hakuna matata
This is one of my favorite things about ants — the ant death spiral. Actually, it’s a circular mill, first described in army ants by Schneirla (1944). A circle of army ants, each one following the ant in front, becomes locked into a circular mill. They will continue to circle each other until they all die. How crazy is that? Sometimes they escape, though. Beebe (1921) described a circular mill he witnessed in Guyana. It measured 1200 feet in circumference and had a 2.5 hour circuit time per ant. The mill persisted for two days, “with ever increasing numbers of dead bodies littering the route as exhaustion took its toll, but eventually a few workers straggled from the trail thus breaking the cycle, and the raid marched off into the forest.”
(thanks, Robert)
from the comments
My first encounter with Starewicz was his extraordinary animated film The Mascot, which was tacked on to a cheap imported DVD of Vampyr for reasons unknown. I watched it repeatedly and, charmed and amazed, ordered more of his work. I love the story of his accidental inauguration into stop-motion: working on a nature documentary, he found the insects wilting under the heat of the lights….
The Insects’ Christmas (1913)
“Rozhdestvo obitateley lesa” (Wladyslaw Starewicz).
Thanks to Stan Carey for this.
I’m not sure about the soundtrack, presumably chosen by XmasFLIX (me, I might go with something by Leoš Janáček), but the film is enchanting.
Especially so in light of my roommates, the invincible box elder bugs, who refuse to die and persist in traveling toward Outside, though Outside is now white and frozen. They remember that they once lived there.
Fire in My Belly (1987) | David Wojnarowicz (Music: Diamanda Galas)
You’ve got to sign in via YouTube or Google to view Fire in My Belly, the 1987 video by David Wojnarowicz that was yanked from a show at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery this week. I urge you to do so.
On December 1 the National Portrait Gallery celebrated World AIDS Day by capitulating to the demands of the Catholic League and of conservative Republicans and removing Fire in My Belly from an important exhibition about art and sexual difference, Hide/Seek.
I just screamed like a girl
I was lying on the couch playing Scrabble with a robot when I felt a tickle on my foot. I assumed it was a cat and looked down to find a huge water bug.
I did the only plausible thing and moved to another room.
Types of flies
You ever see these flies? The ones impossibly small — teeny compared to something regarded as small to begin with — ridiculously tiny? Or the ones that are not afraid, no matter what you do — ticking across your skin as they walk — impervious to flinching or breath — oblivious almost to everything until you fling your hand in pantomime and suddenly they are gone.
cockroach brains are good for you
Extracts of ground-up brain and other nerve tissue from the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, and desert locust, Schistocerca gregaria, killed more than 90 percent of a type of E. coli that causes meningitis, and also killed methicillin-resistant staph, microbiologist Simon Lee reported Sept. 7 at the Society for General Microbiology meeting at the University of Nottingham in England.
Quote out of context
Coby Schal of North Carolina State said he formerly used condoms filled with rabbit blood, but switched to parafilm because his condom budget raised eyebrows with university auditors.
Isabella Rossellini’s Bed Bugs Video, as seen on The Daily Show
from the spam
If you put a piece of candy on the sidewalk ants will come for it if put a rock in front of the candy the ants will go around and over if you sit there all day with a magnifying glass and thumb squashing and burning them the will still come and you wasted your day. Until you get rid of the candy and the ones placing it on the sidewalk the ants are going to come
Cicada Mania
For those who cannot get enough of cicadas, there is a website, Cicada Mania, devoted to them.
There is also a website “in celebration of our singing insects”, Songs of Insects.
Loitering
just outside my motel room.
Anyone recognize him?
The Super Structure
To give a brief overview, these scientists poured ten tons of cement into these ant hills, let them dry for a month and then excavated the area to discover just what these incredible insects had been building.
The appropriate response, I think, is awe.
(Ebert)
Jesus Bees
Over the course of the fair, 40 000 worker bees were released into the case to complete a wax honeycomb structure over the figure of a martyred christ rising out of the chaos, his weight seeming to be upheld by the mass strength of the swarm. the figure within the vitrine is made of a laser sintered framework in which the industrious bees created a honeycomb skin overbefore filling each cell with the honey they produce. then bees worked to remove the honey from the cells and return it to the beehive, cleaning the figure back to the wax cells they originally created.
‘Unbearable Lightness‘ by Dutch designer Tomáš Gabzdil Libertiny.
(via marginal revolution)
Tiger Swallowtail
They’re back. I always like to watch them visit the zinnia bed. This one has been chewed on a bit, but was still able to make the rounds of many flowers.
Quote out of context.
I asked him to clarify how this activity fit into his work as a recording engineer, but before he could answer he leapt to his feet and began chasing a small moth around the room. He finally smashed it against a wall, declared that it had “fainted,” picked it up off the ground, named it “Gary,” and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
-Ronya
Cornelia Hesse-Honegger documents mutant nuclear insects
Conventional wisdom holds that nuclear power stations don’t leak enough radiation to create malformed organisms. But in some locations, Hesse-Honegger discovered mutations — curtailed feelers, misshapen legs, asymmetrical wings — in as many as 30 percent of the bugs she gathered. That’s 10 times the overall rate of about 3 percent for insects found in the wild. “For me, the mutated bugs were like prototypes of a future nature,” she says. A selection of Hesse-Honegger’s work will be shown this fall in Berlin.
Many more images at the link.
from the comments
Sheila and Daryl, that “worm farm” thing you did was representative of why I like to read CF. And I feel weird about de-lurking to comment on it, but God said it was okay, just this once.
Y’all
It’s three weeks from today.
the larger-than average Palouse earthworm
Two living specimens of the once thought extinct Giant Palouse earthworm have been found on the Washington-Idaho border.
The recent discovery of the worms appeared to dispel the myth about the creature’s appearance. They don’t spit, or smell like lilies, and aren’t even that giant.
“One of my colleagues suggested we rename it the ‘larger-than average Palouse earthworm,’” Johnson-Maynard said when the find was announced Tuesday.
from the comments
Yes, but few people know that body lice wear clothes. Early on their ability to mimic their environment evolved to generate structures that appeared to be loincloths, and later chitenous appendages resembling shoes began to appear. This hypersensitivity to appearances was made doubly absurd by the fact that they predated the magnifying glasses needed to observe such things. Only recently has the evolutionary strategy implicit in this mutation become clear: We are now able to observe the clothing of lice, and we have discovered that their fashion sense is far ahead of our own. A congress of well-known designers was recently invited to hover about a stereo microscope and then to comment–and participants who didn’t instantly dissolve into tears left quickly, issuing instructions to assistants as all were swept away in limousines. And lately, a style of blouses rife with a purple flame of cilia has become the rage. As for shoes–well: humans walking in the new ones never fall down and must constantly fight off unwanted sexual partners.
body lice evolved as humans began to wear clothing
Using DNA to trace the evolutionary split between head and body lice, researchers conclude that body lice first came on the scene approximately 190,000 years ago. And that shift, the scientists propose, followed soon after people first began wearing clothing.
how flies fly
Fruit flies beat their wings about once every 4 milliseconds — much faster than their neurons can fire — and can turn 120 degrees in 18 wing beats. This made study co-author Itai Cohen of Cornell University wonder, “How much of the wing motion is being controlled by the insect, and how much is going along for the ride, being controlled by aerodynamics?”
Don’t trust those with bedbug-infested bedclothes
Flavor chemists have found that cilantro aroma is created by a half-dozen or so substances, and most of these are modified fragments of fat molecules called aldehydes. The same or similar aldehydes are also found in soaps and lotions and the bug family of insects.
Soaps are made by fragmenting fat molecules with strongly alkaline lye or its equivalent, and aldehydes are a byproduct of this process, as they are when oxygen in the air attacks the fats and oils in cosmetics. And many bugs make strong-smelling, aldehyde-rich body fluids to attract or repel other creatures.
95 million year old insects
Newly discovered chunks of amber are providing glimpses into the evolution of plant and insect life 95 million years ago.
The amber, which is formed when plant resin fossilizes, preserving flora and fauna trapped within, was found in what is now northwest Ethiopia. Ninety-five million years ago, it was part of a disintegrating Gondwana, one of two vast land masses that spawned the seven modern continents.
The image above is of a false fairy wasp.
