I keep seeing these cute little things scurrying across the paths here in Oregon. I have no idea what they are.
That makes sense. If you have a lamp on outside on a summer night, you’ll get fifty of those moths flying around it. But how did you search google for that?
“Brown and red caterpillar” were the exact terms of this highly scientific endeavor.
Why do I always get the sense Mantis are flashing their eyes at us?
Baby season!
A little Brown Huntsman just before being rescued from the shower:
A batch of Golden Orb Weaver spiderlings, see the egg sac bottom right:
I lack the equipment to get great close-ups of them, sorry!
I was really lucky growing up, and had several by my home. But the best was at a boarding school, where a science teacher had apparently brought a huge bunch of eggs and essentially made a hatchery on the school grounds. They were everywhere, in all their brilliant varieties. Just awesome insects.
Best teacher.
Bring those spider babies to a school and with them, wonderment, Profanicus!
Here are some photos of my Enma Crickets: tough to catch them properly with my bad camera, as they don’t like light.
They are surprisingly aware of any presence:
This one really doesn’t like light, at all:
Here are all six of them. But where is Waldo, the sixth?
I see a leg behind the blue bowl!
I hope his name is Waldo.
Ding-ding-ding!
Your turn!
… oops, wrong thread.
I saw a weird thing today.
I was riding my bike at dusk, and came across this:
Those columns in the right of the path are swarms of gnats.
It’s really weird that they all formed these columns, perpendicular to the ground’s surface and thus at an angle. There were dozens of them, going on for a few hundred yards, a few feet apart from each other.
That’s weird. Are you sure they’re only in those columns and that those aren’t just being illuminated by sun rays coming through the trees?
No picture, but I’d just like to say that the aphid population this year (southern Michigan) is absolutely ridiculous. I can’t go outside for five minutes without having half a dozen crawling all over me it seems, and the goldenrod was covered one end to the other with them.
I wonder what that says about the predatory bug populations.
Absolutely sure… there were no sun beams. It was pretty overcast. (also, that’s not the direction the sun would be coming from, as my back is basically to the west in that picture, and there are no trees between where the gnats are and the sun.
The gnats were absolutely just forming up in columns.
That is weird, and interesting.
Apparently, it’s a thing that gnats do during mating (form columns), but I didn’t find anything about them making a big long line of them like that.
I suspect it’s got something to do with the end times.
It’s the way they’re perpendicular to the ground too.
totally normal
