I disturbed the mass of spiders living in my compost bin, and apparently I disrupted the status quo, because one large female rushed over and attacked a smaller female. I guess she was taking advantage of my intrusion to take out the competition.
Spider battles are tangly and confusing.
The orcas are getting good at sinking ships. It’s gotten so bad that Spanish officials are recommending that small boats avoid the deep water off Gibraltar and hug the coast.
The Alboran Cognac’s crew said they felt sudden blows on the hull and that the boat began taking on water. They were rescued by a nearby oil tanker, but the sailboat, left to drift, later went down.
The sinking brings the number of vessels sunk – mostly sailing yachts – to at least five since 2020. Hundreds of less serious encounters resulting in broken rudders and other damage, Alfredo López Fernandez, a coauthor of a 2022 study in the journal Marine Mammal Science, told NPR late last year.
What I find interesting is that there is so much speculation about what causes the behavior. I’m observing the humans, and what I see is a lot of floundering about trying to blame the sinkings on simplistic single causes, rather than appreciating that these are large brained animals with complex social interactions, and maybe we need to avoid explanations that hinge on one aspect of animal behavior. People are moving in their world and dancing around explanations that respect the sophistication of the animals.
Researchers are unsure about the causes for the behaviour, with leading theories including it being a playful manifestation of the mammals’ curiosity, a social fad or the intentional targeting of what they perceive as competitors for their favourite prey, the local bluefin tuna.
Something else I’ve noticed is that all the explanations are centered on the whales, treating the fact that another large brained animal with complex social interactions is moving into their territory, and we apes are sitting around saying “It’s not our fault!” as if we are blameless victims of dumb animal reflexes.
So I have my own simplistic single cause that may explain what’s going on, and that places any blame appropriately.
The actions of a New Zealand man filmed jumping off a boat in what appears to be an attempt to “body slam” an orca have been described as “shocking” and “idiotic” by the country’s Department of Conservation.
In a video shared to Instagram in February, a man can be seen jumping off the edge of a boat into the sea off the coast of Devonport in Auckland, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to touch or “body slam” the orca, the department said. He leaps into the water very close to a male orca, as a calf swims nearby, while someone on board the boat films it. Others can be heard laughing and swearing in the background.
As he swims back towards the boat he yells “I touched it” and asks “did you get that?” He then attempts to touch the orca again.
Hayden Loper, a principal investigator at the department, said the 50-year-old man showed reckless disregard for his own safety and that of the orca. “The video speaks for itself, it is shocking and absolutely idiotic behaviour,” he said.
I think my hypothesis is backed by an immense body of evidence. Humans are arrogant idiots, and the fact that the orca did not respond by simply eating the stupid individual suggests that the whale are capable of remarkable restraint and are far more civilized than the overgrown monkeys attacking them.
I rest my case.
We have a division of labor in our household. I care about the spiders, Mary cares about the birds. She’s got feeders all over the yard, I raise flies and mealworms for the spiders. She’s signed up for FeederWatch, I tally up observations on iNaturalist. It’s not a competition, but she does score more daily points than I do. These are the birds she observed just yesterday.
House Wren, Common Grackle, American Robin, Pine Siskin, House Finch, Blue Jay, American Goldfinch, Downy Woodpecker, Eurasian Collared Dove, Yellow Warbler, Northern Cardinal, White-breasted Nuthatch, Chimney Swift, House Sparrow, Gray Catbird, Warbling Vireo, Chipping Sparrow, Black-capped Chickadee, White-throated Sparrow, Brown-headed Cowbird, Red-winged Blackbird, Purple Martin, Red-eyed Vireo, Trumpeter Swan, Swainson’s Thrush, Barn Swallow, Tennessee Warbler, Dark-eyed Junco, Hermit Thrush, Mourning Dove, Song Sparrow, Swamp Sparrow, Baltimore Oriole, American Crow, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Western Meadowlark, Common Yellowthroat, Wilson’s Warbler, Magnolia Warbler, Indigo Bunting, Northern Flicker, European Starling, Eastern Bluebird, Hairy Woodpecker, Wood Duck, Common Nighthawk
OK, already. We got birds.
This is a cranefly on my door. It is not a mosquito.
Otherwise, I’d visit this place. I bet it’s better than Disney World!
I’ve mentioned my crazy evil cat before, but here’s another of my little friends, my greenbottle blue tarantula, Blue.
They are just coming down off a massive threat posture, which is a change. For a long time, they’ve been skittish and timid. I turn on the lights in the lab, they run and hide. I rattle the door a little bit when I go to feed them, they run and hide. A shadow moves across their container, they run and hide. I figured I’d adopted a cowardly spider.
Lately, though, as they mature — I can tell by how their pigment is darkening to a deep blue from the prior orange — they’ve gotten aggressive. Now they boldly stand in the middle of their space and turn to face me when I walk up to them, but not in a friendly way. When I put a mealworm in their face, no more fleeing, but instead, they rear up on their 4 hindlegs and threaten with their forelimbs, and flash their fangs at me. I’m feeding them! Calm down!
It’s becoming a trend that any animal I take care of gets psycho hostile.
Whoa, wait…could it be me?
I was walking into work this morning, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, the wolf spiders were underfoot, and I saw all these delicate lines of silk draped over everything (once your eye is attuned to spotting silk lines, you discover that they are everywhere, on every fence post and bush.) I stopped by the lab and saw that the temperature in the spider incubators was a comfortable 27°C, and the humidity is rising at last to about 35%, so I checked the colony. Nobody is laying eggs yet, but they are looking plump and healthy and ready for a season of fecundity.
Steatoda triangulosa
Once the semester is truly over, in about a week and a half, I’m going to be doing some matchmaking, and that lovely virgin is going to take a lover.
These little guys, wolf spiders of the genus Pardosa, are everywhere right now. Mary brought this one home from work because apparently she thinks we don’t have enough of them here.
No worries, it scurried away shortly after I took this photo, and now owns our living room.
I didn’t see much of them while I was growing up near Seattle, but then I spent a year in Indiana, where the cicadas are deafening in the summer. I learned to detest their shrill noisiness then. Now I live in Minnesota where we get the annual cicadas, but they aren’t so numerous as to generate the cacophony people have to live with elsewhere.
It’s going to be bad this summer, because two broods of the 13- and 17-year periodic cicadas are going to be crawling out simultaneously and singing continuously. There’s nothing you can do about it.
See how Minnesota is free of the Magicicada plague? I’ll be staying away from Iowa & Illinois & Indiana, that’s for sure.
Although…I do not dislike the cicadas so much that I would wish a fungal infection on them, especially not a fungus as creepy as this one.
Once the cicadas emerge from the ground, they molt into adults, and within a week to 10 days, the fungus causes the backside of their abdomens open up. A chalky, white plug erupts out, taking over their bodies and making their genitals fall off.
“The cicada continues to participate in normal activities, like it would if it was healthy,” Kasson told CBS News. “Like it tries to mate, it flies around, it walks on plants. Yet, a third of its body has been replaced by fungus. That’s really kind of bizarre.”
Kasson said the reason the cicadas might be able to ignore the fungus is that it produces an amphetamine, which could give them stamina.
“But there’s also something else unusual about it,” he said. “There’s this hyper-sexualized behavior. So, males for example, they’ll continue to try and mate with females — unsuccessfully, because again, their back end is a fungus. But they’ll also pretend to be females to get males to come to them. And that doubles the number of cicadas that an infected individual comes in contact with.”
What’s really evil about that fungus is that despite all the body horror, it doesn’t shut the cicadas up. In another bizarre twist, it also affects animals around them.
The fungus is also the type that has hallucinatory effects on birds that would eat them, Cooley said.
There’s more! Cicadas have another repulsive habit.
Bhamla in March published a study of the urination flow rates of animals across the world. Cicadas were clearly king, peeing two to three times stronger and faster than elephants and humans. He couldn’t look at the periodical cicadas that mostly feed and pee underground, but he used video to record and measure the flow rate of their Amazon cousins, which topped out around 10 feet per second (3 meters per second).
They have a muscle that pushes the waste through a tiny hole like a jet, Bhamla said. He said he learned this when in the Amazon he happened on a tree the locals called a “weeping tree” because liquid was flowing down, like the plant was crying. It was cicada pee.
“You walk around in a forest where they’re actively chorusing on a hot sunny day. It feels like it’s raining,” said University of Connecticut entomologist John Cooley. That’s their honeydew or waste product coming out the back end … It’s called cicada rain.”
I hope the residents of states south and east of me are looking forward to a summer of getting pissed on by shrieking zombie insects while the birds are tripping balls and spacing out.
I clicked on 4 Black Eggs Have Surfaced From the Dark Heart of the Ocean—With Alien Creatures Inside. How could I not? Fortunately, it was a truthful title. An ROV dived 6200 meters beneath the Pacific Ocean and found strange black eggs attached to a rock, and brought some to the surface (the operators have presumably never seen a horror movie. Don’t harvest the mysterious black eggs ever, and don’t bring them back to the lab.)
“Under a stereomicroscope, I cut one of them, and a milky liquid-like thing leaked from it; after blowing the milky thing with a pipette, I found fragile white bodies in the shell and first realized that it was the cocoon of…”
It was flatworms. Platyhelminths.
Niiiice.
Not at all Lovecraftian or scary, though.
