#dead pupa

[doodleshrimps]

new oc!!! Her name is Emily, but she also goes by her vigilante name, Dead Pupa (the costume in the second pic is the updated one) --- After being bit by a radioactive spider during a biology class, she developes a great agility ,the ability to regenerate her limbs (spiders can do that) and heal very fast The mask she wears is an old thing her brother owned and she wasn't creative enough to create a more unique identity

[onenicebugperday]

@four-of-cups​ submitted: Hi! I was wondering if you’ve ever seen anything like this - I found it on my back door the other day. I’m in Melbourne, Australia, and we’re having a weirdly cold summer right now. It’s maybe 2cm tall and quite high up on the door. Thank you I love your blog!

Hello! Thank you! I have indeed seen this. It’s an adult flightless female moth, maybe a tussock moth in the genus Orgyia. This is her cocoon (with empty pupal case inside) covered with her eggs. Because she can’t fly, she pupates, emerges, mates, lays her eggs, and dies all in the same place. You can even see the skin from her final caterpillar molt inside the cocoon right under her body. Males can fly, so they find the females. Cool find, thanks for sharing!

[skulllesbian]

one of the antherina suraka that i kept in summer never hatched and i just kinda assumed it died inside the cocoon (happens) but i still kept it on my desk just in case? and i swear i just saw it move for the very first time since it pupated in..... june

[scrawnytreedemon]

The more I think about it, the more I get the impression that Zant's getup, while certainly reptillian, feels more like a stylised pupa.

Potential moodboard [rough] coming. Maybe.

[opaleyedprince]

i love to think gender thoughts in the morning

[psychosubtransdistricatedcrybrow]

bug ppl if i send u an image can u pls identify it

[the-art-in-arthesia-is-loud]

WAIT WAIT WAIT. this morning i did remembered abt one thing

back then (literally a few months ago and CLEARLY THIS YEAR), during the Early Days™ of the rgverse, i actually had plans to have galactic as the protagonist, and maybe pupa as her companion/support. the thing is, back then, i was planning to make the two of them the EXACT OPPOSITE GENDER AS THEIR CURRENT SELVES.

yea eventually i scrapped that idea, but then i decided to bring them back with the exact opposite gender as their original selves. which is kind of insane now that i think abt it. i. i can't believe i randomly remembered this now. back then, the rgverse was just a fucking shower thought too......

[herpsandbirds]

Howdy! I recently learned about ambrosia beetles and their specialized structures (mycangia) that hold and transport symbiotic fungi that helps break down wood! What a cool relationship, even if it does wreak havoc on trees across the world. Would you happen to have any pictures of ambrosia beetles/Scolytinae? They tend to be very cute and bullet-shaped and I would love to see more of them!

Ambrosia Beetles:

Granulate Ambrosia Beetle (Xylosandrus crassiusculus), family Curculionidae, SC, USA

photograph by Christina Butler

Gallery, pupae, and an adult beetle of Xylosandrus crassiusculus, one of the most common ambrosia beetle in tropical and subtropical areas worldwide.

image by Hulcr

photo credit: Mary Keim on usda.gov

Ambrosia beetles nurture their gardens of fungus with alcohol

Ethanol in dying trees helps ambrosia fungi flourish

Ambrosia beetles survive by boring into trees and growing fungi inside. They prefer stressed or dying trees, which have more ethanol—an alcohol that's produced naturally by the plant—flowing through their tissues. To find out why, researchers took a closer to look at the black stem borer (pictured), an ambrosia beetle native to Asia that has become a tree-boring pest in North America...

Read more: Ambrosia beetles nurture their gardens of fungus with alcohol | Science | AAAS

FIND OUT MORE:

Ambrosia beetle - Wikipedia

The beetles excavate tunnels in dead or stressed trees into which they introduce fungal gardens, their sole source of nutrition. After landing on a suitable tree, an ambrosia beetle excavates a tunnel in which it releases its fungal symbiont. The fungus penetrates the plant's xylem tissue, extracts nutrients from it, and concentrates the nutrients on and near the surface of the beetle gallery. Ambrosia fungi are typically poor wood degraders, and instead utilize less demanding nutrients. Symbiotic fungi produce and detoxify ethanol, which is an attractant for ambrosia beetles and likely prevents growth of antagonistic pathogens and selects for other beneficial symbionts...

[futurebird]

Queen ant perfumes herself with dead ant.

Here is a Formica Rufa queen who is a parasite of other Formica species (these are the famous wood ants of Europe) She has a dead Formica sp. worker and is gathering hydrocarbons from her exoskeleton to disguise herself as a member of the colony. Then she will likely try to sneak into the nest. Sometimes she will replace the queen, other times simply take some pupae and use them to jumpstart her own colony.

She can open and raise the pupae of many sp. in her genus.

[crevicedwelling]

I am a teacher and want to do a unit on bugs for my kindergarteners and preschoolers and I would love to have some live bugs as a class pet.

I would keep the critters after the unit ( I’ve always wanted some and it’s a great excuse to get work to buy it)

Do you have a recommendation on beginner critters that we would be able to observe easily?

I think isopods are a great option since they are harmless, can be colorful, and do well on minimal care! I’ve always thought isopods would be great class pets since they also are good at demonstrating laws of genetics, convergent evolution etc. for older students.

you’d probably do well with Porcellio scaber or Armadillidium vulgare, both hardy temperate species available in a rainbow of color morphs (and often sold in mixed-color cultures). since they eat dead tree leaves, it might be a fun idea to have your kids go outside and gather dead leaves to feed their class pets (make sure it’s away from pesticides). one issue might be that both species are strictly nocturnal and aren’t reliably visible in captivity, spending their time in hiding. you can still flip their hides to find them, but it's best to keep that to a minimum.

if isopods are too mundane, I also suggest cockroaches like dubia or Madagascar hissers. while hissers can climb, dubia can't, and both are harmless and popular insect ambassadors at museums. hissers are good for handling but they still need to be treated gently, and have sharp spines on their legs that they can use to enforce that. if you’re in the southeast esp. Florida these are not legal to keep but I can suggest alternatives.

mealworms and superworms are beetle larvae that eat just about anything and are very hardy to dryness. their complete metamorphosis makes them good teaching species; the superworm Z. atratus avoids pupating in a colony setting so it’s perfect for isolating in little vials so you can watch its transformation into pupa and beetle.

plain old pet store crickets are a very active option too but Acheta domesticus die quickly due to viruses and generally being a crappy bug. if you want crickets find Gryllodes sigillatus—they’re quieter and longer-lived but much more agile

[regurgitater]

For the last week or so when I’d wake up there would be like 20-30 flies in my kitchen, made sure all trash and food were disposed of properly, went as far as taping off any seals on doors and windows at night to ensure none could get in. Then I found it- there was a hidden reservoir of dead flies between the wall and the dryer that live flies were laying their eggs inside of. Disgusting creatures. Fly pupae living under the washer and dryer it was so nasty, pulled the washer and dryer out, doused with bleach, crushed, and scrubbed. ​Every season living in this place has brought a new wave of pests to terrorize me. It’s so old …and porous. Wolf spiders living in the walls, ear wigs, cave crickets, brown recluses everywhere, beetles, never ending mosquitoes. The cats would watch a corner of my living room this summer so I ripped up the carpet and I could see daylight underneath, no floor there! Can’t wait for winter to freeze everything into submission.

[onenicebugperday]

@crypt1dcorv1dae submitted: Just found this tiny lil friend (only about MAYBE a half inch long) in [removed] (pls remove location), any idea what this little buddy is? And what I should do with them? It's very cold out right now, I don't wanna just shoo the poor lil guy outside into the snow :(

What a cute little dude. It's a cedar longhorn beetle, Semanotus ligneus. Larvae bore in dead, dying, and stressed cedar trees and logs. They pupate in the wood and adults will emerge from the bore hole. It's possible you had some cut cedar in your house they emerged from?

I don't know enough about their life cycle to say whether it's the adults or larvae that over winter - my guess would be the larvae or pupae spend the winter cozy inside their chosen tree or cut/fallen log home.

I don't think there's much you can do for this fella - either let them live their probably brief life inside your home, or find a nice cozy wood pile or something similar to deposit them on outside and hope for the best.

[saliinthia]

Desert folk are nomadic, though during the mating and birthing season most clans come together to settle in riverside towns. These times are always full of creativity and partying, as well as a time of relaxation for most. The desert folk celebrate their collective religion, worshipping the twin suns. They share stories and writing, feast, make clothing, dance, and engage in artistic and hedonistic activities for the duration of mating season. After the season ends, most clans leave the towns to resume their livestock’s feeding rotation, but some clans stay behind in the riverside towns to tend to the buildings and grow crops in the fertile soil.

After the season, work begins once again. The desert folk travel in a rotation unique to each family clan, feeding their livestock on various desert plants. The cow-like animals produce crop milk, hair, hide, and meat. To protect their herds, mature members of a clan carry a rifle. These guns are basic and equivalent to our own blackpowder rifles of the past. They are powerful but relatively inaccurate and slow to reload, so they are used as a last resort or to scare off skittish predators.

These livestock are the most widely produced due to their hardiness and the variety of materials they produce. Both cows and bulls produce a milky substance using a digestive organ similar to that of Earth’s birds. Bulls produce less of this liquid, but it is more nutrient dense and bacteria dense to help the bull’s cows or calves gain strength or work through a sickness. Bull crop milk is known for having healing properties and the small amounts of it and importance for the herd’s health makes it expensive.

Crop milk is obtained by massaging the crop of a cow or bull until it regurgitates it. It takes practice to feel the crop and figure out if the texture is ready to be consumed. This substance is cottage cheese consistency, and is separated into the curds and liquids. Curds are used to make cheese, while the liquid is used for drinking and cooking.

These animals are protgynous hermaphrodites, meaning that the most dominant cow in the herd’s body will start changing and producing testosterone until she becomes a bull that can take over when the old bull is sick, weak, dead, or otherwise absent. Bulls will protect their cows with ferocity, and mate with each one during mating season.

When a cow gives birth, it is to 5-6 live grub-like pupae that cling to her back and consume crop milk. During this time, many larvae will die until 1-2 are left. When the grubs are ready to pupate, the mother consumes them and stores them in her crop until they are finished pupating, and during this time the cow does not eat. After the babies are finished pupating, the mother regurgitates them, and they can finish growing to their adult forms. She will continue feeding them crop milk until they can eat solid matter on their own.

[jupiterswasphouse]

WASP REVIEW - BEEDRILL (POKÉMON)

[Image ID: The official artwork for Beedrill, a Pokémon from the first generation of the Pokémon franchise /End ID.]

Now, if you're just stumbling upon this post you may be a bit confused or up in arms here. "Beedrill clearly isn't a wasp, it's a bee!", and that's an entirely fair assessment, it's in the name afterall! However, as returning readers may recall from last week, while they are generally described separately in conversation, from an entirely taxonomical perspective, bees are wasps themselves, having evolved from predatory wasps and being a sister lineage to the wasp family ammoplanidae.

Furthermore, in my opinion, with the seemingly slick surface layer of its presumably chitinous exoskeleton, Beedrill closer resembles a paper wasp rather than the more expected honey bee, having little to no setae/fur to speak of (most if not all wasps, including paper wasps, do have setae themselves, but only in a few families of wasps, such as Mutillidae or the bee families, are these easily visible to the naked eye).

[Image Source: Wikimedia Commons, L. Shyamal and CABI Digital Library, Muséum De Toulouse | Image IDs: A photo of the yellow, black, and brown paper wasp species Polistes olivaceus collecting wood to form its nest, followed by a photo of another, similarly colored species, Polistes dominula, with its wings outstretched /End IDs.]

This idea is strengthened by the Pokédex entry from Pokémon Crystal, which states that Beedrills will hunt down prey to bring it back to the nest, a behavior similar to that of Vespid wasps, only somewhat paralleled in eusocial bees by Vulture Bees, three species in the genus Trigona (But even then, they don't hunt prey down, they collect flesh from already dead carcasses, hence the comparison to vultures).

That, however, brings us to a very important question, that being, they bring it back to the nest for what, exactly? I can only assume that this is a type of food store for the fully evolved adult Beedrills, something that is not actually true at all for the real world Vespids. Many adult wasps are incapable of feeding on solid matter without it being liquified, so the paper wasps (as well as yellowjackets and hornets) carry their prey back to the nest to feed those of them that can actually eat it, their larvae.

This is where the Beedrill line gets particularly unusual and interesting. As you might recall if you know anything about Gen 1 of Pokémon, Beedrill evolves from Kakuna, which, in turn, evolves from Weedle.

[Image IDs: The official artwork for Weedle and Kakuna, two Pokémon from the first generation of the Pokémon franchise /End IDs.]

While the cells of a wasp nest are typically used to house the larvae, larvae of Beedrills, the Pokémon Weedle, are free roaming creatures, only becoming eusocial in the final stage of evolution, often found among plants, feeding on leaves (Not on the meat). Although Beedrills still appear rather defensive of their young, they can move around entirely on their own! This may be another thing that confuses Pokémon fans that are unfamiliar with Hymenoptera, as the free roaming and leaf eating form of Weedle sounds an awful lot like a caterpillar, especially with the addition of the tree hanging cocoon Pokémon, Kakuna. However, this perfectly aligns with some of the Hymenopteran ancestors of the modern day wasps, sawflies!

[Image Sources: ResearchGate sources One and Two, Bao-Zhen Hua | Image IDs: A collage of photos displaying multiple instances of the larva of the Sawfly species Arge pagana feeding on leaves, followed by another displaying the same species as prepupae on the top and pupae on the bottom /End IDs.]

Even in Kakuna sometimes being known to attach itself to trees using silk or a silk like material is true of sawflies, with many Hymenopterans (including the aforementioned sawflies, paper wasps, and honey bees) being capable of producing this material in their larval stage to create cocoons or reinforce their nest cells during their subsequent pupation.

As you might realize, as well, both Weedle and Kakuna, as well as Beedrills, regardless of sex, possess stingers (not visible in Kakuna, but stated in multiple Pokédex entries including Yellow, Gold, and Let's Go, although contradicted in Red/Blue and X/Y), this is untrue of sawflies in general as well as any young wasps or male wasps. The stinger is a modified ovipositor, a reproductive organ, and is specific to the suborder Apocrita.

I'm going to have to let this slide, among other things, though, as these three Pokémon are clearly, like all Pokémon, are highly fantastical in nature and not necessarily going for realism. I mean, Beedrills are not only missing a middle pair of legs but also have an extra two stingers on the end of their forelimbs (four, on both pairs, in the case of Mega Beedrill)!

It is also implied in a few instances that Beedrills produce honey, which is not only the case in the most famous honey producing insects, the honey bees, but is a trait that is surprisingly also found, to varying degrees, in some Vespid wasps, notably including Brachygastra mellifica and Polistes annularis!

All in all, Beedrill has fascinating inspiration/real world equivalents and a cool design, but can also be confusing in a few ways to entomologically analyze.

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Overall: 6/10

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This wasp was suggested by @shadybug , leave your wasp review suggestion in the replies, tags, or askbox!

[crimsonkingart]

If you are curious about how the Day of the Dead is celebrated in Italy, read here!

You may find similarities with your own customs 💕💕

A small excerpt: As is typical of Italy, the food for the festival varies from region to region. In Toscana and Milan the “pane dei morti” is said to be the characteristic offering. It may be made with hazelnuts and grapes. In northern Puglia, a wheat growing region, a sweet dish for the Day of the Dead is Colva or “Grains of the Dead”. It is made of softened and cooked wheat grains, pomegranate seeds, crushed nuts, vincotto, chocolate and sugar. Fave dei morti or “fava beans of the dead” are not beans at all but rather small cookies made with almond meal, and are another dish for the day found widespread through Italy. Ossa dei morti, suitably elongated and frosted “bones of the dead” are sweets found in Puglia and Sicily. Sicily also boasts sweets: “martorana” which look like fruit, and “pupa” small figurines (again sweets). Children participating in such celebrations are likely to be spoilt for choice. In the video linked below, we see a table loaded with food of an even greater variety and can meet the Signora Maria mentioned above, as well as observing some of the “dress up” and rituals the day involves.

[chamom1le-t3a]

LAMPNOLD SHIP CHILD!!!!!!!!!!

i thought id just post this because cringe is dead!!1

-She is a firefly

-she is currently in the nymph stage (infant) and the third image is after the pupa stage 🙏

-None of the teachers know where she came from but they still love of her nonetheless (most of them)