It is a fucking swarm of bees, and I have been reading about bees because I got a wild hair a few weeks back about wanting a hive of my own, but haven’t yet convinced Husbandthing, and there is suddenly a SWARMING HERD OF WILD HONEYBEES IN THE NEIGHBOR’S YARD.

I see postings on the neighborhood page all the time for feral swarm collection, but I also know the guy in the house across the alley just set up a hive. “Hey I think your hive escaped,” I text him. 

He calls me back about three minutes later. Turns out, the swarm he was supposed to get never came; the company went out of business and his order got cancelled, and he’d found out HALF AN HOUR AGO. And he says he’s got a friend who is a professional beekeeper, and he’s going to go pick her up and would it be okay if they came and got this swarm please please please?

So Bee Neighbor and Professional Beekeeper show up and immediately don bee suits. Apparently there is fierce competition for feral swarms, and the swarm in the neighbor’s tree is HUGE, and also twenty feet off the ground, and Bee Neighbor wants them very badly. 

The tree the bees are in is in a yard belonging to neither of us, so we go knock on the door, but there’s no answer. I knock on the house adjacent to it, but that guy’s not home either. Finally, I text the neighbor on the other side of me to see if he’s got contact info for the property owner, who is incredibly shy and in three years has never made eye contact. No luck. 

So…we trespass. We get my extension ladder, and Bee Neighbor climbs the tree while Professional Beekeeper stands on the ladder and walks him through the swarm collection. Turns out, you just shake the swarm into a box, and as long as the queen makes it into the box, the rest of the swarm will eventually follow. Bee Neighbor has never collected a swarm before (this is, in fact, his very first swarm of bees ever) and it takes the two of them the better part of an hour in the tree trying to shake the swarm into the box. 

Bees eventually get into the box. Bee Neighbor gets out of the tree without dying, and Professional Beekeeper examines the swarm and makes pleased noises. At this point, the box is the neighbor’s driveway, and about two thirds of the swarm is still milling around the box all confused. Since the neighbor isn’t home and we can’t contact him, he risks coming and parking right in the middle of a huge cloud of bees. Professional Beekeeper doesn’t want to move the box too far away, because we risk the milling bees losing the queen’s scent and never going into the box. An equidistant point between the current location and Bee Neighbor’s yard is the top of my recycling bin. 

So they put the box of bees on my recycling bin, and I text Husbandthing.

Now I have a box of bees that I am babysitting. They’re being all lazy and dopey and bumbling around. I think I might be in love. Bee Neighbor will pick the box up later tonight and put them in his hive, and then the bees will be MY neighbors too!!

THIS HAS BEEN THE BEST DAY EVER

#beekeeping #also we left a note on the absent neighbor’s door #hi sorry we trespassed #but as you can see from your security cam footage #there was a giant cloud of bees #and we came and got them #we figured you did not want a yard full of bees #and we will love them #yours very sincerely #the friendly neighborhood bee team [Tags by @sacrificethemtothesquid]

every autumn, tens of millions of monarch butterflies travel to their ancestral winter roosts in mexico’s mountain fir forests, coating the trunks of the trees in the orange of their wings, and causing the branches to droop under their collective weight.

surfing winds from southern canada and the northern united states, and taking directional cues from the sun and magnetic poles, they travel 4,500 kilometres over two months to reach their hibernation grounds – a feat that still remains a bit of a mystery, but which has been going on for millions of years. 

interestingly, the autumn migration south is accomplished in one generation, which lives for about seven months, while the spring migration north is done over three generations, each living about six weeks.

last year’s migration, however, was the lowest on record, as excessive herbicide usage has reduced the supply of the milkweed plant which the monarch larvae rely on to feed, and which makes the monarch caterpillars toxic to predators. but the plant is now being destroyed from heavy use of roundup ready pesticides used in soy and corn crop production. 

further complicating matters for the monarch is climate change, as drought along their migratory route has exacerbated milkweed decline, and colder spring temperatures has meant the temperature-sensitive cold-blooded butterflies are unable to begin their journey north.

and once they reach their hibernation sites in mexico, the butterflies, which rely on a thick forest canopy for protection from the cold and rain, encounter deteriorating forests from illegal logging.

experts, however, are hopeful that this year’s migration will double or triple, thanks in large part to the conservation efforts of the mexican government. nevertheless, this increase would still put monarch numbers at one tenth of their record high of one billion.

photos by (click pic) joel sartore, paul bettings, lincoln brower, thomas d mengelsen, and ingo arndt