i cannot express my love for pseudoscorpions
a friend that i just made!
anyone know what he is? i’m thinkin american dagger moth he flew in through my window!
i love the way moths hang on to you for dear life
18 babies!
i bought a male and female b. dubia two weeks ago at the pet store with intentions to eventually start a colony and feed some to my tarantulas.
i wasn’t expecting to get babies this fast! she must have already been gravid when i bought her. :)
this was a nice surprise and a good start to my future colony!
“Surreal” Vegetarian Spider Found — A First
A new discovery has taken the bite out of spiders’ status as meat-eaters.
A tropical jumping spider that eats mostly plant buds has been identified, a new study says—making it the only known vegetarian out of some 40,000 spider species.
Between 2001 and 2008, Meehan and colleagues studied the spider in its tropical habitat in southeastern Mexico and northwestern Costa Rica.
They observed that the spiders ate nutrient-rich buds that grow on acacia plants.
The acacias are also home to a species of ant that live in the plants’ hollow thorns. In a classic example of mutualism, the ants protect the plant in return for shelter and food, said Meehan, who conducted the research while at Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania.
Yet the fast, stealthy Bagheera has figured out how to leap from thorn to thorn to collect its meal—while avoiding the highly aggressive ants.
(Source: National Geographic)
Ant Death Spiral
This is one of my favorite things about ants — the ant death spiral. Actually, it’s a circular mill, first described in army ants by Schneirla (1944). A circle of army ants, each one following the ant in front, becomes locked into a circular mill. They will continue to circle each other until they all die. How crazy is that? Sometimes they escape, though. Beebe (1921) described a circular mill he witnessed in Guyana. It measured 1200 feet in circumference and had a 2.5 hour circuit time per ant. The mill persisted for two days, “with ever increasing numbers of dead bodies littering the route as exhaustion took its toll, but eventually a few workers straggled from the trail thus breaking the cycle, and the raid marched off into the forest.”
(Source)
