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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Aug 15, 2013 - 12:43pm PT
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G_Gnome
Trad climber
who gave up and just goes sailing now!
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Aug 15, 2013 - 02:54pm PT
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No, Mouse's picture is of a discarded casing from a Stonefly. They turn into these.
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Willoughby
Social climber
Truckee, CA
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Aug 15, 2013 - 07:37pm PT
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It's eclosion day (days?) for my tiger beetle pupa. Maybe I'll try to take some photos. Not too pretty though - kind of mostly-still-in-the-old-skin mess at the moment. But it's got the legs moving, which is pretty cool to see, and the back is split at the head, and the top of the noggin' is free and clear. It just blows my feeble little mind how they rearrange almost all of their cells from larva to adult.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Aug 15, 2013 - 08:51pm PT
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The helgrammite, you say!
Grampa Ed called 'em evaporator or evaporated bugs. What's his game? He was a edumacated man and a whiz with the rod.
You think it's hereditary, mis-nomering critters?
I figgered it for a stone McFlyy, having a future, but doomed to endless sequels.
And then a trout ate me.
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dirt claud
Social climber
san diego,ca
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 19, 2013 - 05:58pm PT
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Aug 19, 2013 - 06:06pm PT
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Claud, HaHaHaHa! So it was a dark and stormy night. OK, it was only dark.
We were walking down a dirt road near Vancouver. I can't tell you where or
I'd have to come after you. Jeff, a hard man, had to take a pee. I don't
to this day know why he had to step off a dirt road in the dark to take a
pee. All of a sudden he comes running back screaming like a 13 year old girl.
"Geez, man, what happened?"
"Uh, I walked into a spider web. I went to wipe it off of my face and there
was a spider almost the size of my hand sitting on my face."
"Uh, OK, that's worth screaming about."
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Aug 22, 2013 - 08:47pm PT
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Hey, Ron, a new bug was discovered for you to lie awake at night thinking about!
Maybe you could get some to help you glue stuff together. ;-)
New Glue-Spitting Velvet Worm Found in Vietnam
By Douglas Main, Staff Writer EnvironmentNatureLiveScience
Small bugs of the rain forest have many things to worry about, assuming they are capable of anxiety. But surely some of their more feared predators are velvet worms, a group of ancient animals that spit an immobilizing, gluelike material onto prey before injecting them with saliva and chomping down.
It turns out the velvet worm family is more diverse than thought: A new species has been found in the jungles of Vietnam. Unlike related velvet worms, this species has uniquely shaped hairs covering its body. It reaches a length of 2.5 inches (6 centimeters), said Ivo de Sena Oliveira, a researcher at the University of Leipzig, Germany, who along with colleagues describes the species in Zoologischer Anzeiger (A Journal of Comparative Zoology).
The paper and related work by Oliveira suggest thousands of unknown species of these creatures are waiting to be found throughout the world's tropical rain forests, he said. Research by Oliveira in the Amazon rain forest alone suggests there may be one new species of velvet worm about every 15 miles (25 kilometers), he told LiveScience. [See Amazing Images of Creepy Acorn Worms]
Little-known glue-spitter
The animals are extremely difficult to find and little known, because they spend most of life hidden in moist areas in the soil, in rotting logs or under rocks, due in part to the fact that their permeable skin allows them to quickly dry out, Oliveira said. In some areas, "if you're not there at the right moment of the year, during the rainy season, you won't find them," he added. The rainy season is the one time of year this Vietnamese species exits the soil, he said.
Unlike arthropods (a huge group of animals that includes ants and spiders), velvet worms lack hard exoskeletons. Instead their bodies are fluid-filled, covered in a thin skin and kept rigid by pressurized liquid. This hydrostatic pressure allows them to walk, albeit very slowly, on fluid-filled, stubby legs that lack joints.
Slimed
Their slowness works to their advantage. To hunt, they sneak up on other insects or invertebrates. And that's when the sliming begins — velvet worms like the newfound species hunt by spraying a "net of glue" onto their prey from two appendages on their backs, Oliveira said. This nasty material consists of a mix of proteins that impedes movement. "The more the prey moves, the more it gets entangled," he said.
Oftentimes the velvet worms will eat any excess "glue," which is energetically costly to make. Although the animals have been shown to take down prey larger then themselves, they often choose smaller creatures, likely to ensure they don't waste their precious bodily fluids, Oliveira said.
Fossils show that velvet worms haven't changed much since they diverged from their relatives (such as the ancestors of arthropods and waterbears) about 540 million years ago, Oliveira said. Studies of velvet worms could help shed light on the evolution of arthropods, he added.
There are two families of velvet worm, one spread around the tropics, and another found in Australia and New Zealand. Members of the former group generally tend to be loners. But the other family may be more social. One 2006 study found that members of the species Euperipatoides rowelli can hunt in groups of up to 15, and that the dominant female eats first.
While it's not a surprise to find a new species of velvet worm, this is "great work by [these researchers] to actually characterize and name a new species from this region," said Nick Jeffery, a doctoral student at the University of Guelph who wasn't involved in the study.
The new species, Eoperipatus totoros, is the first velvet worm to be described from Vietnam, said Georg Mayer, a co-author and researcher at the University of Leipzig.
This species was first discovered and listed in a brief 2010 report by Vietnamese researcher Thai Dran Bai, but the present study is the first to describe the Vietnamese animal in detail, Oliveira said.
Email Douglas Main or follow him on Twitter or Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook or Google+. Article originally on LiveScience
Image Gallery: The Leggiest Millipede
New Species Gallery: Expedition into Suriname's Jungles
Images: One-of-a-Kind Places on Earth
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Glue Spitting Bug
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cowpoke
climber
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Aug 29, 2013 - 07:11pm PT
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dirt claud
Social climber
san diego,ca
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 13, 2013 - 01:51pm PT
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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This guy guards our front door.
You don't want him to say
"Thou shall not pass."
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Pepe Le Poseur
Social climber
Parts North
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Reilly and Dirt - Can relate to the spider stuff. Once, going up this gorgeous little mountain creek in Borneo, I came across this volleyball net of a web stretched across the creek. This thing looked like it was designed to catch birds, not bugs.
Saw the critter responsible, and was looking at it in awe (nearly size of my hand) when, like a genius, I decided to "f*ck" with it. I tapped the web to see what it would do....what it did was immediately drop from the web into the current and get washed up on my leg.
Talk about screaming and dancing like a girl. Always f#ck with large spiders from UPSTREAM.
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perswig
climber
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Oct 17, 2013 - 08:08am PT
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Dale
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justthemaid
climber
Jim Henson's Basement
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Oct 17, 2013 - 09:49am PT
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Not sure if anyone linked the story about the bizarre Ball's Pyramid insect they found they thought went extinct 80 years ago. I love this bug's story: (Edit- apologies if this has already been posted.. the stupid 4-letter word-rule here made it impossible to search)
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/02/24/147367644/six-legged-giant-finds-secret-hideaway-hides-for-80-years
(Edited version):
On Lord Howe, there used to be an insect, famous for being big. It's a stick insect, a critter that masquerades as a piece of wood, and the Lord Howe Island version was so large — as big as a human hand — that the Europeans labeled it a "tree lobster" because of its size and hard, lobsterlike exoskeleton. It was 12 centimeters long and the heaviest flightless stick insect in the world. Local fishermen used to put them on fishing hooks and use them as bait.
Then one day in 1918, a supply ship, the S.S. Makambo from Britain, ran aground at Lord Howe Island and had to be evacuated. ...It took nine days to repair the Makambo, and during that time, some black rats managed to get from the ship to the island, where they instantly discovered a delicious new rat food: giant stick insects. Two years later, the rats were everywhere and the tree lobsters were gone.
Totally gone. After 1920, there wasn't a single sighting. By 1960, the Lord Howe stick insect, Dryococelus australis, was presumed extinct.
There was a rumor, though....in 1960 climbers reported seeing corpses [on nearby island, Ball's Pyramid]...
...The only thing to do was to go back... Nick Carlile and a local ranger, Dean Hiscox, agreed to make the climb. And with flashlights, they scaled the wall till they reached the plant, and there, spread out on the bushy surface, were two enormous, shiny, black-looking bodies. And below those two, slithering into the muck, were more, and more ... 24 in all. All gathered near ONE plant.
...The Lord Howe Island stick insect, Dryococelus australis, once believed to be extinct, was found living under a small shrub high up Ball's Pyramid in 2001...
They were Dryococelus australis. A search the next morning, and two years later, concluded these are the only ones on Ball's Pyramid, the last ones. They live there, and, as best we know, nowhere else.
How they got there is a mystery. Maybe they hitchhiked on birds, or traveled with fishermen, and how they survived for so long on just a single patch of plants, nobody knows either. The important thing, the scientists thought, was to get a few of these insects protected and into a breeding program.
That wasn't so easy. The Australian government didn't know if the animals on Ball's Pyramid could or should be moved. There were meetings, studies, two years passed, and finally officials agreed to allow four animals to be retrieved. Just four.
When the team went back to collect them, it turned out there had been a rock slide on the mountain, and at first they feared that the whole population had been wiped out. But when they got back up to the site, on Valentine's Day 2003, the animals were still there, sitting on and around their bush.
The plan was to take one pair and give it a man who was very familiar with mainland walking stick insects, a private breeder living in Sydney. He got his pair, but within two weeks, they died.
Adam And Eve And Patrick
That left the other two. They were named "Adam" and "Eve," taken to the Melbourne Zoo and placed with Patrick Honan, of the zoo's invertebrate conservation breeding group. At first, everything went well. Eve began laying little pea-shaped eggs, exactly as hoped. But then she got sick. According to biologist Jane Goodall, :
"Eve became very, very sick. Patrick ... worked every night for a month desperately trying to cure her. ... Eventually, based on gut instinct, Patrick concocted a mixture that included calcium and nectar and fed it to his patient, drop by drop, as she lay curled up in his hand."
Her recovery was almost instant. Patrick , "She went from being on her back curled up in my hand, almost as good as dead, to being up and walking around within a couple of hours."
Eve's eggs were harvested, incubated (though it turns out only the first 30 were fertile) and became the foundation of the zoo's new population of walking sticks.
Original ST climbing thread about climbing on the island...worth a read as well:
http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/1031298/Balls-Pyramid
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dirt claud
Social climber
san diego,ca
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 17, 2013 - 02:21pm PT
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Great post Justthemaid, those things are crazy. That was a good story Pepe, LOL
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dirt claud
Social climber
san diego,ca
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 1, 2013 - 05:45pm PT
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survival
Big Wall climber
Terrapin Station
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Nov 12, 2013 - 11:43am PT
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Survival, the Hopper Whisperer! Very nice!
I doubt Mighty Hiker checks this, or any, thread any more but this one's for you, Mighty!
From the Life Is Strange Dept; waiting for the termite man I saw this
little guy/gal on my front window...
And just how does one palm vertical glass?
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dirt claud
Social climber
san diego,ca
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 26, 2013 - 05:14pm PT
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Nov 26, 2013 - 07:20pm PT
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Claud, that prolly happened in Aussieland where anything that bites you will
prolly kill you. A buddy of mine was visiting friends there and woke up in
his guest bedroom watching this spider spin this cool web in the corner near
his bed. He goes out for breakfast and starts telling them about it and
they all immediately ask,
"Is the web funnel shaped?"
A big stampede for the RAID ensued.
Found this little cutie while working on my deck.
He's all of an inch long but he was most uncooperative - all he wanted
to do was haul balls for some place dark.
This Tarantula Hawk Wasp was good sized, 1-1/4" body?
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