Like now that I am awake I need to reiterate how huge this is. It was presumed harvested to extinction by the Romans. It was a favorite flavoring and according to historians one of the best contraceptives ever known. True or not it would be fantastic to study that but it being extinct made that impossible.
This is such a huge deal! I hope they get it figured how to grow it.
i learned that there’s a Japanese beetle that when eaten by a frog will haul ass through its digestive system and escape out the back end unscathed (x)
you eat me and i perfectly dodge all of your digestive enzymes and stomach acid and i sprint out your asshole fully intact
DID YOU ALL KNOW THAT YOU CAN DO WHATEVER UOU WANT WHEN YOURW MAKING ART ISNT THAT WILD
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i have no defense against this. you’ve got me
dual's Posts
Dude giving a butterfly garden tour to a kid is way different then giving a tour too an adult. Kids will ask me fun and silly questions like “whats the biggest butterfly ever?” while adults will jumpscare me by randomly asking me to explain my opinions on how the US government handles climate change and how that impacts bugs.
idk how to explain how sad it is that on a post where i say “on earth” in big bold text a very large amount of people immediately think in an exclusively human fashion. like maybe im reading too much into it but it just reminds me of how common it is that humans will only think of humans as the “main” life form on earth.
me thinking of eyes ratios: well, spiders for one
me thinking of legs ratios: hm. spiders
This is a lot harder than it seems initially. I voted “legs” and i just now realized…fish
The most numerous animals by a mile are ants (5 eyes, 6 legs) and krill (2 eyes, 10 legs). There are more krill in the ocean than fish, @headspace-hotel! So leg sweep is safe from fishes.
My main concern is that green algae have one eye each. But only the cells with flagella have eyes, so if we count the flagellum as a leg it cancels out.
Ants have many more than five eyes! I think you’re thinking of the compound eyes and the ocelli–ocelli being the three simple eyes on top. (However, ocelli are only needed by flying insects, to orient themselves relative to the sun. The majority of ants are non-flying workers, who have no ocelli!)
But as for the compound eyes, they’re not just two eyes. Each compound eye is formed of ommatidia, each ommatidium a little eye comparable to one of the ocelli. One insect can have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of eyes!
So, yes. Many more eyes than legs on this planet. Many more.
“counting compound eyes is cheating” well I regret to inform people that if spider eyes count, every facet of a fly’s eye is one of those
do we count the pseudo legs on caterpillars as legs?
entomologists are the most fucking wild people ive ever met
i pointed out a cool wasp to one and she just picked it up with her bare hands and started showing me different features she was using to identify the species
on a walk with another one he just paused, turned, violently shoved his hand into some rotting wood and offered me a tunnel web spider like oh okay i guess-
when i was in college i did larp shit and one of the guys in the group was an entomology student and i once watched him drop directly to a plank position in the middle of a swordfight to look at a moth on the ground
i used to work at a used bookstore and there was an insect anatomy book for sale that was over $8000 im not even kidding. and i just found it at my school library. its mine for the month.
It’s page after page of the most detailed illustration on insect morphology I’ve ever seen
External anatomy only I’m afraid, but an absolutely invaluable resource nonetheless
It’s called An Atlas of Insect Morphology by Steinmann and Zombori. Looks like there are some much cheaper options now than when I last looked. When I saw it in the bookstore’s system I thought it was a pricing error but I remember looking it up and seeing one for sale that was over $10,000 so I was like okay then. I could only find pdfs from university libraries I don’t have access too. So I’m glad my school has a physical copy.
Idk if I can describe how useful this book is. It’s all illustration. The only text is the labels. I have a really nice book on insect anatomy but it’s like your classic textbook
Like very useful but it is still a pain to flip through a thousand page book looking for images but it’s mostly text. There aren’t nearly as many diagrams. It doesn’t show you nearly as many angles. It doesn’t show or label even close to level of detail the one above does.
In case anyone hasn’t read my tags: I’m going to scan this whole book and make it into a pdf. You all can have it for free. It will take a while. Bear with me.
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