A new article on my site about what is simultaneously the most underwhelming and incredible animal you will ever read about.

Gaze into its majestic lack of a face!

NOW BACK TO MONTERS

This is another great life-form from Wayne Douglas Barlowe’s book “Expedition,” detailing the scientifically plausible inhabitants of an alien world.

The “Forest Gulper” begins life as a small, winged flier, but matures into a sedentary carnivore with a huge, cavernous mouth and no sonar pits (this planet’s stand-in for eyes). Its breath is attractively sweet to herbivores and the floor of its mouth highly adhesive. The stunted wings beat constantly, presumably to waft its odor.

Earwigs are a good place to start! Here’s an adorable picture by Joel Meunier of an earwig and her nymphs:

NO SHE IS NOT EATING THEM! She is picking them up and moving them to a safer location, just like a mother cat will do with her kittens. She will stand guard over them and bring them food for weeks, which is especially interesting considering they are fully capable of fending for themselves almost as soon as they hatch, actually faring quite well when “orphaned.” As long as their mother is present, however, they’ll keep close to her (or maybe she keeps them close?) until they reach a certain size.

Another insect with strong maternal instincts is the female burying beetle, who will remain underground with her larvae and the small corpse (usually a dead rodent) that her mate helped her to bury. There she chews the rotting meat into a paste that the grubs can more easily digest. She dies of old age around the time that they pupate, still beside them. The grave she created as a nursery becomes her grave as well.

Certain cockroaches such as Phlebonotus pallens carry the young under the wings, which may be fused together and arched for this purpose. The young are equipped with temporary fang-like mandibles, allowing them to pierce their mother’s back and feed on her haemolymph or “blood.” She has more than enough!

Certain tortoise beetles like this Acromis sparsa will use their bodies as a shield to protect their eggs and larvae throughout their development, though the larvae have their own interesting defense; anal hooks adapted to collect their own feces. Those are clumps of poo hanging off their tails, making them unpleasant to many predatory tastes. In this case, the young and mother probably both help to protect one another.

There are other protective mothers scattered around the Insecta, but some of their only devoted fathers are certain giant water bugs; the female glues the eggs to the male’s back and just goes on with her life, leaving him to keep them safe and hydrated!

ASK YOUR BUG QUESTIONS! No question too small or too large!

The Prismalope and Butchertree from Wayne Douglas Barlowe’s “Expedition.”

The huge, female butchertree pokes her leaf-shaped tentacles up out of the ground until a Prismalope’s flicking tongues get caught on the barbs, then impales her prey on one of her huge arms and drains it of body fluids.

The male butchertree is a tiny flying creature closely resembling one of her false leaves, and will help draw Prismalopes into her feeding range.

This book was the basis for the television special “Alien Planet,” but the mockumentary seemed to have left out most of its strangest creatures. I grew up with this book and it’s still one of my favorites!

Diaethrea eluina, a butterfly with a nearly perfect “88” on its inner wings.

Sometimes the second “8” varies enough to resemble 9, 0, 6, p, or b.

I haven’t watched television in a few years now, and was reminded why when I caught an episode of Animal Planet’s “Call of the Wildman” yesterday.

The show - which follows a hillbilly wrangling problematic wildlife - was fair and accurate in its treatment of snakes, but immediately lost me when the protagonist identified a small spider in a web as a “brown recluse,” which the narrator went on to describe as one of the deadliest spiders in America, further referring to its sacs of eggs as “ticking time bombs” before the wildman killed the whole family with a napkin.

First off, recluse spiders do not construct or hang in webs, and aren’t even shaped like the spider we were shown. Second, as I’ve ranted about before, recluse spiders are not significantly dangerous at all. Nobody on record has ever died or come anywhere close to dying from recluse venom, and of thousands of confirmed bites actually studied, the very worst exhibited a tiny area of necrosis (dead tissue) which healed with little to no treatment.

It is a widely accepted *myth* that recluse bites cause any serious tissue damage. Most will even come and go with no discomfort at all, and recluses themselves only bite if trapped against human skin (in clothing or bedding, for example)…they’re called recluses for a reason. They take great pains to avoid us, as do most other spiders.

Lobster Caterpillar wants you to go to Question Bug and ask me your bug questions!

I’ll help with ID’s or answer anything you could possibly wonder about the anatomy, lifestyle and characteristics of arthropods or other invertebrates!

A rock quarry on Easter Island apparently houses a number of incomplete Moai statues. The one in the background remains only partially carved out, while the other was closer to being carted off and erected.

Most, if not all of the Moai were actually made with bodies, but they’re usually buried underground.

Here’s a thing I wrote about Chitons. I’m sorry if creeping rock slugs aren’t very exciting to anyone but me.

God is a humongous insect and people who don’t like bugs are simultaneously reincarnated as one billion of them until they learn their lesson.

So this awesome video has gotten some attention recently as a “mystery animal,” with some even arguing that it may be a whale’s lost placenta, a fishing nest, or a CG effect:

However, I’ve had the following illustration saved to my hard drive for about seven or eight years:

This is a depiction of the jellyfish Deepstaria enigmata, which lacks tentacles and seems to just engulf prey like a giant killer bed sheet.

The specimen in the video bears a cluster of organs not previously documented in this species, but it’s clear we’re at least looking at something in the same family. The artist’s rendering even has the weird surface texture down, which was what some were pointing to in the “fishing net” argument.

The art comes from HERE, which includes dozens upon dozens of other beautiful deep-sea illustrations!

So it’s not a really new kind of creature, but it is amazing new footage.

The last few steps on the evolution half are what the entire creationist agenda basically hinges on ignoring. They want to believe - or rather, hope they can convince everyone else to belief - that evolution is only widely accepted as fact because scientists run some sort of racket together, oppressing anyone who dares to challenge it.

In reality, evolution is widely accepted as fact because scientists themselves never stop challenging it, from every possible angle, because that’s what scientific research means. And in this endless onslaught of minds across the globe who want nothing more than to prove every other researcher wrong, evolution continues to stand like an impenetrable fortress of objective, undeniable truth.

The entire fossil record, all genetic data, the population distributions of modern organisms and literally every single pattern and detail we can identify in the natural world reinforces evolution and only evolution, because while there is always more to learn about our planet, some things just are. No new research will ever prove that the Earth is cube-shaped, and no new research will ever prove that species all appeared at once in a puff of smoke.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17839642

I always thought most cockroaches had a social structure since it’s well documented in at least Madagascan hissing roaches, but science has finally taken a harder look.

Cockroaches recognize one another individually, communicate with one another about the best hiding places and food sources, and suffer poorer health if isolated from others of their kind, probably due to the sheer stress of isolation.

I’m declaring ahead of time that rebloggers who say “ew” or “gross” are stupid.

Cockroaches are adorable and everybody should like them.

LEARN ABOUT STARGAZERS ON BOGLEECH!

Images used with permission :)

I’ve written whole long articles, blog posts, and even narrated a long winded video in defense of cockroaches! I think they’re beautiful, cute, cool looking and extremely interesting.

The pest control industry thrives off fear. The more people hate, fear and loathe insects, the more money they make. They exaggerate everything, from the dirtiness of roaches to the destructiveness of termites. There are around 5,000 cockroach species that have been named (more likely tens of thousands out there), around thirty of which survive well in human habitations, but only four species thrive well enough to create infestations and become “pests.” Of these four, only one is a very common problem (the German cockroach) and even these are more vilified than necessary.

There’s actually no solid, proven case of cockroaches passing diseases onto humans, whichthey’re only theoretically capable of by touching something germ-ridden and then touching your food. This is true of any animal loose in a home or restaurant, but a lot less likely to occur from a cockroach - bacteria don’t cling very easily to their body surface, and they fastidiously groom themselves whenever they feel contaminated.

As long as a home is kept fairly clean, roaches won’t pick up any germs to begin with - though they’ll still have no difficulty moving in. There’s a common misconception that roaches are connected to “filth,” but they can survive equally well in environments completely sanitary to us. They don’t especially care either way how rotten their food is, and can even go outside to forage on fungi, dead leaves or other insects.

In the wild, roaches serve many important purposes. They’re integral to forest health and cave ecosystems as decomposers, pollinators and sometimes even predators, keeping other insects under control.

Despite all this, though, I think their “dirty” and “scary” reputation also adds a lot of charming character to them, best demonstrated in the under-rated cinematic masterpiece, Joe’s Apartment.