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All in Insects
It’s been five years since the dreaded “murder hornet” was first spotted in the Pacific Northwest. Ever since, teams of assassins from the US and Washington State departments of agriculture have tracked down and killed the invasive species; this week the agencies declared the killer hornet dead and gone.
Thousands of giant spiders are on the prowl in the UK and that’s a good thing, according to the Chester Zoo, which is responsible for setting the arachnids loose.
Spider-gazing researchers in China say that the orb-weaving spider (Araneus ventricosus) entices male fireflies into its web, then it gets freaky. Somehow the spider manipulates its prey into mimicking a female firefly’s flashing light, which lures more amorous males into the deathtrap.
Hawaii’s birds are seriously imperiled by avian malaria, which spreads, like the more familiar variety of the disease, by mosquitoes. The counterintuitive solution to this dire problem involves releasing millions of mosquitoes into the wild.
This week a story on the history of cockroaches, based on new research published in Proceedings of of the National Academy of Sciences, dominated nature writing all over the country.
The cicadas have arrived. Slightly earlier than predicted, but the first bugs have been reported in Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. In the coming weeks, two distinct bug broods, which usually emerge in separate years but in 2024 their disparate cycles are in sync, will infest the US southeast and midwest.
Because the spider called daddy longlegs has a particularly salient trait – namely its long legs – biologists never really considered the creature’s eyes, which were assumed to be a standard-issue pair situated at the top of the head. Now researchers have discovered two more sets of peepers, vestigial and useless, on the side.
A brave soul on Australia's NSW Central Coast recently captured a very large funnel-web spider, the world’s most venomous arachnid. The spider, the largest male of its kind ever seen, has been donated to the Australian Reptile Park, which will now put the ginormous creeper they’ve named Hercules to work saving lives.
A research team in southern Thailand has discovered a new species of tarantula with a dazzling feature they describe as “a blue-violet hue resembling the color of electrical sparks.”
Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have taught bumblebees to roll little wooden balls around for no discernible reason, which makes bumblebees the first insects known to engage in “play.”
Researchers at the Universities of Hong Kong and Würzburg, Germany have addressed a question that no one asked, “How many ants are there on Earth?” The answer: 20 quadrillion. It’s difficult to grasp the enormity of such a number. The authors of the study that painstakingly added up the ants call it “20 thousand million millions, or in numerical form, 20,000,000,000,000,000 (20 with 15 zeroes).” The researchers warn that figure is a “conservative” estimate.
Researchers at the University of Konstanz in Germany have been staring intently at baby jumping spiders while they sleep, wondering if the eight-legged children have the capacity to dream. Their conclusion: maybe.
Let’s take a closer look at one of the parasites that live on our bodies. A species of microscopic mite (Demodex folliculorum) lives in the pores on our face, as well as in facial hair follicles, including the eyelashes. They are an invisible 0.3 millimeters long and are passed on to us at birth. They mate – right there on our faces – at night.
