macrocritters

This piece, from nerdist. com, describes one of the more amazing cases of mimicry I’ve seen. Look at the picture below, and see what you think it is:

It’s not a snake, despite the very snake-y appearance of the thing. It has eyes (fake), the eyes even have a “glint” in them (fake), it has a fake mouth, and even fake “scales”.

It’s from Trinidad, and it’s one of the life stages of a lepidopteran. In fact, it’s the pupal case of the Daring-Owl butterfly Dynastor darius darius, a subspecies from Trinidad (the species D. darius is found in Central and South America).

Here’s a picture of an adult of another subspecies,D. darius stygianus:

And the caterpillar of D. darius darius, which is weird looking but not nearly as weird as the pupa:

It’s when this caterpillar becomes a pupa that it turns into a snake…

Reader Julian, who sent me this 2013 link to this caterpillar on GrindTV, noted that “It really does look like Donald’s hair.” And it does:

Caterpillar:

Donald Trump’s hair:

Is this a case of mimicy, with the larval habitat being men with bad wigs? Clearly not, but you can guess from the insect’s appearance that those are “urticating hairs,” i.e., hairs that, on contact, transfer an irritating substance, just like the hairs on tarantulas (I used to have a menagerie of those spiders).  As GrindTV notes:

. . . for that reason, this flannel moth caterpillar photographed in the Amazon has been nicknamed the Donald Trump Caterpillar.

It was spotted and photographed recently by Phil Torres of Posada Amazonas Rainforest Expeditions while leading a photography tour in a Peru rainforest. He posted the photo online and immediately people began commenting about how it looks like Donald Trump’s hair.

“We didn’t…

There is at least one species of bird that is toxic to predators and shows it off by displaying bright “aposematic” (warning) colors. That one, the hooded pitohui of New Guinea (Pitohui dicrhous), was discovered to be toxic by Jack Dumbacher, one of our grad students at Chicago, and now Curator of Ornithology at the Cal Academy in San Francisco. As I recall, Jack noticed this when handling one of the birds and getting a tingling sensation in his hands. He later discovered that the feathers contain a neurotoxin, probably obtained by eating toxic beetles and spreading saliva over its feathers.  Here’s a photo of the hooded pitohui from New Guinea Birds:

We were all amazed when Jack discovered what was the first—and perhaps still the only—case of a toxic bird showing off its distastefulness with bright colors.  But now a group of researchers from the U.S. and Colombia have discovered…

by Matthew Cobb

Female moths are well known to produce pheromones that attract potential mates, sometimes from miles away. Male moths generally have much larger or more feather-like antennae than females, in order to catch a whiff of their partner on the air. But some males also produce pheromones, using structures called coremata or ‘hair-pencils’. Imagine have a rubber glove in your mouth, then blowing out so it suddenly appeared. Sexy, eh? Well here’s a male moth being helped to do exactly that. Wake up and smell the pheromones, ladies!

Whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry on hair-pencils has done a pretty good job, and there’s some nice references there, although none of the key ones are open access, sadly. As you’ll see, the compounds released by these structures can also be used to warn off competing males.

by Matthew Cobb

As I write, terrible hobgoblins are stalking throughout Europe. To celebrate Hallowe’en, here’s a nice tw**t with the Jack o’ Lanterns caterpillar. The butterfly, which lives in India, is a rather dull brown affair, but the caterpillar is stupendous.

When I go out at night into the rainforest to search for katydids I don’t like to have any company. Not that I am particularly antisocial, but tracking skittish and cryptic animals is an activity that’s better done alone. I walk slowly, trying not to disturb anything and anybody, slowly scanning the vegetation and the forest floor in the light of my headlamp. Every now and then I turn the light off to fully immerse myself in the ambient sounds of the forest, which often helps me pinpoint a faint trill made by a katydid’s wings. A few years ago I was deep in the rainforest of Guyana doing just that – listening to the sounds of the night in a complete darkness – when I heard the rustle of an animal running. I could clearly hear its hard feet hitting the ground and dry leaves crumbling under its weight. I…

Today we have two overachieving arachnids.

First, from the Torygraph’s picture gallery for today:

The incredible spider’s web which appeared in front of Russell Harding s garage door. A pensioner could not believe his eyes when he stepped outside his front door and almost walked into this spider’s web – which spanned six foot. Russell Harding, 74, was shocked when he spotted the huge web as he went to carry out some early morning work in his garage. The web, which spread the gap between his car’s wing mirror and his shed and had an inch and a half spider sat in the middle.

From Matthew: The spider is a European Garden Spider, and is obviously substantially closer to the camera than the garage door (if not, the spider would be truly immense…) In fact, we could probably work out how far away the spider and the garage food are…

Reader “pyers” called my attention to a Torygraph article about an upcoming BBC documentary, “Wonders of the monsoon,” that is a must-watch. But the Torygraph piece has a title more suited to the Daily Mirror, to wit (click on the headline to go to the article):

Indeed, that’s just what happens, and for those of you who like nature red in tooth and claw, by all means read the piece and then watch the movie at the bottom of the article. You can also go directly to the BBC clip (which also plays in the US) by clicking the screenshot of the carnage just below:

From the Torygraph:

The creature is so new to science that it does not yet have a taxonomic…

Read some biology today; it’s good for you!

It’s not often that a new animal phylum has been described, but a new paper in PLoS ONE apparently does just that, basing the phylum on two enigmatic species, dredged up from the deep sea, that can’t be placed in any existing phylum. This may add one more to the 35 phyla that already exist (see the list here, and please look. It’s nice to review the major divisions of life.)

The paper is by Jean Just et al. (all authors are from the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen), and the reference and pdf, which is free, are below.

What we have is something that looks like a cnidarian (jellyfish, corals, and sea anemones) or a ctenophore, but with a stalk. (Some cnidaria do have a stalk). But it has features that keep it from being placed in the phyla…

Bicyrtes quadrifasciatus digging a burrow | Stoddard Co., Missouri

Here is an animated gif that I made from a series of photographs of the digger wasp, Bicyrtes quadrifasciatus (ID courtesy of Doug Yanega), digging a burrow in a sand bank in extreme southeastern Missouri (it’s amazing what you can do with an iPhone and a free internet app!). A large number of these wasps had colonized the sand bank, and as I photographed this one individual busily digging its burrow, others repeatedly flew up and investigated. The digging individual would disappear briefly down into the burrow, and each time it returned to the surface with a fresh load of sand another wasp would fly up to it and investigate. The digging individual never seemed to pay much attention to the investigating wasp, so I’m not sure if these other wasps were looking for a potential mate or perhaps even trying to usurp the burrow.

The cumulative noise…