Komodo Dragon of Wasps

Joan brings us this beauty, via Dailymail. Behold this newly discovered species of wasp, found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. 

This two-and-a-half inch monster has mandibles so large that when closed they wrap around its head. When opened, they are larger than its front legs. This specimen is a male warrior, which Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, describes as the komodo dragon of wasps.

What good are those mandibles for? Well, the obvious answer is that they would be good in defending the nest, as all good warrior wasps do. But they also aid in reproduction. Those mandibles wrap around a female wasp's thorax perfectly to hold her in place while they do their business.

How handy would it be if I, a self-styled warrior human (by virtue of the fact that I have a nest to defend and there are no other of-age males available to fulfill the role) came equipped with such mandibles? I wouldn't have need of my blunderbuss, moat, and hounds to ward off invaders. 

Alas, I don't think my wife would be impressed by the mandibles. 

Thanks, Joan!

Excuse me, there's a bug on your shoulder

Via our friends at Archie McPhee's Geyser of Awesome, here's a rhinoceros beetle out for a ride on a human being in Costa Rica.

If you're wondering if there's any chance a person could be that oblivious - no, he really does seem to be doing this on purpose, since he's smiling in this additional photo.

This guy may take second place to the zookeeper we saw a while ago with stick insects all over his face, but that's a real lover of ugly animals.

-Wombat (No Relation)

Year-End Reviews: Whose side are you on?

You have a choice. You could look at more of photographer Alex Wild's favorites from the past year on his blog Myrmecos, like the photo above. That's a type of army ant biting the photographer - getting a grip like that makes it easier for the ant to use her stinger at the other end.

Or you could look at The Telegraph's Review of the Cutest Animals Pictures of 2011. After all it does contain ugdorable babies like this orphaned wombat in a teacup:

Only you can decide what's right.

-Wombat (No Relation)

Up close and personal with ugly creatures

According to The Telegraph, "Senior invertebrate keeper Evan Armstrong is adorned in various species of stick insects to celebrate the opening of the Bugs Garden habitat at Wild Life Sydney." Do YOU love ugly animals that much?

And while I've got your attention: a shark-themed gift guide from our friends at Southern Fried Science.

-Wombat (No Relation)

The stuff of nightmares

You may be trying to comfort yourself that that is a child's hand and a baby carrot. It is not.

That's the largest specimen ever found of an insect called the weta, and has been declared the largest insect in the world in terms of weight. It has a wingspan of 7 inches and weighs 71g, which I am not going to translate into a weight system that I understand because I am afraid of the answer.

You can read more about it here, if you dare. You can also read more about Mark Moffett, who discovered it, here. The news coverage refers to him oddly as a "nature-lover" and "former park ranger," but he's actually a rather famous naturalist, explorer, and photographer.

-Wombat (No Relation)

Zombie caterpillars rain death from treetops!

That's the headline (well, without the exclamation point) from Live Science. It's a report of some research that apparently has significance if you care about the specifics of how genes work. But it's also full of riches if what you're interested in is ugly animals and ugly animal behavior.

That's a close up of the face of a gypsy moth. Lovely, right? Also badly behaved. As an invasive species introduced to North America, gypsy moths eat the heck out of our trees.

But when you're mad at gypsy moths, you can take pleasure in thinking about a horrific virus that infects them. It changes their behavior, making them climb to the treetops when they'd normally be hiding in a protected spot. It also stops them from molting, so they'll still eat and grow bigger. Soon they die, and that's when the fun really starts: their bodies liquefy, spewing virus-laden goo all over the tree and through the air to infect more moth victims.

Foresters hope that understanding this virus may help them to control the invasive moths. But it may have implications for us as well:

"Who knew that a virus could change the behavior of its host?" study author Jim Slavicek, of the U.S. Forest Service, said in a statement. "Maybe this is why we go to work when we have a cold."

-barring the doors and windows,
Wombat (No Relation)

Serengeti Nymph?

Usually, when we get an ID request it is of a bug from someone's backyard. Perhaps the same can be said of the critter below, but Dr. Colin Beale's backyard is the Southern Serengeti, in Tanzania.

Can anyone help us identify this wee beastie? Dr. Beale thinks it might be a cricket nymph. To help with the ID, it might be useful to know that he caught it trying to eat his brains (or else it was just resting on a soap dish with 1 cm ridges so you can know the scale, I can't remember).

If you would like to follow more of Dr. Beale's adventures in Tanzania (and I think you should), then go to Safari Ecology. It's full of pictures, mostly of creatures that are readily identifiable (and probably never to be found here). Thanks, Colin!

Hydrothermal Horrors

It's because of creatures below that I don't frequent hydrothermal vents in the abyssal depths of the ocean. I've read Dune, and I've seen Tremors, and such encounters rarely play out nicely.

True, this photo was taken with an electron microscope. True, this creature is almost as small as a bacterium, but the point remains. Although, it's never fair to look at a creature too closely. If you put a magnifying glass on my face, oh the porous horrors you'd see (a la Gulliver's time in Brobdingnag).

Photo source: FEI and Philippe Crassous via HuffPo

Thank you for the hydrothermal worm, Ellen. Our microscopic world just got a bit horrificer.

Ugly souvenir

I went to the beach this past weekend, and I brought you back something - it's a horsehoe crab.

Sadly, I found that I had just missed the annual horseshoe crab festival held in Milton, Delaware. (It's actually the Horsehoe Crab and Shorebird Festival, but we don't care about those pretty shorebirds on this blog.)

If you wonder why horseshoe crabs deserve a festival, I suggest you check out horseshoecrab.org. It's the website of a group that's devoted to their conservation, and it turns out, they're pretty amazing creatures. Did you know they have ten eyes? And they've been around since before the dinosaurs? And their blood is used to test medical products for bacterial contamination? No, you didn't. Go check it out.

-Wombat (No Relation)

More Food Chain Disrespect

You may recall a bit earlier I introduced you to the Giant Centipede, which doesn't follow normal food-chain conventions, given that a large portion of its diet are bats that it catches in flight. Today, I'll be giving you some new nightmares, with another bug that eats above it's station - the Giant Water Bug.

Now, Water Bugs like this are known to take small vertebrates (frogs and fish) for dinner, but the Giant Water Bug, Kirkaldyia deyrolli, from Japan sets its sights a bit higher.

Yes, it's eating a turtle. According to the researcher who photographed it, this particular specimen was about 6 cm long, less than half their maximum size of 15 cm. After catching it, as the bugs only catch live (or at least moving) prey, the Water Bug "insert[ed] its syringe-like rostrum into the prey's neck in order to feed." Again, not the proper order for the food chain. Similar species live across North and South America, as well as East Asia. They're nocturnal, can fly, and have a venomous bite. They have been know to bite humans, causing pain for several hours. Anyway, here's another one, this time eating a snake.

Thanks to the BBC for information and pictures.

Tkrausse

Possibly the most horrible ants ever

Wombat normally handles the posts about animals that don't act right, but these are so horrible that I just have to post them. I'd recommend not reading this post before/during/after eating, because you might not for another week. If you still want to continue, I bear no responsibility for the consequences.

Today's ants come from the genus Adetomyrma, more commonly known as "dracula ants". The sort of fill the evolutionary gap between ants and wasps, but it's their dietary habits that make them so disturbing. While the name "dracula ant" makes you think they'd go for blood for dinner, it's not your blood they want. According to Myrmecos Blog,

...ants have a skinny little waist through which their digestive tract must pass. Solid food would lodge in the bottleneck and kill the ant, so the ants can’t eat solids. They can only drink.

Yet, in forgoing solid food ants miss out on all sorts of protein available in the environment. Ants must either give up protein or figure out how to convert solids into drinkable juice. That’s where the larvae come in.

Larvae are made to eat and can handle all manner of food. They consume the solids that the worker ants have brought back to the nest and, after a little digestion, pass the protein back as a liquid. Most ant species have a simple, elegant way to do this: they regurgitate for the adults when prompted. But this direct food-passing behavior only appears in the more recent ant lineages. The ancient subfamily Amblyoponinae- including Adetomyrma- diverged from the rest of the ants over 100 million years ago and couldn’t inherit this sensible way of doing things.

Natural selection is a blind process. Evolution often solves problems with unexpected, rube-goldberg solutions that any reasonable designer would never implement, and the Amblyoponines happened on one of those odd solutions. They found a more morbid way to get at all those larval proteins. The adult ants just chew a hole in the larval skin. The hemolymph oozes out, and the adults take a drink.

Yes, these ants cut open their own young and drink their blood. Fortunately, the young seem to have no long-term harm (besides scaring from having their abdomen chewed open), and grow up to continue the cycle.

Enjoy your lunch,

tkrausse

Pictures courtesy of Myrmecos Blog and Cracked.com (NSFW/18+)

Poof Go the Spores

Lie is hard for tropical carpenter ants. You've got to work in the heat (wet heat), with little fluctuation in the seasons. You've got no union protection, and your boss treats you like just another drone. But that's nothing compared to zombie fungus.

That's right, here's yet another tale of critters getting zombified by a parasitic something or other. In this case, it's a fungus that infects a tropical carpenter ant, coerces it to climb 25cm up a plant, face NNE, latch onto the plant with its mandibles, and then die. The fungus then sprouts the twiggish growth you see below, and *poof* go the spores (a great band name, if I do say so myself).

Thanks for the link, Kris. I'll be sure to skip the mushrooms on my pizza tonight. You can never be too sure.

Photo source: Pete Huele via CBC

Giant Centipede Doesn't Respect Food Chain

The food chain, while informal, does tend to have a few rules. Chief among them is the general consensus that those of us with backbones get to eat the ones that don't (I am in favor of this being a rule, even if it isn't, owing to the fact that I, and most of you reading, have backbones). Unfortunately, no one bothered to tell the Giant Amazonian Centipede about this little rule. He tends to enjoy eating such things as mice and bats.

Yes, that mouse is in trouble. The Giant Centipede grows over a foot long (see first picture for scale - no that's not me, I'd be way to chicken), and is extremely venomous. Mice are easy, he just has to sneak up behind them. Bats are a bit tougher, seeing as the Giant Centipede isn't content to catch them on the ground. Instead, he nabs them in flight.

He does this by climbing onto cave ceilings and hanging down. Then, when a bat flies by, he grabs it and bites. His venom is so powerful that the bat is killed instantaneously. It takes him an hour or two to eat, but after that, I think he deserves it. Watch a video of him in action below.

Strangely, people have been adopting them as pets recently. If you decide to follow them, remember

extreme care must be taken while handling them due to the fact that the slightest trace of the venom can cause a reaction on the skin. Fortunately, the poison from the Scolopendra gigantea is insufficient to kill a healthy human adult. The alarmingly massive centipede can, however, cause symptoms such as local sharp pain, swelling, chills, fever, weakness, and uncontrollable running-away-and-screaming.

Pictures courtesy of Cracked.com(NSFW/18+) and Damn Interesting.

Youtube video courtesy of user Twinkdizogg

And speaking of ants

I was thinking it was wrong to post about ants twice in a row, but I just stumbled upon the amazing blog Myrmecos, which you all need to know about.

I can have my cake crumbs and eat them too, though, because - and I am about to blow your mind - that picture is NOT an ant. It's an ant mimic which is actually a crab spider (which, while not a crab, is a spider. Thank goodness there's one thing we can count on here).

There's actually a lot of cool not-ant stuff on the blog, like the Friday Beetle, and a recent guess-the-species that featured this amazing stick insect:


But there's no shortage of ants - get over there right now for Army Ant Week. You won't regret it.

-Wombat (No Relation)

Rest in Ugly Peace

The world recently lost an man who may have done more than anyone else to spread the word about ugly animals - and was well paid back for his efforts.

Milton Levine invented Uncle Milton's Ant Farm in the 1950s. Since then, over 20 million have been sold, introducing countless children to the joys of creepy crawly creatures.

Levine, who died last week at the age of 97, sold his company last year for more than twenty million dollars. He once told the New York Times about one unique way he personally appreciated ants: “Their most amazing feat yet,” he said, was that “They put three kids through college.”

With sympathy,
Wombat (No Relation)

Solar Powered Hornet

Our topic today is the Oriental hornet, Vespa Orentalis. For some time, scientists had know that the workers of this species were most active towards the middle of the day. It was only recently that they confirmed that they are capable of directly harvesting solar power. Under very close examination (on the nanometer scale), the brown segments of the hornet's abdomen are a series of reflective mirrors. They reflect the sun's energy onto structures on the yellow part of the abdomen, which contains a pigment with photoelectric properties, thus turning the light into electrical energy, which the hornets then use for their activities.

Story and picture courtesy of the BBC. Plenty more details, including microscope scans of the hornet's skin.

Killed by Behavior-modifying Parasite Fungus

There has been a rise in our fascination in zombie fiction and movies lately. I think such tales strike a deep chord in our psyche. But for much of the animal kingdom, such tales aren't fanciful. They're an everyday occurrence.

Take this poor yellow dung fly (Scathophagia stercoraria). It's been infected by a previously unknown (yet to be described) species of Entomophthora fungus. This parasite fungus causes its host to climb up a grass blade, stick it wings out, and position itself so that its abdomen is in the air, and then die. All of this is accomplished so the fungus' spores are better dispersed.

I'm assuming that zombification (a new word?) is more readily found in the insect kingdom because their nervous systems are more easily hijacked than those of higher order animals. Nevertheless, I've purchased a large supply of fungicide, and my wife has instructions to spray me down should she find me climbing up to the roof to stick my butt in the air.

Thanks for the fantastic photo, Dave. It's entomologists like you that show us how ugly and fascinating this world can be. I'm glad to be human.

Pretty Blood Sucker

Photo courtesy: Sean McCann
Sabethes mosquitos live in the forests of Central and South America. This particular one was photographed in Nouragues, French Guiana. These hematophages (great rock band name) are vectors for yellow fever and have a predilection for landing on humans' noses.

Why the nose? Maybe because that orifice breathes out a lot of carbon dioxide (a supposed lure for the mosquitos)? Maybe they want to give you pause with their iridescent colors, long enough at least to take a sip and then float away?

And speaking of those colors, I appreciate that they've gone to some effort to be more visually appealing. It makes it less insulting when you catch them sucking your blood.

Dewy Insects

Enjoy these dewy photos. Makes me thankful I've got a roof over my head. Also makes me thankful that we've got photographers like Miroslaw Swietek to capture such images.

Thanks for the arcticle, Ida.

Photo source: Miroslaw Swietek via DailyMail.co.uk

Camouflaged Spread

Jaden sent us this link from ThisBlogRules.com. Enjoy this spread of camouflaged creatures, including a crab spider, a scorpion fish, a stone fish, and an orchid mantis. Thanks, Jaden.