Posted on 08/09/2006 11:44:23 AM PDT by pissant
Ok. Enough news about Joe Lieberman, angry A-Rabs, and kittens around here. It's time to tell us what your favorite bug is and why.
Pissants top 7 are as follows:
7. Potato Bug. The little fellers are like miniature Armadillos and was one you could pick up as a kid without getting bitten or stung.
6. Earwig or Pincher Bug. Those pinchers on their tushes are quite intimidating. And for some reason like to hang out in Dahlias, so beware.
5. Butterfly. They always looked the best tacked to my bug collection corkboard. And were much easier to catch than grasshoppers.
4. Army Ants. These little communists are simply amazing. Putting your arm into an ant hill as a kid was a right of passage.
3. Dung Beetle. Besides being awesome at rolling a turd accross the ground, the name is a useful insult to be tossed around at cocktail parties.
2. Bird Eating Spider. There is nothing cooler than watching a giant spider attack a bird or small rodent.
1. Praying Mantis. This bug has inspired many nightmares in people and is responsible, with the onset of National Geographic photos and TV, for inspiring many loonies to claim they have been abducted by aliens. Any similarity to James Carville is strictly incidental.
I like all bugs.
If I had to pick a favorite, I would probably choose jumping spiders. We have a lot of them around the house and on the porch.
I sometimes push them a little and they hop away, but do it 2 or 3 times and they will invariably turn around and face my finger, standing on their hind legs, claws extended and jaws ready: ready to rumble.
They have that "so what if you're a million times bigger than me, come over here and I'll kick your #$$" attitude.
Potato bugs are just awful...
Spiders are very cool. But you can't tell me you like roaches.
Excuse me. Any bug that makes itself into a ball and be fired from a peashooter qualifies as cool.
In canary yellow, no less.
No, I don't like roaches. I think roaches, mosquitoes and gnats are the only critters I don't like.
Deer flies are a fishermen's bain her in my neck of the woods. They take chunks of flesh.
Distome (Leucochloridium paradoxum)
Sometimes amber snails (Succinea or Oxyloma) can be found, that attract attention by their largely swollen tentacles, laterally striped by pulsating rings. This phenomenon is because of an infection of the snail by a parasitic distome, Leucochloridium paradoxum.
This parasitic worm belongs to the group of flatworms (Plathelminthes), and among these to the distomes (Trematoda, Digenea).
Similar to other flatworms, the development of a distome also passes a change of generations, where one generation infects a snail as intermediate host, and one generation infects a warm-blooded animal, in this case a bird, as final host.
The bird, with its droppings, spreads the distome's eggs, of which hatch the ciliated larvae or miracidia. Those then infect a snail living near the water.
Out of the snail's digestive system, the miracidia wander into the main digestive gland and change into the next larval stage, the cercariae. Those gather in sporocystes, long tubes, that extend into the snail's tentacles. Several hundred cercaries can be contained in one of those sporocyste tubes.
The sporocyste tube is what can be seen pulsating in the snail's tentacles. The tentacles, swollen by the sporocystes, cannot be withdrawn by the snail, but instead attract a bird by their eye-catching colouring and movement. The bird rips off the snail's tentacle, and as a reward, is infected by the cercariae within.
In the bird's digestive system adult distomes evolve from the cercariae, that reproduce sexually and lay eggs, which are then spread by the bird's droppings. The circle is closed.
Oh yeah: and Bedbugs.
When we were kids they were always welcome because it was common belief that these guys ate mosquitos (but it ain't true,) so we'd also catch one or two and put 'em our tents, or wherever we were.
Wicked and spooky. I like it
When I lived on a corn farm, periodically this type of insect would fly into my apartment. It had a long snout to bore into stalks of corn. Completely harmless, but uniquely situated to give me an absolute sense of the creeps. I never figured out why.
A furry ant?
I get swarms of those annoying things in my lawn each year. And they always make a beeline for the house. grrrr.
Do you know the name of it?
Velvet Ants.
They are some seriously bad dudes. Their sting is supposed to the most painful of insect stings. And they are TOUGH to kill.
But boy, they would flame up good under the magnifying glass....not that I ever did that as a kid. LOL
Velvet Ants, a very pimp name.
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