Antdude, if you’ve been waiting for an article to be specifically dedicated to only you, here you go. Of course, even those of you who aren’t insect/human hybrids will be sure to enjoy io9′s fascinating article featuring 10 frightening facts about ants. For example, did you know:

Ants have already survived a mass extinction event
The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event is thought to have occurred approximately 65 million years ago following an absolutely massive impact event. Widely regarded as the downfall of the dinosaurs (and, incidentally, the rise of mammals), the years following the KT-extinction event are actually believed to have been a time of incredibly rapid speciation and worldwide expansion for ants, marking what researchers Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson call “a rise to ecological dominance.”

Really, there’s a good chance ants will outlive humans as well.

Link

We tend to think of insects as creepy and crawly, but not so much cute. But there are some bugs that are simply precious…maybe not as much as a puppy or kitty, but definitely cute nonetheless. If you dig on six-legged cutie pies, then don’t miss this great article featuring some of the most photogenic invertebrates around.

Link

Scientists recently discovered that the shiny bits embedded in the shell of the Diamond Weevil is more than just stylish bling- they’re actually small diamonds grown for protection. Here’s what they discovered, and what they plan to do with this discovery:

A new high-tech investigation reveals the diamonds are just that: chitin in a diamond-type arrangement that’s optimized to throw off brilliant greens, yellows and oranges. What most people call diamonds are made of carbon, but other materials can take on the same crystal structure, called diamond cubic.

“Materials scientists could look to these scales to inspire new materials, but we don’t yet know how they are made,” said biophysicist Bodo Wilts of the University of Groningen, co-author of a Dec. 21 study of the scales in Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

“We’ve got some catching up to do,” Wilts said. “The nature-produced tiny structures are far beyond any human designs.”

The scales are a type of three-dimensional crystal, called a photonic crystal, which is much like an opal. Each kind of photonic crystal reflects a specific wavelength of light at a specific orientation. Other crystals lacking a regular 3-D structure, meanwhile, aren’t as brilliant or iridescent.

It seems that no matter how high tech our society becomes, we can always learn a thing or two from the natural world.

–via Wired –image via Bodo Wilts/Journal of the Royal Society Interface

Ant farms are cool in and of themselves, but that doesn’t mean their designs can’t be improved on to look even more fascinating. WebEcoist has a great collection of some of the coolest ant farms around. From flags of different nations to the Clone Trooper farm, these toys make me want to go buy my own ant farm.

Link

Erin Pearce’s Etsy store is called “What the Hell Is This?” That’s the best possible name for an Etsy store. Or a blog. Or a restaurant. It’d be a terrible baby name, but a great restaurant name. Anyway, she sells beetles that she’s dressed up like Jurassic Park characters.

Link -via The Mary Sue

Bees have an impressive sense of smell and New Zealand biologists now believe they may be able to train them to help identify people with tuberculosis by the faint floral odor victims of the disease develop.

“When we tested them with the tuberculosis odours we found the bees can still smell it down to parts per billion,” says Max Suckling.

Christchurch zoologists are training bees to associate the smell of the disease with a sweet treat and to stick out their tongues when it’s present.

While TB is common worldwide, it is most prevalent in poverty stricken areas and the bees could provide an inexpensive screening solution for these people.

Link Via BoingBoing

Image Via Dendroica cerulea [Flickr]

You know how when you cut a worm in half you’ll get two worms and how mice love cheese? If you said yes, then actually you don’t know much about these creatures. Cracked recently took a look at common animal myths that are actually totally bogus. How many of these did you still believe before you read the article?

Link

“I’m all for it,” says Keith Brouillard, owner of Raleigh, N.C.’s Carolina Forestry, a consulting group that helps manage timber land for private owners. “Kudzu is a nuisance and almost impossible to get rid of.” The vine is virtually impervious to herbicides, chain saws and even fire. Its roots can weigh 300 pounds and run 12 feet deep.

But the bug is also chewing up soybean stalks, reducing some yields recently by as much as a quarter, according to entomologists at the University of Georgia.

“Disappearing kudzu is a cultural problem,” says John Shelton Reed, a sociologist and essayist on Southern life. “But disappearing soybeans is an economic problem.”

Researchers are looking for ways to protect soybean crops from Megacopta cribraria while still searching for a species that will kill kudzu and leave crops alone. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: University of Georgia at Griffin)

Recreating this method means finding materials that can not only detect the presence of an insect but also close on it quickly. At Seoul National University in South Korea, Seung-Won Kim and colleagues have done this using shape memory materials. These switch between two stable shapes when subjected to force, heat or an electric current.

The team used two different materials – a clamshell-shaped piece of carbon fibre that acts as the leaves, connected by a shape-memory metal spring. The weight of an insect on the spring makes it contract sharply, pulling the leaves together and enveloping the prey. Opening the trap once more is just a matter of applying a current to the spring.

Mohsen Shahinpoor at the University of Maine in Orono took a different approach. His robot flytrap uses artificial muscles made of polymer membranes coated with gold electrodes. A current travelling through the membrane makes it bend in one direction – and when the polarity is reversed it moves the other way.

Bending the material also produces a voltage, which Shahinpoor has utilised to create sensors. When a bug lands, the tiny voltage it generates triggers a larger power source to apply opposite charges to the leaves, making them attract one another and closing the trap (Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, DOI: 10.1088/1748-3182/6/4/046004).

“We should be able to benefit enormously from these flytrap technologies,” says Ioannis Ieropoulos of the Bristol Robotics Lab in the UK. He and colleagues previously developed Ecobot, a robot that can digest insects, food scraps and sewage to power itself. Ecobot uses bacteria to break down a fly’s exoskeleton in a reaction that liberates electrons into a circuit, generating electricity.

It’s an interesting premise, the bug-eating robot. I’d personally never thought of feeding a machine anything other than electricity (or sunlight for the solar-powered variety).

If you built a robot, which fuel source would you design it to run on?

Link

Parasites are raising an army of zombie wasp queens to do their bidding, and it’s a good thing that these parasites aren’t more ambitious,  because they’d probably be well on their way to taking over the world by now!

The parasites cause common wasps to believe that they are queens, rejecting their normal caste and acting as self serving loners in wasp society:

Infected P. dominulus — better known as common European paper wasps — reject their genetically preordained roles, abandon their hives and embark on a long, macabre journey during which a few live for a time as queens, albeit murderous queens.

Read on about this fascinating example of parasitic mind control at the Wired link below, and pray these little critters don’t develop a taste for human blood!

Link

This ad shows how efficient Snapdragon processors are by inferring that they can be powered by insects. And if you care about cruelty to bugs, you should know that the actual circus acts are special effects, a well-done combination of CGI and image collage. Which is less expensive than actually procuring bugs this big! -Thanks, Dustin Willson!

If you’re one of those people who think insects aren’t pretty, particularly big ones like the praying mantis, well then, you’d better take a look at this great BuzzFeed article that’s sure to change your mind.

Link

Insects are so numerous and so varied that are an evolutionary success story. Much of this success is attributed to an insect’s wings, which can do so many things besides fly. Different bugs use their wings to communicate, attract a mate, hide, protect themselves, and more. Wired has a gallery of close-up views of the special things wings can do. For example: the butterfly pictured doesn’t need camouflage, since its wings are so transparent as to render it invisible to predators. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Maki Aoyama)

Humans might be one of the only animals to use tools as weapons, but Crack has a great list of animals born with weapons built right into their bodies -like the Giant Amazonian Centipede’s ninja skills, which allow him to catch and eat whole bats. Read about the rest at the link.

Link

It’s likely the larvae of many ancient insects also passively absorbed oxygen from water and were not able to regulate their oxygen intake very well—a big danger when oxygen levels were so high.

One way to decrease the risk of oxygen toxicity would have been to grow bigger, since large larvae would absorb lower percentages of the gas, relative to their body sizes, than small larvae.

“If you grow larger, your surface area decreases relative to your volume,” Verberk explained.

Read more about the study at National geographic News. Link

(Image credit: Ned M. Seidler, National Geographic)

- Sugar trap. I was optimistic about this one: Dumping a quarter cup of sugar into an open mason jar, then filling the jar halfway with water. The hypothesis is that the flies are attracted to the sugar, then fall into the jar and drown. But I guess the flies here laugh in the face of such low-tech devices, instead preferring to walk down the sides of the jar, sip the nectar and fly out. Two fell in, though. Bottom line: Doesn’t really work.

- Dish soap trap. Instead of sugar, pour an inch of liquid dish soap directly into the jar, then add another inch of water. This worked nicely to trap flies. However, not all liquid dish soap fared well. A floral scent didn’t attract flies to the trap, but a green apple scent beckoned the flies to their doom. Definitely go for a fruit scent. Bottom line: This works. Be sure to use a fruit-scented dish soap.

Other methods were tried and rated for their effective as well. Link -via Breakfast Links

(Image credit: Flickr user Refracted Moments™)

Sounds gross, I know, but it’s actually a pretty interesting concept. To try to call attention to the bee plight in London, Capital Bee, a campaign that promotes community beekeeping, has created a series of ads featuring dead bees. The bees encounter a number of city calamities, from getting squished on the Tube to the window washing mishap above.

Link via AdFreak

Sure, it looks like a wayward ball of fluff. Maybe a even baby tribble. But that little guy in the pic above is the White Flannel Moth caterpillar, and the photographer who picked it up? Not happy. Those tiny little hairs are urticating setae, poisoned barbs that break off in the skin, causing pain and itchiness and general freaked-outness.

The Ark In Space has a whole collection of crazy-looking caterpillars (including one that looks like a toupee for Chewbacca, should he ever need one). Click through for the gallery!

Link | Image: Flickr User Urtica

It’s a Heteropteryx dilatata, more commonly known as a Malaysian Jungle Nymph. At six inches long, these critters are among the biggest insects in the world. They eat bramble, leaves, and unattended children.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ

UK artist Tom Hardwidge makes intricate steampunk insect sculptures he calls Arthrobots from recycled materials, including deactivated ammunition and watch parts. Some of these delicate artworks are for sale!

Link | Artist’s site -Thanks, John!

Image via Thomas G. Moertel [Wikipedia]

Beetles are one of the most common types of animals in the world. There are already 350,000 known species, but scientists believe there could be up to 8 million more. New beetle species are discovered at an amazing rate of about one per hour. With so many different types of beetles, it’s hardly surprising there are around 750,000 trillion beetles on earth!

The secret to the beetle’s success is its ability to adapt to almost any environment. They can fly, swim and burrow and different species can survive on anything from tobacco to bonemeal to carpet to strychnine to fiber insulators on cables. The also survive in all types of habitats. One species, the zonocopris gibbicolis survives exclusively on the feces of land snails, living in the best possible place to get that meal –inside the snail’s shell.

As if their diets and living quarters weren’t weird enough, some beetles also have seriously strange breeding habits. The flour beetle (seen above) has sperm that attaches to the members of other beetles that breed with the same female. The sperm has a long shelf life and can then go on to fertilize the eggs of other female beetles. In fact, the female flour beetle has a one in eight chance of being fertilized by a male she never even encountered before.

Image via ©Entomart [Wikipedia]

The blister beetle spreads its larvae with the help of digger bees (pictured above) in what is called a honeytrap. The larvae cling together and form the shape of a female digger bee while emitting bee pheromones. A male digger bee will then approach the trap and attempt to mate with it, giving the larvae a chance to cling onto his chest hairs and hitch a ride to an actual mate. When they get the chance, the larvae then grab on to the female bee and catch a ride to the inside of the hive where they can feed on young bees and honey.

Don’t think for a second that bees are always the innocent victims of beetles though. The stingless bee (pictured below) takes revenge on invading beetles not by striking them down, but by mummifying their bodies in large amounts of resin, mud and wax. The beetle then slowly suffocates before shriveling up like a mummy corpse.

Image via Muhammad Mahdi Karim [Wikipedia]

Bees are fascinating creatures aside from their fighting skills. Outside of humans, bees have the most sophisticated communication systems in the animal kingdom. They can tell each other exactly how to get to a food source and how good the food is using a series of different movements. This method of communication is known as the “waggle dance.” Humans can actually translate the waggle dance and scientists can actually track down a specific flower that one bee mentions to another while under observation.

Bees also have fairly good memories. They can remember human faces in laboratory tests –of course, they were given nectar every time they were shown a certain face, so they really just thought the face was a weird type of flower .

The ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians believed the insects were sacred, thanks in part to their ability to provide humans with honey. Bees are the only animal to provide us with a food source that isn’t milk or meat. Honey is the only food that will never go bad. Archeologists have even eaten honey that was buried in three-thousand year-old tombs of the Pharaohs.

Of course, while humans love honey, it’s not the only food source that bees are responsible for. The insects pollinate many of our fruit and vegetable crops –over $19 billion worth in the U.S. alone.

Unfortunately, that means we depend on bees for the majority of our fruits and veggies. With colony collapse disorder rates increasing all the time while scientists argue about the cause, the entire bee population –and our food supply is at risk. If the colony collapse disorder manages to eradicate the entire bee population, we’ll not only be eating a lot less food in general, we’ll have to start eating a lot more beans, corn, tomatoes and beets.

Because beets are incredibly nutritious and pollinated by the wind, they are one of the staple crops that scientists believe we would be forced to eat regularly if bee colonies completely collapse. But that’s not the only thing to make these veggies special.

Image via Quadell [Wikipedia]

While we tend to think about the red-bulbed beetroots when we hear the word “beet,” there are actually many varieties of beets including the sugar beet and Swiss chard. Beets were first cultivated around 4,000 BC and have been grown across Europe and Asia for thousands of years. During its early history, the most commonly grown beets were the leafy varieties, but after spinach cultivation began, interest turned to the beetroot and sugar beets.

If you think that you don’t eat beets, you’re probably wrong. Not only is 30% of all sugar manufactured made from sugar beets rather than sugar canes, many commercial food products use beetroots for coloring and as a natural sweetener. Of course, if you love beets and eat too many, you’ll most certainly realize it –your urine will turn pink.

Image via Darkone [Wikipedia]

While beets may not be at the mercy of bees for pollination, they can still be victimized by other insects –particularly beetles. Those bee-hating blister beetles mentioned above (and pictured directly above) have a soft spot for potatoes, but their second favorite food is beets. While these beetles can destroy whole crops of beets, anyone who finds them on their veggies is well advised not to remove the bugs by hand –they’re named blister beetles after the injuries they give humans. The beetles secrete a chemical called a vesicant that causes swelling, blisters and burning sensations. The injuries often turn black, leave scars and become infected.

What do you guys think about the beetles, bees and beets connection? Are there any other strange connections you’d like to see explored in more detail?

Sources: The Book of Animal Ignorance, Scientific American, Google Books, Wikipedia #1, #2, #3

When I was five, I asked my mother what hair was made of. She attempted to explain it to me in a way that I could understand, but eventually said “protein”. “What’s that?” She tried to explain protein, and used peanut butter as an example. So, as I misunderstood it, hair was made out peanut butter. I then made a hair-and-jelly sandwich. It tasted terrible.

Where was I? Oh, yeah: Adrienne Antonson makes stunningly realistic models of insects using human hair as her crafting material. They do not go well with jelly.

Link via The Presurfer | Artist’s Website

Most insects have wings that appear to be transparent. Researchers from the University of Lund have found that they actually have rainbow colors, but the background of those wings makes all the difference in what the human eye sees.

“You hold the wing up against the light, so you can see the veins,” said study co-author Daniel Janzen, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “If you’re looking through a microscope, you try to get a clear view behind the wing. It’s the antithesis of getting wing color.”

The researchers studied wings under microscopes, against black backgrounds. But once Janzen, who breeds wasps for his research on caterpillar-parasite symbioses, started to look, colors could be seen by the naked eye as wings passed over insects’ black bodies.

This study looked at the wings of wasps and flies, and the team believes they may find similar results in other orders of insects. Link

The team raised cockroaches, dragonflies, grasshoppers, meal worms, beetles and other insects in atmospheres containing different amounts of oxygen to see if there were any effects.

One result was that dragonflies grew faster into bigger adults in hyperoxia.

Experimenting with giant insects — what could possibly go wrong?

Link via DVICE | Image: Warner Bros.

Japanese chef Shoichi Uchiyama has developed a line of sushi recipes that use insects, rather than fish, as the primary source of protein. He believes that carefully-selected insects are not only healthy and tasty, but can help feed a growing world population. From a 2008 article in The Daily Telegraph:

“In order to get 1 kg of beef, we have to raise cows on huge areas of land and give them many more kilos of fodder before they are ready to be slaughtered,” he said. “Insects eat the things that humans don’t and can be kept in much smaller spaces.

“Most importantly, insects are very nutritionally balanced, have little fat and are the perfect food source.”

Article Link and Photo Gallery via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Damn Cool Pics

When British scientist Jason Chapman told us (listen to the radio piece or watch our video) there are 3 billion insects passing over your head in a summer month, he was talking about his survey in Great Britain. Closer to the equator, he says, the numbers should rise. He wouldn’t be surprised, for example, that in the sky over Houston or New Orleans there could be 6 billion critters passing overhead in a month.

Link -via reddit

Do you have a nagging, gnawing feeling that …well, just a nagging, gnawing feeling? You should-odds are you’re being slowly devoured by one of these tiny, vicious parasites right this very second.

EATIN’ YOU: Fleas

BIO: Fleas are tiny insects that just can’t live without blood. They eat more than 15 times their body weight in blood in a single day. That includes the blood of dogs, cats, rats, rabbits, and any other mammal that’s handy, including you. They’re also “Super Bugs”: Fleas can pull 160,000 times their own weight (the equivalent of a human pulling 24 million pounds) and can jump over 150 times their own size (the equivalent of a human jumping about 1,000 feet).

DANGER! In the right-or wrong-conditions, fleas are disease machines. They can transmit tapeworm to pets or humans, and can carry a number of diseases, including the blood parasite babesia, and the dreaded bubonic plague.Thankfully, they’re not nearly as bad as they were in the days before the vacuum cleaner. (Most eggs hatch in your carpet.) Image credit: Flickr user Dr. Hemmert.

EATIN’ YOU: Bedbugs

BIO: Tiny, painful, smelly, and disgusting, bedbugs are nocturnal, spending the day in walls, furniture, or in your bed. At night they crawl out of the mattress and suck your blood. And they can wait up to a year in that mattress between feedings.

DANGER! Their bites are often painful, but, thankfully, bedbugs are not known to transmit any diseases. Image credit: Flickr user PeterEdin (Tag Man).

EATIN’ YOU: Ticks

BIO: Ticks are arachnids-not insects-and are related to spiders. There are no ticks that live solely on humans, but if there are no deer, cattle, birdsd, or reptiles handy, you’ll do. They have three life stages after hatching-larva, pupa, and adult-and each stage needs a “blood meal” before morphing into the next stage. Ticks use a hunting technique known as “questing”. That means that since they can’t hop or fly or run after prey, they wait around on grass or twigs for a host to come to them. How long will they wait? Years, possibly decades. And despite all that sitting they can leap into action the instant they sense a host coming by. One female tick can increase its body weight 200 times in a six-day feeding. Human equivalent: going from 170 pounds to 34,000 pounds in a week.

DANGER! Only mosquitoes transmit more diseases to humans than ticks do. Image credit: Flickr user Micah Taylor.

EATIN’ YOU: Chiggers

BIO: Chiggers are the blood-sucking, infant larva of mites, but before they can grow up, they must eat. They prefer rodents and lizards, but they’ll happily dine on you. These ravenous babies digest skin cells by spitting up powerful enzymes. Irritated skin cells react by building a hard mound around the tiny hole created by the enzymes, forming a “straw” (called a stylostome) through which the chigger continues to suck your mushed skin.

DANGER! Chigger bites are possibly the most irritating and itchy bites in the world-and the sores can itch for weeks-but they’re not known to carry any diseases. Old wives’ tale: Putting nail polish over the hole will suffocate the submerged parasite. Wrong! Chigger do not burrow underneath the skin. If you have sores, you probably already scratched the chiggers off. Image credit: Flickr user Cabezalana.

EATIN’ YOU: Face mites

BIO: What’s that on your eyelid? It might be one of those microscopic mites. They live in the pores and the hair follicles of the face, especially around the nose and eyelashes. They plant themselves head-down on a pore or follicle, and happily live there feeding on sebaceous secretions and dead skin debris.

DANGER! Usually you wouldn’t notice them, but bad infestations can cause the face to become polluted by the excrement and and corpses of these invisible bugs. That and their eating of hair roots and oil glands may cause hair loss, rashes, and rough skin. They are not known to transmit diseases.

EATIN’ YOU: Head lice

BIO: These bloodsuckers live their entire lives on the human scalp and hair. They puncture your skin with special piercing/sucking mouthparts and feed two to six times a day. They’re particularly prevalent among children, who can spread them easily by sharing hats and combs, and by playing games such as “I’m gonna rub my lice-infested head against your head …because its fun!” (But personal hygiene is irrelevant-they’ll live on anybody.)

DANGER! The bites may itch, but head lice aren’t dangerous. Image credit: Flickr user Eran Finkle.

EATIN’ YOU: Crab lice

BIO: Also permanent human residents, these larger lice live in the warmer, moister climes of pubic and armpit hair. They’re sluggish: If not disturbed, one can live its entire life within a half-inch of where it was born, but, like all lice, can be passed to other people through close contact. Not gross enough? Crab lice can also live in beards, moustaches, eyebrows, and eyelashes.

DANGER! Like head lice, you’re only in danger of embarrassment from crab lice.

EATIN’ YOU: Human liver fluke

BIO: This flatworm is contracted from eating infected fish, and primarily targets humans. They live in your bile ducts and liver tissue, as well as blood, and can grow up to an inch long and can live inside you for ten years.

DANGER! Symptoms can range from none …to death, for heavy infestations. (There have been cases where one person housed more than 20,000 of the parasites.) They are most prevalent in Asia, where raw and pickled fish are dietary staples. Image credit: Wikimedia user Flukeman.

EATIN’ YOU: Mosquitos

BIO: Contrary to popular myth, mosquitoes do not live on blood. They survive on nectar and other fluids sucked out of flowers. But females take a “blood meal”-they need protein to develop their eggs. You can’t hide: Mosquitos home in on their prey using specialized organs that can sense heat, carbon dioxide-which you just exhaled-and other gasses from up to 100 feet away.

DANGER! Mosquitoes traveling between hosts can transmit several diseases to humans, including malaria, sleeping sickness, and elephantiasis. Mosquitoes are the most deadly animal to humans on earth, causing more than 1,000,000 deaths a year. Image credit: Flickr user bogdog Dan.
____________________________________

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd.

This book focuses on the odd-side of life and features articles like the strangest TV shows never made, the creepiest insect on Earth, odd medical conditions, and many, many more.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute

This radar image was obtained by the National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office in La Crosse. The area depicted is where the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa meet.

A mayfly hatch along the Mississippi River was caught on Doppler radar out of NWS La Crosse this evening. The radar view below shows an image at 9:13 p.m. CDT on Saturday, May 29, 2010. The bugs are showing up as bright pink, purple, and white colors along the Mississippi River mainly south of La Crosse, WI. After the bugs hatch off the water and river areas, they are caught in the south-southeast winds while airborne for about 10-20 minutes.

Link, via.

To begin construction, she bites the petals off of flowers and flies each petal — one by one — back to the nest, a peanut-sized burrow in the ground.

She then shapes the multi-colored petals into a cocoon-like structure, laying one petal on top of the other and occasionally using some nectar as glue. When the outer petal casing is complete, she reinforces the inside with a paper-thin layer of mud, and then another layer of petals, so both the outside and inside are wallpapered — a potpourri of purple, pink and yellow.

See more pictures at NPR. Link -via Nag on the Lake

(image credit: Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History)

Every culture has some traditional dishes that make those from elsewhere cringe. The author of this post heard from quite a few people in India that pizza is clearly disgusting! Here are some other offbeat delicacies from around the world. I think I would have to try some of these before I make a judgement. For example, in Iceland, you may encounter Hákarl, or rotten shark.

Typically, a Greenland or basking shark is the Hákarl shark of choice. First, gut and behead it. Next, place it in a shallow hole, dug in gravelly-sand, then cover it with the sand and gravel. Place stones on top of the sand in order to press the shark and extract any fluids out of the body. Allow the shark to ferment for 6-12 weeks. Following the curing period, cut the shark into strips and hang them to dry for several months. During this drying period a brown crust will develop. Remove the crust prior to cutting the shark into small pieces and presto, ready to serve.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by mrmunchies.

There’s a lot going on in a small garden pond! Mirko Faienza blends beautiful macrophotography and music in My Father’s Garden. -via Metafilter

Over 700 paired species of fig trees and wasps have symbiotic relationships. The fig tree host wasp eggs, and the wasps pollinate the fig trees in return. But according to a new study, if the wasps don’t pollinate the host plants, the fig trees retaliate:

If the wasps don’t do their duty, the trees respond by enacting a sanction — aborting their fruit, killing off the teeming mass of baby wasps. A new study of this killer tree phenomenon, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B comes from Cornell University and The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, shows that negative reinforcement may be an important part of symbiotic relationships.

Pollination by wasp comes in two varieties: passive and active. With passive pollination the wasps carry pollen that happens to stick to their bodies; where with active pollination they collect pollen in special pouches to deliver to the flowers.

With the passive pairings, the fig trees abort their fruit far less often than with active pairs. In the actively pollinating groups, the tree species that tend to enforce sanctions less often have a higher occurrence of freeloader wasps, who take advantage of the figs without doing any of the work. Inversely, by using the sanction option more frequently, some fig species have a lower incidence of non-pollinating insects.

Link | Scientific Paper | Photo: University of British Columbia

You may well be thinking ‘The mystery of what?’ but resin (the type from trees) is still something of a mystery. The jury is still out about why exactly plants secrete (or excrete, depending on what side of the argument you are on) the sticky oozy stuff on which you may well have at some point inadvertantly put your hand or your clothes while taking a stroll through the woods. Plus at the right time it looks simply amazing, especially with insects inside it.

Some plants produce explosive resin. The Jeffrey Pine of California produces resin which is highly volatile – that mean it has, under the right circumstances – a tendency to vaporize. When people tried to distil it in nineteenth century America, they thought it was Ponderosa Pine resin. A number of distilleries exploded as a result of this mis-classification and the mistake was put right in something of a hurry. The reason behind the explosion was that the Jeffrey Pine resin was made up largely of pure heptanes – highly flammable. Distillation of Jeffrey Pine resin continues to be very dangerous to this day but the denizens of California have managed to get it right since the great pine explosions of 1852.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

Ants are such amazing creatures! Able to work together to create vast underground empires and take down almost any animal of any size…even humans! So, what happens when a creature such as the crab ends up getting the ants attention? In a Goliath vs. David (x100 or so) situation a crab thinks its protective armor is a deterrent preventing the ants from killing it, guess again. I can’t imagine what it must feel like having something start eating you from the inside out. O_O

From the BBC show “Ant Attack”.

Image: Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

Since 1967, scientific illustrator Cornelia Hesse-Honegger has visited 25 nuclear sites, including that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, documenting the mutated insects resulting from radioactive contamination. In an interview about her work, Hesse-Honegger said:

I never thought really about myself as being an artist. I just made what I thought was necessary. I thought that these laboratory flies are the prototypes of our understanding of nature, in the sense that we can do anything to nature—we the humans dictate in the end how nature should look like. It was for me the prototype of a future nature, man-made.

The professor who first gave me the mutated flies was convinced, however, that the radiation from Chernobyl had no impact on nature. This is what brought up the question of “low-level radiation.” Nobody was interested in doing research; this is why I thought I had to make these paintings to show the scientists that it would be important to start research in fallout areas.

Link via Fast Company | Interview with the Artist

It is fitting location for artist Jennifer Angus to show her work. Nestled within the Ballentine House, Angus has taken two rooms, the former rooms of the two Ballentine children, and covered them in insects. From a distance it looks like wallpaper, but upon closer inspection, the walls have been covered in thousands of precisely pinned bugs. Giant pink grasshoppers, perfect replicas of leaves and iridescent jewel beetles all swarm the walls in orderly geometric patterns.

Curious Expeditions visited the exhibit, and interviewed the taxidermy-inspired artist. Link

They do not look as if they belong in this solar system, let alone on planet Earth. This collection of photos reveal the strange beauty of insect eggs (though that may well be a matter of taste). Close up they are quite out of this world:

Where is John Hurt when you need him? If he could perhaps just lean over these eggs he might get a nasty surprise but we would perhaps have a chance of identifying these eggs. Although the species is unknown this is a good starting point on our journey through insect eggs. At once a little scary but fascinating, it is difficult to believe that these will hatch in to something probably harmless to us. Fortunately, the eggs measure millimeters rather than meters so don’t have nightmares!

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

Caterpillar pancakes made by Heidi Kenney, who was inspired by these pancakes. Don’t miss Heidi’s adorable plush creations.

Previously: Pancake art.

Some amazing photography enables us to get up close as various insects meet their demise.  Includes various acts of dismemberment (including one in mid air) which are not for the faint hearted!

Death in the domain of the insects can be swift and cruel but retains a magnificence and beauty that is somehow at odds with the brutality of what is happening. Take a look at this collection of awesome photographs and see whether or not you agree – but beware! This is not for the squeamish!

Link – via webphemera

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.