The insects, arachnids and myriapods pictures thread

This isn’t a picture, but it’s an interesting thing, to me anyway.

Someone was recently taking about whether it’s humane to boil a lobster. I said that a lobster basically had the level of consciousness on par with an insect, but in order to demonstrate this i googled a bit. While i knew a bunch of the numbers shown here, i had never really seen a table like this before.

One of the things that i found interesting was that lobsters actually have far less developed of a central nervous system than most insects. A lobster only has around 100k neurons, total.

By comparison, an ant or a fruitfly has around 250k.

Anyway, not a picture of insects, but still neat to me.

Fascinating stuff, Timex! Your point about lobsters makes me think of how Alton Brown refers to lobsters as “bugs” throughout his lobster episode of Good Eats.

Spotted this spider on my door outside a minute ago and got her to jump on my finger for a better view. But this gal did not want to get her picture taken and made it difficult. Not the most exciting lil spider but this thread needed a bump so now maybe the better bug hunters can add some pics.

She’s so little

I went to but a car today, but the dealership was closed. However, while walking around looking at the cars, i encountered a Cecropia moth, which is apparently the largest moth in North America.

Wow, look at that thing! It looks massive.

Those moths are so beautiful.

I finally got two good pictures today’s add.
A fly eating out of our Elfin Thyme:

And a butterfly or moth doing the same. You can see his tongue (probiscus)

Elfin Thyme is very tiny. Flowers are just 2-4mm in size.

Saw these on my deck today. Cute now, but later…

Nice pics jp. Those tiny flowers look adorable.

Later…?

image

Thanks for the pics, guys! Keep it up this summer! Need me more arthropoda!

Deprived of camera, I can’t provide anything new, so I’ll just dig some stuff.

Here is a larva, that one of my local cousin identified as being a ladybird.

An Aphrophora maritime in the Kansai. That bug fascinated me.

@Simonout’s jorogumo, from the other side — sadly in a quite poorly attended web.

The variety of shapes, colours and patterns of those respectable spiders is fascinating. You can almost always spot a tiny male hiding in one of the top corner of their web, waiting for their opportunity.

I had no idea ladybird’s started out so ugly!

Jesus, @krayzkrok. Bug spines on your eyeball, being pushed into your eyeball by your contact lenses. This belongs in a horror movie or something. Ahhhhh!

Aw, look at those happy guys! (And much less happy plant…)

Maggots… I hate these guys.

Dang they have just annihilated that plant.

A beautiful allegory of mankind’s condition. If only we were as cute!

Here’s my caterpillar necropolis pics from a walk a few years back.

And here’s the spider that lives in my bike shed.