Bugwatching

I emailed myself this link recently, in case I wanted to post some spider pictures. I found it via Neurophilosophy.

This guy, Mike Libby, found a dead beetle one day and, intrigued by its beautiful exoskeleton, installed some watch parts in it. Why? I don't know, really. His artist statement type page says he explores "themes of science, nature, fantasy, history and autobiography; highlighting illogical and acute correspondences between the real and unreal."

The results aren't working watches or clocks, but rather really compelling little pieces of cybernetic sculpture.

He's got beetles, and butterflies, and dragonflies, and of course arachnids. He continues to work with found specimens occasionally, but he also obtains them from some kind of entomology supply house. In addition, you can send him a specimen you're particularly fond of and, if possible, he'll make it into a custom piece for you.

The news? It's all lies.

Maybe you heard this item on Weekend Edition last Saturday: a bunch of lobsters escaped their tank in a Stuttgart grocery store, and made a run for it. They were able to scuttle out under a loose shutter or metal grate and into the street, where were found by a passerby, apprehended by animal control, and brought to a shelter. Apparently the store has not claimed them. The source cited in the NPR story was this story in Spiegel Online International, but when I looked it up, I also found a link to the same story on the Australian site news.com.au, but the escapees were identified in that story as crayfish.

So which is it? The Spiegel Online story was posted first, but both stories were online well before the NPR story aired on Saturday. They had time to figure it out, I should think. I suppose if I had a choice, I would go on the air with the lobster story, as it offers the cheap but totally worth-it opportunity to play the song "Rock Lobster," which one doesn't hear often enough on the radio, but accuracy is kind of a key thing for me. On the other hand, maybe it's one of those weird Aussie "you say tomato, we say crayfish" type things. But still, which is it? Can we believe anything we hear on NPR? Anything we read online? I mean, a coupla dozen lobsters walking down the street is one thing, but a bunch of crayfish? I mean, they're a hell of a lot smaller than lobsters, in my experience.

Still, it would be weird to be walking down the street at 2 a.m. and see either one, so I guess the difference is maybe only important to certain types of people. Sort of like the whole octopus vs. squid thing. I mean, why would you find either of them in your driveway in Wisconsin while you were clearing snow out of the driveway? What does it really matter which it is?

Yeah, OK they're similar, lobsters & crayfish; they belong to the same phylum, subphylum, class, order, and infraorder (Arthropoda, Crustacea, Malacostraca, Decapoda, and Astacidea, respectively), but lobsters belong to the family Nephropidae, while crayfish are either Astacoidea (Latreille, 1802) or Parastacoidea (Huxley, 1879). Generally, lobsters live in saltwater, crayfish in freshwater, but in New Zealand there is a saltwater-dwelling crayfish commonly called the spiny lobster. And most lobsters are bigger than most crayfish, though there are some smallish lobsters and some biggish crayfish that are around the same size.

Anyway, I had to look this all up because when I heard it on the radio Saturday, I thought I was dreaming. Do you ever do that? I mean, have really wacky dreams when you're half-asleep, and then later you find out that they weren't actually dreams, but stuff you heard on the radio? Or that it was a dream, but the subject matter was heavily informed by the story on the radio? During the week, I have the radio on from about 6 am until noon, so I usually hear the earliest Morning Edition stories over again and realize what's going on, dream-wise, because the show is only two hours long and repeats itself. But on Saturday, they don't repeat it, at least on my local NPR station. So I had to look this story up on account of it was just so weird, and I couldn't tell if I was making it up or not.

Not least because it had one of my favorite B-52's songs underneath the brief story.

Nutty McNutcase

I have had this poster in my kitchen since my very first apartment; I think it was a housewarming gift. I couldn't find a legible online version; but each item includes, in addition to the picture, the number and symbol (same as on the real periodic table), the Latin name of the item, and the number of calories per 100 grams uncooked. It's come in handy a couple of times lately as I have several fruit and nut trees in the back yard that I'm not sure what they are.

Whatever they are, Ruby is enormously entertained by both the falling fruits and nuts and the wildlife that comes to investigate. Her new nickname is Nutty McNutcase.

I have a couple of what I think are pecan trees next to the patio, and there are lots of nuts falling down and they're driving poor Ruby, well, nuts. A lot of them fall directly onto the patio, and a couple have actually fallen on her (and one hit my neighbor, who'd stopped by for a glass of wine). They also roll off the garage roof and she catches them on the bounce, and tosses them in the air, and then searches kind of frantically for a place to bury them. These are more exciting than the ones that fall directly from the tree, as there's some warning they're coming.

She'll accumulate several in one spot, cover them with dirt, and then notice that I've seen where she put them, so she'll dig them all up and hide them somewhere else. I've had to actively discourage her from bringing them in the house, because I'm tired of finding them under my pillow, in between the sofa cushions, and on the floor, where I step on them and twist my ankles. Confiscating them at the doorway is harder than one might think; the pecans, especially, fit right in her mouth and I don't always notice that she has one. She does not want to surrender them.

There's also, apparently, a black walnut tree either on the very edge of my yard or in the neighbor's yard, and sometimes those nuts hit the garage roof and roll down onto the patio. They're bigger and heavier than the pecans, and rounder. Even more entertaining, though less numerous.

And just to the side of the patio there's a tree with some kind of fruit that might be a persimmon? It's shaded by the house next door, so all the fruits are up too high to get a good look at them, and the few I've found on the ground are too rotted to tell for sure what they are. Not anything I'm very familiar with. Do persimmons even grow here? From what I can see, they are going to start falling off en masse any day now, so I'll be able to check them out. If the birds don't get them all first.

But last night Ruby brought in an item a little bit bigger than a golf ball, but smaller than a baseball. I'd heard something heavier than the usual nuts fall in the back yard. Ruby investigated and returned, looking very pleased with herself, with what I thought might be a smallish pear. I got it from her on the way in, and brought it into the kitchen to get a closer look. It was too round to be a pear, and the outside was the texture & color of a lime that's been in the fridge a bit too long. So I rinsed it off and cut into it with a sharp paring knife. The cut didn't go all the way through, but I opened it enough to see a dark, kind of fig-like fleshy glop, and maybe there was a hard central pit-type thing (like a black walnut?), but I didn't look any closer or cut any deeper because it was also full of tiny white squirmy worms that didn't seem too happy to be disturbed.

My first thought? Take a picture! But I left the big camera at work, and the little one I have at home has no flash. Dammit! Second thought? Eeeuuuwww! Get that thing out of my kitchen!!! So I tossed it out the back door. Ruby was not very happy about this. It was gone when we went out this morning, but I found a couple more whole ones, which I left where Ruby can't get them. Gotta remember to bring the camera home from work. But I'm cutting it open outside.

Out in the yard this morning

Ruby and I were just out in the backyard. We got a little rain the night before last, so it's neither excessively dusty nor muddy. It's been kind of grey and cool, but the sun is starting to shine.

She found a very new, very large black corduroy slipper somewhere, and was having quite a big time with it. It was difficult to persuade her to let go of it, but she did not damage it. I suspect it belongs to the guy who lives in my carriage house apartment, who was moving boxes of stuff out last night. No one stays in that apartment for very long; within six months they meet their dream dates and move out into some kind of happily-ever-after scenario. OK, n=2 (so far!), but this has happened to 100% of them. I'm thinking that I should call it the Love Shack, and double the rent.

But after I'd liberated the slipper, and Ruby had gone on to bark wildly at some tree-dwelling mammals in the way back yard, I started to hear a persistent tapping noise. I looked up and saw what I think is a Hairy Woodpecker. About two feet away from me. I think it was too big to be a Downy Woodpecker. He noticed me and moved to another tree about six feet away and up higher than I can reach, but kept on with the tap-tap-tapping, flipping from one tree to another. Not sure he found what he was looking for, though, as he did not hang around very long.

The Green Moth

I have a new guy living in my carriage house apartment and he is very cool. He works nights and the other day he brought this moth home for me in his lunch container. He just thought I'd like to see it, for one thing; for another thing, some birds were trying to eat it. You can see that there is kind of a tear in its tail region. It sat for a while in the container, and then I helped it crawl out and perch on this stick. And then after a while it folded up the lower parts of its wings, so that it looked like a spaceship or a sea creature. The antennae were especially fascinating, I think.

After hanging out on the porch railing for a while, it found a shady spot rather too close to Ruby's water dish, but it was gone the next time we went outside.

Spring is springing

These aren't the first ones I've seen, but I took this picture in my yard this morning. With the cellphone. Pretty, no?

It got up to about 60F today, with shiny sun and breezy breezes.

I can't wait to see what tomorrow will bring.

Spider pics

I stopped by to say howdy to my friend fstorch, intrepid urban wildlife photographer, the other day and found him crouched in some shrubbery behind his workshop.

He had a camera in his hand, so I tried not to make any noise until he stood up. I didn't want to frighten any timid wildlife.

By the time he was done and I walked over to see what he was photographing, it was already gone. While he watched, this tiny spider had tossed out strands of silk into the breeze and then when it caught somewhere, the spider took off -- whoosh! You can see the first strand of silk here, and then multiple strands here, and what I think is a pre-launch shot here.

Add this to the list of things I worry about

Squirrel bitings.

I worry sometimes about my sister the mailman: she could be attacked by a mean dog, or a mean customer, or a crazy person; she could be run over by a crazy person in a car; she could fall on the ice, or on someone's unshoveled sidewalk, or a broken stair railing could catch her bag and cause her to tip over into someone's shrubbery (that really happened); plus the back pain from carrying around all those stupid mail-order catalogs, the stress of mandatory overtime -- especially during the winter with the damn daylight savings time thing making it dark so freaking early. But it never even occurred to me to worry that she might get bit by a squirrel and have to get rabies shots.

Well, it happened to a letter carrier in Oil City, PA, last Monday and she had to go to the hospital and get treated for cuts and scratches inflicted by a squirrel that attacked her while delivering the mail. "We are not issuing a squirrel alert," said Steve Jolley, a USPS manager in Oil City, "but everyone is aware of the incident."

Awwww

A heartwarming spider story from last week's news: A great big yellow spider has settled on the front porch of the Smith family of somewhere near Akron, and they've stopped using the front door in an effort not to disturb the nearly six-inch golden silk spider. Golden silk spiders are not poisonous, but apparently it's giving dad Kim Smith "the heebie-jeebies."

I guess Akron is north of the Really Big Spider Line.

I sure am glad they didn't freak out and try to kill the spider, which is thought to have hitched a ride to Ohio from South Carolina in (or on) the Smiths' car during their recent vacation. Good thing it didn't crawl across the dashboard while Mr. Smith was driving.

from NewsNet5, via snopes.com

There's fungus among us. And slime mold

No, I'm not talking about politics.

It's that time of year again. Occasional commenter Fstorch sent me this photo he took the other day of a field full of mushrooms just down the street a ways.

He was driving by and saw all these mushrooms that had sprouted up practically overnight. Huge mushrooms, all over the whole field. Intrepid nature photographer that he is, he immediately circled back and got his camera and documented the event. And of course sent it to me, because, well, I asked him to. They do spring up all over the place here this time of year -- and not just mushrooms. All kinds of fungi.

Also slime mold, which as it turns out, isn't really a fungus, technically. It just sort of looks like it must be fungal in nature, and it usually appears in the same kinds of places, and under the same general conditions: hot, humid, dark, dank, yucky. Decaying wood chip mulch, yum.

In fact, slime molds (Kingdom: Protista; Phylum: Amoebozoa Class: Mycetozoa) were classified with the fungi for a long time, at least by the mycologists, who called them Myxomycetes ("slime fungi"). The zoologists also claimed them, however, and classified them as Mycetozoa, or "fungus animals," which I think is charming. The zoologists appear to have prevailed in some respects.

These photos are from late last summer, and also from Fstorch; I'm not sure why I didn't post them here at the time, but I think it was at the beginning of that blogging and writing and thinking slump that I had going for a while there. Slime mold is more interesting than politics, as you can see.

Anyway, these photos show a slime colony in two of its several life cycle manifestations. Seriously cool looking stuff, I think, although apparently it's sometimes mistaken for dog vomit. It's even referred to sometimes as Dog Vomit Mold. I'm not making that up. This one was in the little garden right outside our neighborhood pub. And yes! it really does move! Kind of. You can sort of see it when you compare these two pictures, even accounting for the difference in scale. They were taken maybe a day apart.

And this from the wikipedia entry on slime molds:

"In the DVD release of "This is Spinal Tap" there is an outtake of an interview with David St. Hubbins where he speaks of slime moulds, saying "They are both plant AND animal...it's like they can't make up their mind...but if they ever did, they can take us over just like that!"

Think about it. But not too hard.

Friday llama blogging

Hey, remember that nice wedding I went to a while ago? Did I mention there were llamas there? There were llamas there. At least I think they were llamas. I'm not entirely sure if these are llamas or alpacas, to be perfectly honest.

But in any case, there I was with the Holga, and there were the llamas (or whatever), so of course I had to photograph them. They didn't seem to mind, though when I rejoined the crowd at the party, someone mentioned that they'd been waiting anxiously to see whether I was going to grab hold of the fence, which was of course electrified (it's visible at the bottom of the frame and behind the llama's head). I didn't. I could see the insulator thingys at the corners and I figured it was probably electric. How else are you going to keep a bunch of llamas inside the fence?

Blueberries for Stella

Stella loves to eat berries. Here she is in my lovely ex-wife's front yard in the blueberry patch. You can't quite tell in this blurry photo, but she's eating them right off the bush.

That's a blueberry branch, visible just to the left of the black-eyed Susans, in case you can't tell. Stella is the pointy-eared black dog on the right. She only picks the ripe ones, but she can be quite greedy about them. It's so adorable I can hardly stand it.

She does the same thing with blackberries. She's been doing this since we first took her out on a hike and found some blackberries when she was just a pup.

And of course she likes it when you feed her just about anything; in the photo at left, that's my lovely ex-wife's hand dropping blueberries into Stella's mouth. I tried to get the perfect photo of the berry falling, but I just can't get the hang of the delay on the digital camera. And it was just a little too light out for the flash & a little too dark out for really sharp photos.

Despite Stella's enthusiasm for blueberries -- and her ability to be way too adorable for me to make her stop eating them, I picked about two pints on Saturday, and it really seemed as if more were ripening even as I picked them. I'm sure there will be several more pints waiting to be picked when I get home tonight.

Yum. And of course they freeze well, and frozen blueberries are an excellent snack in hot weather, for dogs and their humans. Lots of antioxidants.

Leaves of three, let it be -- right?

I like to sit out on my porch. I can talk to my neighbors, enjoy the (relatively) cool evening air, get much better cellphone reception, and every night this time of year there are all these fireflies that rise slowly up out of the grass and up up up into the treetops starting at dusk.

That's the good part.

The bad part is the poison ivy. And the brown recluse spiders (sorry, no photo yet). Apparently there are poisonous snakes as well, but only the first two come up on to my damn porch.

Searching for meaning. And ass.

I was looking at my site stats earlier today. That's certainly amusing and instructive. Most folks seem to arrive here at alphabitch.org on purpose via their own bookmarks or links from other sites/comments, but a few show up here via links from search engines. For the last 100 visits (as of this morning), the top five search strings were "DIY haircuts," "Dynastes tityus," "ants on countertops," "ass," and "Tab Energy." In order of popularity, in case you care.

Ass? Who the hell opens a search window and types only the word "ass?" I guess I did use the word in the title of a recent post, so of course that's what popped up. I don't really know what they were looking for of course, but I suspect that it's something they won't find here.

Among the Tab Energy-related searches, my favorite was "tab drink (pink)." I hope they didn't take it too personally when I described it as "way too fucking pink." Although they would have seen on their search result that the headline of my post was Tab Energy Drink is an abomination, so caveat lector, as they say.

Of the Dynastes tityus searchers, most appeared to be trying to find out where to buy one to keep as a pet. Beetles as pets? It's true that they're fascinating critters, and I guess they would be pretty low-maintenance compared to certain other pets I could name my blog after. But when I do trap Coleoptera under glass to observe them (and I do that from time to time), they seem alarmed and, frankly, a little hostile -- and who could blame them? I don't think I'd want to keep one for a pet. Not because I think they're icky & weird, but it just seems mean. I wouldn't want to be responsible for incarcerating a creature that is constantly alarmed & hostile. They're sure pretty, though. Maybe you can get some kind of happy beetle habitat, or -- hell, I don't know, maybe you can train them. For all I know they make loving and attentive pets. I guess I need to follow some of the other links in those searches.

The DIY haircut folks included one searching for "cute haircuts of 2006" [gosh, you really think so?], and one looking for information on "compulsive behaviour" + haircutting. I hope they followed my links to Liz and Mrs. Kennedy. That has been one of my more popular posts for a while now.

"Ants on countertops" searches also included one search for "'tactile hallucinations' + bugs." The less said about ants the better, as far as I'm concerned. But I will say that I learned this morning that there's a reason they call sweet corn sweet: on account of it contains enough sugar that the one kernel left in the bottom of my sink when I rinsed out my plate last night was sufficient to attract ooty pazillion ants.

Oh, the horror that was my morning. No way could I make coffee or eat breakfast. I did put on a pair of gloves and wipe away that kernel of corn and every other speck of remotely food-like debris from the drain. And discovered that I am out of bleach, dammit.

There were also quite a few amusing search strings that each led one person here. Some of them led to a specific post, but the weirder ones just led to an archive page that happened to contain all of the words in the strings that weren't enclosed in quotes. My favorites, and the posts (or archive pages) they found:

• kitten carpal problems [I was the #1 result in that search. Go figure.];
• fishbone bicycle stop;
• what does a dream of being hit by another car mean?;
• white german shepherd puppy skin blotchy; and
• what is the difference between an octopus and a squid?

The 'Squid? or Octopus?' post is one of my favorite stories, and it seems like the one that is most frequently linked to in other peoples' sites.

Oh, and a couple of people have found this site lately from search strings with the word 'bisexual' in it. Unfortunately they end up at this post, which is kind of boring. This one, from quite a while ago, is a little more entertaining.

[Update: I just added the picture of my beloved alphabitch to the above post. I sort of miss her today.]

Enough of cute?

"It's like he's coming out of the fog to rescue me from some bender that has gone so badly that I think it's going well. He'll nurse me back to sobriety and sanity. This time's for real."

Occasional commenter fstorch, rescuer of turtles and baby owls and suchlike, sent me this link, and, well, it's a blog full of pictures of fossas and rusty spotted genets and tapirs and the degu pictured here. No cute puppies or kitties, just lots of pygmy lorises and javelinas and lemurs. And so much more. Plus some seriously weird comments. As the proprieter over there says, it's "puppy dog eyes without all the puppy dog." The blog is called JustALittleGuy. The proprieter of the blog goes by the name Awwwww.

Baby owls & a mockingbird

These two juvenile barred owls fell out of a tree during a recent storm, and my friend (the same one who rescued the turtle last fall) found out about them so we went and got Stella's old crate and pick them up and he ended up keeping them for a couple of days waiting for the wild bird rescue people to pick them up.

It took quite a few phone calls, and he got a lot of conflicting advice, but all ended well for the birds as far as we can tell. One of the places my friend called told him to try to feed them dry cat food, but they were not particularly interested in it. They did, however, respond pretty enthusiastically to the takeout mice offered by another friend who keeps them on hand for his snakes. They may look like adorable little puffballs, but those beaks and talons are the tools of highly efficient predators.

I feel lucky to have crossed paths with them briefly. They are beautiful birds. Unlike the mockingbird in the tree outside my window. I don't feel lucky at all at 4 a.m. every day to wake up to hear him do his car alarm imitation. You can tell it's a bird making the noise, but the resemblance to one of those awful car alarms that cycle through about seven different annoying sounds is uncanny.

Urban wildlife

Stella & I missed all the excitement at the neighborhood pub the other day. A friend of mine was there with his camera, though, & sent these photos of the box turtle he found in the parking lot. A beautiful specimen and apparently on some kind of mission, traveling obliviously across lawns and pavement and a gravel parking lot. A death-defying mission, you could say. After posing for these photos, the turtle submitted to the relocation efforts of kind-hearted pub patrons.

I've been thinking a lot about this turtle, and all the other turtles I've known. I'm afraid I've become a little bit numb with my rage at all the senseless death going on everywhere, and it did my heart good to know that somebody had bothered to try to keep this turtle off the road. Their beautiful and durable shells give them a perfect refuge from all but the most wily and persistent predators, but they are no match for cars. Plus they don't move very fast.

Looking at these pictures reminds me of a box turtle I once knew by the name of Fred; when I last saw Fred about ten or twelve years ago, he had been living for almost 30 years with this guy in my revolutionary knitting group. I think my friend felt a little bad about keeping him captive, but he was worried that Fred would end up dead on the pavement.

So Fred had his own aquarium with the kind of light he needed to keep his shell in shape and keep warm. There was a pool in it, and some plants and pretty rocks, and on one side there was a whole gallery of turtle-themed art taped to the outside of the glass for him to enjoy. He ate mostly cat kibble, with occasional bugs & stuff. He spent a few hours each day in the aquarium but was otherwise given free run of the house, much to the amusement of the cats. They loved to follow him around, but when they got too curious, he'd of course just pull inside his shell and freak the cats out.

I went over there one day to see the litter of kittens that a stray cat had showed up to deliver. They were all in a cardboard box being cute in that helpless newborn mammal kind of way. Several of us were standing around staring at them when someone said, "Hey, look at Fred!" He was moving pretty briskly, for a turtle, circumambulating the box (there's just no other word to describe what he was doing), stopping every now and again, craning his neck to try to see into the box. He seemed agitated. Worried? How to tell? My friend sat down on the floor and held Fred so he could see inside. He stared for quite a long time at the kittens. Finally he looked up at my friend, who put him down. Fred sat calmly near the box for quite a long time after that.

Spider pics

Some nice photos of jumping spiders via Hattie's Blog.

Still too busy to post much, but do check out the puppy pictures over at Twisty's place -- and read her posts while you're there. She's very funny. And smart.

Visitor

I guess this is going to be an all-bug blog for a while. I'm too tired of looking at words all day to write anything, so here's another nifty bug.

You can click on the picture for a closer look, should you want one. It's not a very big specimen, but I think it's kind of pretty against the peeling paint and the oxidized metal. Not a great place for a bug to be, what with people going in & out & closing the door, so my friend transported it across the parking lot & into a nice leafy tree. It stayed there for a while but was gone by the time I arrived, alas.

Glad I got to see the pictures, anyway.

Fish or cut bait

This is a catalpa (or catawba) worm. It's the caterpillar stage in the life cycle of the Catalpa sphinx moth. The moths lay zillions of eggs on the leaves of catalpa trees, and when they hatch, they (very swiftly!) eat all the leaves & climb down to the ground to pupate in the dirt. I think you'll get a larger picture if you click on that one, & you can sort of see the bare twigs where there used to be leaves. Apparently these make excellent fish bait, but I'll probably never confirm this myself. I'm also told that there is a species of hunting wasp that lays its eggs on these particular caterpillars; haven't seen any of them yet, though.