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Chinston Wurchill posted:Speaking of geese, 
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May 8, 2020 16:46
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Mak0rz posted:Jumping spiders are tiny eight-legged cats if all cats had big fangs and venom we would all have been eaten thousands of years ago
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May 8, 2020 16:46
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Mantis update: Sassy
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May 8, 2020 22:05
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poverty goat posted:if all cats had big fangs and venom we would all have been eaten thousands of years ago Cats could be considered venomous - they have protein in their saliva remarkably similar to the venom used defensively by slow loris. This protein is responsible for people's allergic reaction to cats and also means that wounds from their bites heal much slower and are prone to infection.
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May 8, 2020 22:54
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Stoner Sloth posted:remarkably similar to the venom used defensively by slow loris. In all seriousness, I had no idea that's a thing. It's really interesting... although I'm just amazed they're not from Australia.
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May 8, 2020 22:58
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Stoner Sloth posted:Cats could be considered venomous - they have protein in their saliva remarkably similar to the venom used defensively by slow loris. This protein is responsible for people's allergic reaction to cats and also means that wounds from their bites heal much slower and are prone to infection. I assume the levels of the protein would vary from cat to cat, as this would explain why I am very allergic to some cats but not others. My mom has one cat that if she just drools on me it will raise a welt, whereas her other cat I have no reaction to at all. This has been true for years, and aside from learning the hard way which cats I am allergic to there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it.
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May 9, 2020 05:39
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I found something new and interesting today! I have no idea what I am looking at here. I only realized it was a bug because I thought a little bit of leaf litter had gotten stuck on my garden furniture and tried to pull at it. Luckily, bug friend is unharmed and wandered off after deciding that I my camera was getting a bit too much into its personal space. Looks a little like a leaf-bug, except we don't even get those here. Really neat. As you can probably tell from the size of the weave on that chair, it wasn't very big, so that's as good a picture as I could make.   
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May 9, 2020 17:11
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I'm thinking that's a funky lacewing, possibly species Drepanepteryx phalaenoides. Might be worth submitting to iRecord or your local equivalent, very nice find!
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May 9, 2020 17:30
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vaguely posted:I'm thinking that's a funky lacewing, possibly species Drepanepteryx phalaenoides. Might be worth submitting to iRecord or your local equivalent, very nice find!
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May 9, 2020 17:32
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this friend and their very active pedipalps came to visit today:  what might they be, and are they best left alone or put safely outside? sacramento CA area. e: https://imgur.com/0XQW2Pw video Chard fucked around with this message at 02:05 on May 10, 2020 |
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May 10, 2020 01:58
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Cardiovorax posted:A venomous primate. Now I've seen everything. They are quite strange little animals! There are nine species of them that we know of. Frankly I agree, it's weird they're not from here but we make up for it by having the world's only venomous egg laying mammal I suppose! CaptainSarcastic posted:I assume the levels of the protein would vary from cat to cat, as this would explain why I am very allergic to some cats but not others. My mom has one cat that if she just drools on me it will raise a welt, whereas her other cat I have no reaction to at all. This has been true for years, and aside from learning the hard way which cats I am allergic to there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. I would imagine this is true - I suspect that there isn't much selection pressure to increase the amount of this protein but also since cats are mostly domesticated probably not much to get rid of it entirely. End result is naturally varying amounts of the protein in question based mostly on genetic drift. The evolution of venom is fascinating - it can probably evolve in any lineage pretty rapidly if there is advantage to it. This happens usually by a duplication of genes coding for a protein or peptide with the right sort of characteristics - water solubility being a main one. This gives a spare copy that can then mutate from the original purpose without causing the organism problems. Mostly this happens with defensins or else with 'house keeping' proteins such as insulin, blood clotting proteins or ones that effect neuronal function. Interestingly in the early stages (say the first 50-100 million years) of venom evolution, most of that evolution is diversification in which new, more toxic compounds evolve. This would include snakes and cone shells for example. In older venomous lineages, centipedes and cnidarians for example, what you see is more a 'purifying' evolution in which less effective variants are lost while more effective ones are retained. But the flip side is that venom also is usually metabolically expensive so in the wild there is a large amount of pressure to get rid of it. This can be pretty extreme and total when it happens - the marbled sea snake is a good example: having evolved to prey exclusively on fish eggs they not only lost their venom but also their venom glands and even their fangs! Chard posted:this friend and their very active pedipalps came to visit today: Jumping spider imo - the way it moves and those two big front facing eyes tend to suggest it - if so quite safe to have around and probably capable of find its own way outside. Very cute little critters and good friends to humanity!
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May 10, 2020 02:17
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i'll let them go in a kitchen corner then; i remember reading that some 'house' spiders actually want to be outside
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May 10, 2020 02:25
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Chard posted:i'll let them go in a kitchen corner then; i remember reading that some 'house' spiders actually want to be outside That is true - my experience of jumping spiders is that they'll generally come and go as they please cause they're very good at solving visual puzzles (better than many mammals!) so they can usually find their way back outside anyway. Also helps their case that they are small and don't need to eat that much plus they are often fairly pretty and something about their big eyed faces make people less scared of them than most spiders. Your little guy or gal there has some nice patterning going on! My old house used to get dozens of big hairy wolf spiders (and the occasional brown trapdoor spider) wandering in when it got to the rainy season and those definitely need to be brought back outside cause they won't be able to find prey or shelter inside. Poor buggers are also kind of an arachnophobes worst nightmare cause they are fast and jumpy as well as perhaps not the most charismatic individuals but, like any spider, they really don't mean us any harm so I always would just get a bit of paper and a bottle and take them outside once the rains had calmed down. You gotta be a bit watchful with them though cause sometimes you'll get a female covered in hundreds or thousands of babies and you got to be a bit careful to make sure they don't disperse so that the smol spider friends are safe too!
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May 10, 2020 02:53
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I should probably do more research but I pretty much operate intuitively when it comes to deciding if a spider is indoors-appropriate or needs to go outside or probably starve. At my last house I had a kitchen spider for over a year who was a little badass - watching her immobilize and dispatch a crane fly many times her size was awesome.
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May 10, 2020 03:33
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Jumping spiders tend to do surprisingly well indoors, in my personal experience. I've got this little jumper who lives on my front door, has been there for ages now. He just wanders around and eats little fruit flies and such as they bump up against the glass. The area has been getting liberally sprinkled with dead bodies for years and there's always a jumper around, if not necessarily the same one, so I'd say it manages to eat well.
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May 10, 2020 08:10
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So, uh. Three mallards just waddled up the side walk near where I live, whereupon one of them laid an egg.
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May 10, 2020 08:16
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Deliveries are a bit chaotic with the pandemic, so the storks are doing a bit of outsourcing. Congratulations on your new baby!
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May 10, 2020 09:40
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Free egg. Enjoy!
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May 10, 2020 09:49
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Stoner Sloth posted:Cats could be considered venomous - they have protein in their saliva remarkably similar to the venom used defensively by slow loris. This protein is responsible for people's allergic reaction to cats and also means that wounds from their bites heal much slower and are prone to infection. Yeah, cats may as well be venomous given that a proper deep puncture wound bite from one will absolutely put a person in hospital.
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May 10, 2020 09:53
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Cardiovorax posted:Free egg. Enjoy! Yeah pretty much, mother earth Gaia just gave you an egg.
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May 10, 2020 17:26
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Organza Quiz posted:Yeah, cats may as well be venomous given that a proper deep puncture wound bite from one will absolutely put a person in hospital. Absolutely. And that toxic protein seems to increase the rate of severe infection from slow loris bites so possibly partly responsible for cat bites being a severe infection risk. Interestingly big cats seem to have the same protein but at much lower levels, unlikely to cause an allergic reaction, suggesting a common ancestor evolved it as a defensive mechanism which became unnecessary and is in the process of being lost in larger cats but which has persisted in smaller ones. Shifty Nipples posted:Yeah pretty much, mother earth Gaia just gave you an egg. When mother nature gives you eggs, make an omelette?
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May 11, 2020 10:01
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Organza Quiz posted:Yeah, cats may as well be venomous given that a proper deep puncture wound bite from one will absolutely put a person in hospital.
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May 11, 2020 10:11
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 Caught this puppy in my house and released outside. It chilled out in the glass for a while before departing. Im looking at a page of insects in my area (northern VA) and I see some that look very similar, like the four toothed mason wasp, but no exact matches. I'm not sure how much color can vary. Any ideas?
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May 11, 2020 19:43
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Blue Footed Booby posted:
How about different Mason Wasp, Ancistrocerus campestris? Got there from here.
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May 11, 2020 20:25
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 My new tiny friend
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May 11, 2020 20:46
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This hunstman was trying to tell me that my floor is too dirty. I tried to clean the dust off its feet but was unsuccessful, so I let it go outside...
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May 12, 2020 01:22
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I forget what kind of bug specifically it is, it's an assassin bug type, but the nymphs seem to actively try to cover themselves in dust in your house as camouflage. Sometimes I'll see a weird clump of dust moving up the otherwise clean white wall, completely obvious to everything around it.  edit: apparently it's called the Masked Hunter. look at this cute little idiot. the ones in my house get covered in dog hair and dust bunnies so they're basically just fuzzy blobs, not clearly bugs but with some crap on'em like in most photos. (not my photo)  edit: also my neighbor texted me to notify my a bird has made a nest in the exhaust pipe of my car, which I haven't been using much what with the lockdown and all. that's unfortunate. Captain Invictus fucked around with this message at 01:37 on May 12, 2020 |
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May 12, 2020 01:34
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Found some pupating ladybug larvae today. I've been trying a new camera function for macro shots and I think it came out fairly well. It's kind of interesting to see the colors. The last ones I saw weren't really orange and black, more orange and purple. Must be a regional thing. 
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May 12, 2020 19:20
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The purple to black thing might also be a function of how freshly pupated or close to emerging they are
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May 12, 2020 22:03
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I googled it a little and I'm thinking it might be the difference between native ladybug larvae and invasive Asian Ladybeetle. They're more visibly black, while the native species is a pale violet-blue. Could be either, though!
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May 12, 2020 22:08
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joat mon posted:How about different Mason Wasp, Ancistrocerus campestris? That looks dead on, thanks! It's amazing how many varieties of that patterning there are. I spent a good chunk of time going "that one's not yellow enough, and that one doesn't have that spot on its thorax, and..." but then my boss started bugging me about stuff.
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May 14, 2020 04:59
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Chaosfeather posted:
Additionally, some caterpillar (?) friends that are everywhere that I have taken to calling 'fuzzies'. Because I am a child.  They get pretty sizable! 
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May 14, 2020 07:13
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Borb obtained.
I cannot tell you how much time I spent going "OH MY GOD YOU'RE SO LITTLE"
Just moved them to base today, made a little ramp for them since they aren't great at flying yet to get off of the ground. In an aviary with other house sparrows. Stay safe little kiddo.
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Five-lined Skink Plestiodon fasciatus Found it trapped in the garage after a bit of reorganization and let it out. Scampered into the stones and bushes right outside after I tried to get a little closer for a better shot and such. Really good size, quite healthy! Love the longbois 
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May 15, 2020 01:46
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I love having lots of flowers in my yard - this double-flowering plum blooms early and insects love it. I spotted at least four types of bees in there today, plus a couple of wasps and some hoverflies.    Cleaning up last year's scraps.  I believe this is a purple-rimmed carabus. They're pretty common around here.
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May 18, 2020 01:47
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I saw a big ol' spider trying to get a start on a five-foot web today, just scrambling through the air on a single horizontal thread, flailing its legs madly and trying to get to the other side before the wind turned bad. And then it slipped and fell off half a foot from the other end and it was very sad. I wish I'd had my camera ready.
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May 19, 2020 13:46
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 I think this one was a wee little wasp. I can't find an ID on the internet but I''ll check my insects of Alberta book when I get home.  I was about to put a hot pot on the trivet when I noticed a bit of debris on it. Good thing I checked what it was, otherwise I would have cooked this (very stoic) little crab spider!
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May 19, 2020 16:24
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Cardiovorax posted:I saw a big ol' spider trying to get a start on a five-foot web today, just scrambling through the air on a single horizontal thread, flailing its legs madly and trying to get to the other side before the wind turned bad. It didn't have a drag line? What an amateur. Enjoy natural selection, idiot
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May 19, 2020 16:30
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Mak0rz posted:It didn't have a drag line? What an amateur. Enjoy natural selection, idiot
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May 19, 2020 16:32
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We have a mulberry tree in our backyard and every spring it's swarmed by a big flock of cedar waxwings. They're really fast and all I have is a point-and-shoot so this is the best photo I got. I love them  .
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May 19, 2020 16:46
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Waxwings are great, aside from all the berry mess. An unfortunate giant water bug in my work parking lot this morning.
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May 20, 2020 14:40
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