How to repel mosquitoes naturally
We’ll help you take back your summer with eco-friendly tips for how to control mosquito problems in the yard.
Parasitic Mind Control
Now this is strange, even scary: ants controlled by parasites, all because they ate the slime of a snail!
via National Geographic.
Ever get that not-so-sentient feeling? At least you aren’t an ant.
Happy Mothers Day! Here’s some of the best and most interesting moms in the animal kingdom. Send some love to the Homo sapiens that made ya today!
- Harp seals have to care for their fluffy, marshmallow-like pups in an icy, scary world patrolled by polar bears. The little snowy cotton balls have to gain weight fast in order to survive the cold and avoid predators. So their moms help them gain five pounds a day for the first 12 days by feeding them milk that is 48% fat! How is that even liquid?! It’s like feeding them butter. Oh, and the moms don’t eat for the whole time!
- Queen bees are some of the hardest working moms in terms of pure reproduction. If a fertilized (and therefore female) bee egg is laid in a special honeycomb receptacle and continuously fed a secretion called “royal jelly”, it will develop into a queen. That queen will mate with one or many drone males, storing their sperm to lay as many as 2,000 eggs a day (both fertilized female workers and unfertilized drone males) to stock the hive. That’s a lot of kids to look out for.
- Elephants never forget … that they carried their young for 22 months, the longest pregnancy term of all mammals. A 22 month pregnancy. Just let that sink in the next time your back hurts a little. Of course, that’s nothing compared to the frilled shark, who can carry its young for as long as 3.5 years, probably because it’s so terrifying that it doesn’t want to scare its children to death.
- Earwigs aren’t known for being a particularly heartwarming species, but the females are unique among non-social insects for attending to their larva, helping them hatch, feeding them regurgitated food, guarding them until they molt into adults, and even allowing them to eat her if they are starving. Of course, sometimes they have been known to eat their eggs to, so it’s not all cuddles and kisses in earwig families.
- Orangutan moms and babies might take the cake for pure cuteness. I know we aren’t supposed to humanize animals and read our emotions into their lives, but come on. There is something very close to love between mothers and children among these, the most playful of great apes. Orangutan mothers take seven years between pregnancies, and will care for their young for at least two years among the treetops. For the first four months they never break physical contact with their young, and build a new nest of leaves and twigs every night for fresh, comfy orangu-snuggles. Best ape ever (they love puppies!)
(images via Wikipedia, Shutterstock)
(via the-science-llama)
Are there more of these? There certainly are.
(Source: brettkingery, via scientificillustration)
Striking watercolors of malformed insects by scientific illustrator Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, a visceral political statement about the dangers of radioactivity and nuclear power gone out of hand.
The elephant who killed her trainer, the ass that loved a man, and the goat that’s to blame for just about everything.
(via missedinhistory)
"In ants and bees, there are no sex chromosomes. Instead, sex is determined by whether or not an egg was fertilized. If the egg isn’t fertilized, the offspring is male. If the egg is fertilized, it’s female. So male ants have no fathers, and they have half as many chromosomes as females. Poor little things."
—
Beatrice the Biologist: Clarification, Sex Determination, and Cheesecake
(via chopdawg)
(via scinerds)
Close-up photographs of insect wings. See more here. It’s hard to imagine that there is this much beauty in tiny animals most of us regard as nothing more than pests. Nature is as much a work of art as anything humans could come up with.
(via thescienceofreality)
Curious how this sorcery happens? You bet you are.
An insect like a wasp or a water strider can rest atop the water, held up by surface tension. This means that the cohesive force of the water molecules sticking to each other is stronger than the force of the bug being pushed down by gravity. This works because it spreads its weight out over a large surface area (like snowshoes).
That creates a slight indentation in the top of the water, changing the direction that the light coming down is refracted and re-directing it slightly sideways (that’s where the bright halos around the dark areas come from). And what’s the absence of light?
A shadow.
All those words in picture form:
nybg:
sundew (drosera) consuming a syrphid fly
As I’m sure you know carnivorous plants do not actually have nerves and muscles which allow them to close around (and then slowly consume) insects. The actions you see above are accomplished through a complicated chain of events wherein different cells within the plant expand and elongate to capture the prey. And yet somehow, this knowledge doesn’t make it any less creepy! ~AR
Yeah, nope.
IT’S A HUMMINGBEE
These are BEE FLIES!
Harmless to everything else, these precious little cutie pies sneak their eggs into beehives, where their larvae can parasitize bee larvae and eat their food reserves!
Well that’s the cutest, most horrible thing.
(Source: cortem1, via earthlynation)
