#Swarms

[randomencounters]

Encounter: dragon that is a mommy

[wonderful-emoji]

what are some emoji combos you have done that just creep you out or make you uncomfy? :O

[foxthebeekeeper]

Practicing for April~

[dndcreaturesinfo]

Hive Hag by Critical Crafting

[archivist-crow]

On this day:

MYSTERY SWARMS

On August 20, 1880, swarms of black flies, from points unknown, rained down on both sides of the Atlantic. At Le Havre, France, a boat sailed into the waterfront wrapped in insects, while millions of flies fell in the streets. The exhausted creatures couldn't move. Pilot boats navigating the English Channel became black with bugs. Days later another swarm poured down in Nova Scotia, Canada, flying close to the water; many of the flies went under. Back in Britain, "millions and millions of flies" covered a schooner, forcing the sailors below deck for five hours. Upon reemerging, they had to shovel the deluge overboard. On the Hudson River, in New York State, a cloud of flies, driven by the wind and resembling a black blizzard, cloaked a steamboat.

In August 1869, in Great Britain, the Lincolnshire coast saw a strip of "pea-soup" so colored by the bodies of dead aphids floating on the water. The strip was three yards wide and hundreds of yards long, and odor of the dead insects made breathing difficult. The Norfolk coast watched a ten-foot-wide, three-mile-long line of dead ladybugs float downriver. The Essex coast experienced a "fog" of aphids, which blocked sunlight for days. Up and down the Thames River, ladybugs poured down, forcing brickyard workers indoors, mesmerizing cats, soiling laundry hanging on clotheslines, and making umbrellas a necessity.

Later that autumn, a beelike insect swarmed down Britain's east coast. Spiders and their webs streamed down from the sky at Carlisle and Tiverton, 280 miles apart, all day long, cloaking everything in gossamer. The summer of 1921 was eerily barren of insects, yet that same year a swarm of large fireflies appeared in Wales. The same week in London a species of unknown stinging insects arrived in a swarm, and an overabundance of fireflies showed up in Caterham, Surrey.

Text from: Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible, and the Ignored by Juanita Rose Violins, published by Weiser Books, 2009

[bpod-bpod]

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Swarm Regards

Organisms living side by side produce a new form of life – a community. While ecosystems can be miles wide, this tiny swarm of bacteria is just establishing itself on a lab dish. Its two bacterial species, Bacillus subtilis (highlighted in red) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (green), behave very differently, growing and dividing on different time scales and moving at different speeds. Here researchers watch as they mingle but not completely, keeping themselves to themselves but sometimes cooperating – with B. subtilis seeming to improve how the P. aeruginosa swarms. Bacterial communities, including those that stubbornly colonise surfaces in hospitals, are a natural form of active matter – a complex balance of biological behaviours and physical properties that crop up when 'things' move together. But even considering these factors, the team believe there are hidden subtleties still to discover – including the ways bacteria to recognise their own species when moving through the crowd.

Written by John Ankers

Video from work by Gal Natan and colleagues

Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, The Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Midreshet Ben-Gurion, Israel

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Scientific Reports, October 2022

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[aeshnacyanea2000]

She had half a dozen hives of them and knew, for example, there is no such creature as an individual bee. But there is such a creature as a swarm, whose component cells are just a bit more mobile than those of, say, the common whelk. Swarms see everything and sense a lot more, and they can remember things for years, although their memory tends to be external and built out of wax. A honeycomb is a hive’s memory – the placement of egg cells, pollen cells, queen cells, honey cells, different types of honey, are all part of the memory array.

Terry Pratchett - Lords And Ladies

[woundgallery]

Anselm Kiefer, Die Sechste Posaune (The Sixth Trumpet), 1996

[riftclaw]

a revamp of the random bee design i made a couple years back now, potentially finalised-- on one hand, it IS just a bee right now but. most petsite bugs don't really look like bugs, so i can maybe lean on that for the originality thing?

[tombiwidgeon]

After having seen Vash and the gang appreciate the beauty of the worm swarm on the surface, I noticed when re watching ep. 1 how incredibly vast those worm clouds could be. No Man's Land is viewed as so desolate but life there is incredibly abundant!

How far across must those be!?

[prose2passion]

I like that kind of thinking ...

[wonderful-emoji]

I wanna see your most cursed emojis! Go with your heart on what that means to you :)

[foxthebeekeeper]

And like clockwork, another Easter comes, and another swarm lands!

It’s a small one, but it’s my first one since the poisoning so I’ll take it.

[dndcreaturesinfo]

Baby Yagas by Fluffy Folio

[inthewindtunnel]

Stumbleine

ft Ess​á​y

Rhiannon

Swarms

Low Sun

(Stumbleine RMX)

Last Japan

Settle Down

(Stumbleine RMX)

Stumbleine

& Friends

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