HOME |
RSS | 
Looking a bit like precious gold, this fossilized beetle is 47 million years old and retains almost the same color it had when it was alive. According to paleontologist Maria McNamara, the fossils are only slightly redder than they originally were. -Link
Ladybug Bag $29.95
Are you looking for the perfect summer accessory. You need the stylish Ladybug Bag from the NeatoShop. This useful handbag is made out of rubber and has fantastic detail work. There really is no better way to show your love for this useful little insect!
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fabulous Bags & Totes!
Comments Off
This beetle is named Onymacris unguicularis, or the ‘tok-tokkie’ beetle. Why does he look as if he’s trying to stand on his head?
He’s developed a rather nifty way of getting a drink. As a sea fog rolls in of a morning the beetle presents himself to it. This is where things get clever, his carapace is made up of a series of peaks and troughs. The peaks are very attractive to water and the fog settles on them, the troughs however are waxy and hydrophobic and the water rolls off the trough and begins to form droplets. The water naturally runs down the inverted beetles body and into his mouth, smashing!
The beetle derived its English name from his drinking habits. Read more at Ever So Strange. Link -Thanks, Danny!
The Lesser of the Two Weevils – $9.95
For entomologists, the choice is clear: always pick the lesser of the two weevils. This clever design by Chris Murphy is my current bug T-shirt favorite! Link | More Science T-Shirts
Trivia for you: the word weevil comes from an Old English word "wifel" meaning "small beetle." We won’t go into the philosophical matter of whether a bug can be evil, but the destructiveness of certain kinds of weevils is well established: the boll weevil devastated the US cotton industry in the 1920s.
This video clip comes from the BBC’s new “Life” documentary series. All of the David Attenborough nature documentaries are superb in terms of photography, as this segment illustrates. The music is wonderfully appropriate, and the humor… well, for that you have to wait until the very very end.
A bit too strong? No, this record has nothing to do with the way they smell. A recent study determined that a dung beetle can pull 1,141 times its own body weight. Just picture how they figured that out:
In the study, scientists calibrated the males’ strength by gluing a cotton thread to the beetles’ hard wing-cases, stringing the thread across a pulley, and tying it to a miniature bucket, to which they added drops of water [ScienceNOW]. The dung beetle’s coronation as the world’s strongest insect steals the thunder from the rhinoceros beetle, which can lift up to 850 times its own weight.
Dung beetles developed this strength in other to compete for mates, but that isn’t their only strategy. Some weaker male dung beetles mate successfully because they have “substantially bigger testicles”. Link
(image credit: Alex Wild)
Scientists have named a newly discovered species of beetle, Agaporomorphus colberti, in honor of humorist Stephen Colbert.
One of the outstanding features of the species is the genitalia of the males. “This new species is similar to members of a clade within the genus exemplified by A. knischi…and unique in having similar, extremely complicated male genitalia…”
