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Invertebrate and Insects
The small creatures - Insects, Invertebrates and bugs
The small creatures - Insects, Invertebrates and bugs
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The small creatures - Insects, Invertebrates and bugs
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/09/praying-mantis-fishing-hunting-behavior-animals/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=social::src=facebook::cmp=editorial::add=fb20180920animals-mantishuntsfish::rid=&sf198067319=1 Known to take down animals as large as birds, mantises have now been spotted fishing for the first time outside captivity.
Credits to Kamil Stajniak Makrofotografia.
Myrmica cf. scabrinodis.  *This image is copyright of its original author
Credits to Lifeunseen - Nick Monaghan's macro photography.
Members of the genus Myrmecia, aka Bullants and Jumper Ants, tend to have poor reputations due to their aggressive nature and painful stings, but they really can be beautiful at times, like this one I found in Dalgarup State Forest, south west Western Australia.  *This image is copyright of its original author
Credits to David Mora del Pozo.
Info by Andrea Salimbeni. Intraspecific aggression between two species of Reticulitermes. As with many termite with the slicing/slashing mandible type they attack with fast foward strikes with the aim to slice their opponent body and/or extremities. This forward strikes followed by a return to the original position allow them to attack distant enemies while remaining in cover (when available of course). They are the most aggressive toward a moving target, and will readily attack any non-termite object that disturb them (like a tweezer tip). Click on it to play. 
Helping the honeybees: https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/local-v...t-lemonade
Credits to Ronald Zimmerman - Wildlife Photographer.
Most of my photographs are portraits of animals. You have to spend a lot of time in the field to encounter, witness and photograph animal behaviour. Because behaviour is harder to encounter and easy to disturb, scenes like this have a higher level of difficulty. I was lucky enough to witness this fascinating “cleanup crew” scene while walking through the basecamp. I saw a dead gecko laying on his back being demounted part by part by ants Ectatomma brunneum. After this shot I saw an ant walking away with a foot. It all looked creepy, but as a biologist I find this very interesting. It is “the circle of life” at work. No nutrients will go to waste. All the ants were walking around and eating parts like they were having a big “dinner table” or working at a car graveyard.  *This image is copyright of its original author
Credits to Smithsonian.com
Ant Colonies Retain Memories That Outlast the Lifespans of Individuals : By Deborah M. Gordon, Aeon. An ant colony can thrive for decades, changing its behavior based on past events even as individual ants die off every year or so Signals from other workers can tell ants when and where to fan out and search for food. :focal(700x420:701x421)/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/1b/0b/1b0b4087-bb15-4f81-b9a0-b6ecac4135ef/idea_sized-170407-f-se307-0020.jpg) *This image is copyright of its original author Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behavior. People use their brains to remember. Can ant colonies do that? This question leads to another question: what is memory? For people, memory is the capacity to recall something that happened in the past. We also ask computers to reproduce past actions – the blending of the idea of the computer as brain and brain as computer has led us to take ‘memory’ to mean something like the information stored on a hard drive. We know that our memory relies on changes in how much a set of linked neurons stimulate each other; that it is reinforced somehow during sleep; and that recent and long-term memory involve different circuits of connected neurons. But there is much we still don’t know about how those neural events come together, whether there are stored representations that we use to talk about something that happened in the past, or how we can keep performing a previously learned task such as reading or riding a bicycle. Any living being can exhibit the simplest form of memory, a change due to past events. Look at a tree that has lost a branch. It remembers by how it grows around the wound, leaving traces in the pattern of the bark and the shape of the tree. You might be able to describe the last time you had the flu, or you might not. Either way, in some sense your body ‘remembers,’ because some of your cells now have different antibodies, molecular receptors, which fit that particular virus. Past events can alter the behavior of both individual ants and ant colonies. Individual carpenter ants offered a sugar treat remembered its location for a few minutes; they were likely to return to where the food had been. Another species, the Sahara Desert ant, meanders around the barren desert, searching for food. It appears that an ant of this species can remember how far it walked, or how many steps it took, since the last time it was at the nest. A red wood ant colony remembers its trail system leading to the same trees, year after year, although no single ant does. In the forests of Europe, they forage in high trees to feed on the excretions of aphids that in turn feed on the tree. Their nests are enormous mounds of pine needles situated in the same place for decades, occupied by many generations of colonies. Each ant tends to take the same trail day after day to the same tree. During the long winter, the ants huddle together under the snow. The Finnish myrmecologist Rainer Rosengren showed that when the ants emerge in the spring, an older ant goes out with a young one along the older ant’s habitual trail. The older ant dies and the younger ant adopts that trail as its own, thus leading the colony to remember, or reproduce, the previous year’s trails. Foraging in a harvester ant colony requires some individual ant memory. The ants search for scattered seeds and do not use pheromone signals; if an ant finds a seed, there is no point recruiting others because there are not likely to be other seeds nearby. The foragers travel a trail that can extend up to 20 meters from the nest. Each ant leaves the trail and goes off on its own to search for food. It searches until it finds a seed, then goes back to the trail, maybe using the angle of the sunlight as a guide, to return to the nest, following the stream of outgoing foragers. Once back at the nest, a forager drops off its seed, and is stimulated to leave the nest by the rate at which it meets other foragers returning with food. On its next trip, it leaves the trail at about the same place to search again. Every morning, the shape of the colony’s foraging area changes, like an amoeba that expands and contracts. No individual ant remembers the colony’s current place in this pattern. On each forager’s first trip, it tends to go out beyond the rest of the other ants travelling in the same direction. The result is in effect a wave that reaches further as the day progresses. Gradually the wave recedes, as the ants making short trips to sites near the nest seem to be the last to give up. From day to day, the colony’s behavior changes, and what happens on one day affects the next. I conducted a series of perturbation experiments. I put out toothpicks that the workers had to move away, or blocked the trails so that foragers had to work harder, or created a disturbance that the patrollers tried to repel. Each experiment affected only one group of workers directly, but the activity of other groups of workers changed, because workers of one task decide whether to be active depending on their rate of brief encounters with workers of other tasks. After just a few days repeating the experiment, the colonies continued to behave as they did while they were disturbed, even after the perturbations stopped. Ants had switched tasks and positions in the nest, and so the patterns of encounter took a while to shift back to the undisturbed state. No individual ant remembered anything but, in some sense, the colony did. Colonies live for 20-30 years, the lifetime of the single queen who produces all the ants, but individual ants live at most a year. In response to perturbations, the behavior of older, larger colonies is more stable than that of younger ones. It is also more homeostatic: the larger the magnitude of the disturbance, the more likely older colonies were to focus on foraging than on responding to the hassles I had created; while, the worse it got, the more the younger colonies reacted. In short, older, larger colonies grow up to act more wisely than younger smaller ones, even though the older colony does not have older, wiser ants. Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next. A neuron uses the rate at which it is stimulated by other neurons to decide whether to fire. In both cases, memory arises from changes in how ants or neurons connect and stimulate each other. It is likely that colony behavior matures because colony size changes the rates of interaction among ants. In an older, larger colony, each ant has more ants to meet than in a younger, smaller one, and the outcome is a more stable dynamic. Perhaps colonies remember a past disturbance because it shifted the location of ants, leading to new patterns of interaction, which might even reinforce the new behavior overnight while the colony is inactive, just as our own memories are consolidated during sleep. Changes in colony behavior due to past events are not the simple sum of ant memories, just as changes in what we remember, and what we say or do, are not a simple set of transformations, neuron by neuron. Instead, your memories are like an ant colony’s: no particular neuron remembers anything although your brain does. 
This morning, I discovered an amazing creature that I didn't know at all: the mantis shrimp. Really fascinating ! Marine crustacean stomatopoda. 10 to 30-35 cm long, but the largest ever caught measured 46 cm.
Several facts I quote from the wikipedia link : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp Human possess 3 types of photoreceptors in their eyes cells. Tha mantis shrimp 16 ! The most sophisticated vision sense of all animals. Strongely armed the mantis shrimp are currently divided into two kinds of groups according to the type of claws they possess: The Smashers possess a much more developed club and a more rudimentary spear (which is nevertheless quite sharp and still used in fights between their own kind); the club is used to bludgeon and smash their meals apart. The inner aspect of the terminal portion of the appendage can also possess a sharp edge, used to cut prey while the mantis shrimp swims. The Spearers are armed with spiny appendages topped with barbed tips, used to stab and snag prey. Both types strike by rapidly unfolding and swinging their raptorial claws at the prey, and can inflict serious damage on victims significantly greater in size than themselves. In smashers, these two weapons are employed with blinding quickness, with an acceleration of 10,400 g (102,000 m/s2 or 335,000 ft/s2) and speeds of 23 m/s (83 km/h; 51 mph) from a standing start.[16] Because they strike so rapidly, they generate vapor-filled bubbles in the water between the appendage and the striking surface—known as cavitation bubbles.[16] The collapse of these cavitation bubbles produces measurable forces on their prey in addition to the instantaneous forces of 1,500 newtons that are caused by the impact of the appendage against the striking surface, which means that the prey is hit twice by a single strike; first by the claw and then by the collapsing cavitation bubbles that immediately follow.[17] Even if the initial strike misses the prey, the resulting shock wave can be enough to stun or kill. The impact can also produce sonoluminescence from the collapsing bubble. This will produce a very small amount of light within the collapsing bubble, although the light is too weak and short-lived to be detected without advanced scientific equipment. The light emission probably has no biological significance, but is rather a side effect of the rapid snapping motion. Pistol shrimp produce this effect in a very similar manner. Smashers use this ability to attack snails, crabs, molluscs, and rock oysters, their blunt clubs enabling them to crack the shells of their prey into pieces. Spearers, however, prefer the meat of softer animals, such as fish, which their barbed claws can more easily slice and snag. 
In November last year, German scientists found a 44-million-year-old caterpillar: https://www.dw.com/en/german-scientists-...a-51341040
Scientists said that it was the first time a fossil from a large butterfly species has been discovered preserved inside an ancient block of amber. They've described it as an "exceptional" find.  *This image is copyright of its original author German researchers discovered a 44-million-year-old caterpillar, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports on Wednesday: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53734-w The critter is the first caterpillar of its kind to be discovered in Baltic amber, according to researchers from the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich. The 5-millimeter (0.2-inch) larva has been given the name Eogeometer vadens under the family of Geometridae butterflies, which comprises around 23,000 different species. Scientists said the little caterpillar likely got trapped in a drop of tree resin, which ultimately hardened into amber and preserved the worm's unique structure over millions of years. "Caterpillar finds in amber are rarities in any instance, and this is the first ever large butterfly fossil to be found in Baltic amber," study co-auther Axel Hausmann said. "This may be due to the noctural activity of most caterpillars," he added, given that resin would likely be closer to liquid in direct sunlight or warmer daytime temperatures. Unlike most other butterfly species, Geometridae caterpillars only have two or three pairs of legs instead of the usual five pairs. This means they move forwards with an unusual gait — by pushing their hind legs to their rear legs, then stretching out and repeating the action. The researchers said the fossil would provide an insight into evolutionary processes during the Eocene period (about 34-56 million years ago), when flowering plants butterfly species would have been interacting with were already well established.
Swarms of locusts being a menace in the Horn of Africa:
- Ethiopian Airlines' plane forced to divert after reportedly being hit by a swarm in its engines, windshield and nose: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51098209, https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/...of-locusts  *This image is copyright of its original author - The UN says that desert locusts pose an unprecedented threat to food security in Ethiopia: https://www.herald.co.zw/un-says-desert-...-ethiopia/
Dereck Joubert: " Do a cursory Google search for termites and much of what you’ll find will be about extermination… controlling what we humans view as a pest. Unlike other social insects such as ants or bees, these tiny, mostly blind cockroach cousins tend to inspire little benevolence in us. And this seems unjustified… and very uncharitable. Because when we look to the termite with fascination and curiosity, we begin to appreciate a creature that provides an array of vital ecosystem services. Not just as food for people and wildlife, but also in traditional medicine and scientific research, in their role as recyclers and decomposers, as aerators and engineers of the soil, and even as the biological inspiration in our human endeavours to create sustainable architecture – and much more. It’s time we give termites the appreciation they deserve. "
(01-15-2020, 10:55 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: Swarms of locusts being a menace in the Horn of Africa: Now the southwest Saudi city of Najran, in the 'Asir subrange of the Sarat Mountains near Yemen: https://www.khaleejtimes.com/region/saud...saudi-city فارس اليمني Twitter: https://twitter.com/1v3xEaCmb5irNdA/stat...saudi-city  *This image is copyright of its original author
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