Sabethes cyaneus


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An awesome blog post about PREDATORY SNAILS politely tapping LANTERN BUGS for honeydew and calcium, and then being mugged by ANTS for the honeydew before they can drink it. This is possibly the most awesome bit of insect-farming and kleptoparasitism I've seen in EVER.

And the photos are just gorgeous!

via e_apraksina. A stunning example of Batesian mimicry from a caterpillar of the Hemeroplanes genus. They'll even lunge at you in imitation of a snake striking


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Buprestids are a highly successful family of usually wood-eating beetles - at least 15,000 species in 450 genera - but their biggest claim to fame is their bright colouration. Ridiculously bright colouration, metallic iridescence so remarkable you'd think it couldn't be real, or that somebody painted the thing ( Read more... )

Zoologger: Horror fly returns from the dead

"a mythical beast, not seen for more than 160 years. A nocturnal animal that feeds on the rotten flesh of large mammals. A species active only during the winter months that reportedly emits a luminous glow from its large, orange head. What new horror is this?

It's a fly, the bone skipper Thyreophora ( Read more... )

A couple weeks ago I assembled a big two-page article for my site on what I felt were the twenty most unusual and interesting beetles ( Read more... )

Humans communicate largely through talking, listening, and looking (and thanks to Johannes Gutenberg we've become increasingly dependent upon talking's linguistic derivative: text). "Humans are the most audio-visual creatures on Earth. We're highly unusual. The vast majority of creatures on Earth communicate the way the ants do- by chemicals, ( Read more... )

Humans didn't invent the wheel. They reinvented it. From this clever video, you can see salamanders and caterpillars had it figured out, first.

Lake Malawi is the third largest lake on earth, and one of the deepest. In it's depth midge larvae hide out, away from predators, until the rains break.

Then they emerge in swarms as adult midges and form clouds of busily mating insects.

This article has some crappy pics of the swarms.The footage from the freshwater episode of Planet Earth is ( Read more... )