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One critical difference: the umpire has a halberd and is willing to use it. The Ghistelles Hours, a Fourteenth Century Flemish devotional manuscript, contains illustrations of people playing something that scholar Carl Pyrdum describes as baseball. But I think that it sounds like cricket:
Though there’s no base in sight, various historians of sport have identified this game as a version of “stool ball” or “stump ball”, which was baseball played with only one base, where the object was for the pitcher to hit a stump or a stool or other handy protrusion with the ball while the batter protected it by batting away the pitcher’s balls. Each player stood on or near what was essentially a “base” If the batter made contact, he was expected to run around the pitcher’s base and back to his own. Various fielders could catch the batted ball and throw the ball at the stool while the batter is occupied running.
Link -via Retronaut | Photo: Walters Art Museum
So as the cautious man (or my mother) says, “Safety first.” However, for the male cricket–as gallant as he is–he’ll risk his life for a lady friend. In danger, a male cricket will wait until his female partner dives into their hiding burrow to ensure that if she’s pregnant, his genes will survive.
At the entrance, it’s ladies first: the male cricket waits while his partner dives in first. It’s a delay that could cost him his life. This may all seem very chivalrous, but the male’s seemingly selfless actions also make selfish sense. He may die, but he ensures that his genes pass on to the next generation.
Male insects often stay close to female ones after they mate, and people have generally assumed that they’re standing guard. If the female mates again, the first male’s sperm will be flushed out by the second male’s contributions. If he wants to ensure that he fathers he offspring, he’d do well to keep other suitors at bay.
But Rolando Rodriguez-Munoz from the University of Exeter found that this narrative of conflict doesn’t quite work for field crickets. He set up a network of infrared cameras to study a wild population of the crickets that had all been individually marked and genetically analysed. The cameras recorded thousands of hours of video, and Rodriguez-Munoz watched them all.
The article goes on to describe the advantages both partners have when the male is accommodating to the female. Men, take notes.
-Link | Image Credit Roberto Zanon
It doesn’t get much more random than this, Neatoramanauts! College Humor presents: a chameleon eating a cricket off a sumo wrestler’s face, captured in super slo-mo goodness.
Hit play or go to Link [College Humor] – Thanks Sparks!
The armoured ground cricket of southern Africa are fat and flightless, two things that make them prime targets in the food-scarce African landscape.
Predation should’ve killed off these crickets, but evolution has equipped them with an amazing arsenal of self defense mechanisms, including vomiting and squirting blood in every direction.
Entomologist Bill Bateman of the University of Pretoria said:
“If [the attack] is from above the blood wells out and coats your hand. If grabbed by forceps from the side, by a leg, they lean towards it and crouch down, then there is a slight cracking sound and the blood jets right along the line of attack.”
“The blood is pale green and rather acrid smelling. I couldn’t bring myself to actually taste it fresh but it leaves an acidy, tobacco-like taste on your fingers if you do not wash it off,” he says.
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