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The Malay Red Harlequin is a butterfly found in the rainforests of peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo. This particular individual was photographed in Gunung Palung National Park in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo. Gunung Palung National Park is today an island of forest amid a largely deforested landscape.
There more than 2,500 species of butterflies found in tropical Asia.
this is the masked bee! she has no friends and hates everyone. Sometimes when she has kids she raises them alone and doesn’t let the father come for day trips. she loves pollen but does not like waiting for it so she chews flowers open which is essentially stealing. we love her anyway.
these bees are homalictus bees! they are the rainbow gay bees. Females tend to live together in one nest and guard the entrance. one time we found 160 gay girls bunking together. They’re so irridescent and small that they might look like flies but they are really just tiny lesbians.
and this is the blue banded bee! she may look like she’s wacked out, but really she is pretty chill. she just wants to live independently (or with some friends) in a nest or burrow and look after tomatoes.
this is a cuckoo bee! she is really cool! she goes into other bee’s houses and lays eggs there, and then when the baby hatches it eats the host bees’ pollen and lays waste to the hive, murdering and eating all the other bee babies! BUT ONLY if it’s mother bee didn’t kill them all first.
thank u dark bee tumblr
This is the most successful thing ever!
this is dawson’s burrowing bee! they are one of the largest bees in australia and they burrow into the ground to make nests. males are so aggressive that they will literally fight and kill each other to get a female! and if a particularly aggressive male does not get a female he will murder all of the other males out of rage! (and sometimes the females will be casualties of these brawls – here is a video of a bee brawl where a female get decapitated. these bees are very large and kind of look like half bee half cockroach. but the females’s fuzzy white heads are pretty cute! [photo credit]
and dark bee tumblr comes through for us again… we are so fortunate. thank u dark bee tumblr. thank u
I’m mad that they missed the opportunity to use “les-bee-ans”
This is a tree bumblebee- they’re pretty similar to honeybees in that they have big nests with a polyandrous queen. However, these guys love to be around humans and in gardens, and are super resilient- there are now large populations in Iceland. They have a more complex social hierarchy than most bees, with multiple worker castes. If a worker gets close with the queen she can mate with a drone and lay her own eggs in with the big pile, but eat the eggs of any workers beneath her that try to do so.
This is a valley carpenter bee- the only bee that can thermoregulate and had a circulatory system complete with aortic arch. Carpenter bees are good because they are too big to get into many flowers and have to be extra hairy to get pollen. They live in raw wood in small family units of all females (mothers and daughters or sisters) and are excellent cooks and workers. Males cruise around mating with multiple females and then leave.
These are green sweat bees- they burrow in the ground and live in apartment complexes, where they all use the same entrance but then have their own separate burrows rather than one large room. Some have kids, some don’t, so someone’s always around to keep out invaders. Unlike most bees the males actually do quite a bit of pollinating and go out in groups.
dark bee tumblr has graced us once again with even more forbidden and secret bees we are truly blessed
Fun fact: that valley carpenter bee (that big golden one; Xylocopa varipuncta) is the male. The females are all black. The males do this thing where they just… hover… looking for females. They’ll just cruise around a likely spot checking everything out to see if it’s a female they can mate with. They don’t sting (though the females can).
Now working to banish the thought that came into my head when I imagined a big, golden-colored male organism obsessed with females and basically just hovering looking for its next mating opportunity.
It’s time for a time-tested #TrilobiteTuesday! Whenever the trilobites of British Columbia are considered, images of the historic Burgess Shale and its world-renowned treasure trove of Middle Cambrian material naturally and rightfully spring to mind. That outcrop of the Stephen formation stands as perhaps the most studied and lauded invertebrate fauna in paleontological history. However, this rugged, mountain-strewn province along Canada’s Pacific Coast should also be recognized for a number of intriguing Lower and Upper Cambrian. Magnificent Olenellus and Wanneria (pictured) specimens emerge from the area’s oldest fossil-bearing rock—the Rosella and Eager formations. Meet many more trilobites on the Museum website.
Every growth, marking, bump, or blemish on a plant was made by something, and surprisingly often the cause can be closely traced to a particular animal. I could see from a distance that these hickory leaves had orangish spots on their underside.
On close examination the spots were furry balls! These little growths are galls that have grown around insect eggs, in a weird bit of mostly harmless and stunningly common parasitization.
These orange tribbles hide and protect the larvae of the hickory gall midge (Caryomyia sp.). The creature inside is a helpless pinpoint of a maggot that will grow into a fly so small that it would otherwise go completely unnoticed by humans.
Barcelona-based fashion designer Alassie of El Costurero Real creates delicate cloaks, capes, and scarves that look like diaphanous moth and butterfly and wings for an instant fairy transformation. Each pair of vibrantly-colored insect wings is made of muslin that’s so light and delicate it looks like chiffon. The edges of the wings are wired to help them keep their shape and make them easy to use while dancing. Build a human-sized cocoon and you’ll be ready to entertain friends at parties or stage impromptu street performances.
Visit the El Costurero Real Etsy shop to check out more of Alassie’s wings as well as all sorts of other fantasy, Victorian, and steampunk garments and accessories.
Nature is so beautiful… look at this beautiful display of the prickly rose gall. These galls are a parasitic sack formed by the cynipid wasp. The wasp, like many other parasitic insects, uses the wild rose plant as a safe haven for its offspring. They inject a substance into the plant and then lay their eggs in it, as the larva grows, so does the gall and that is what the larva uses as a food supply and as a protection sack until they are ready to join the world. You would think this type of parasitic infestation would be damaging to the host plants, but research shows that the plants are not affected by these types of infestations.
I find galls very interesting and these ones in particular are one of my favorite… the wasp that created these galls was surely an artist… it used the leaves to create the perfect bed for its children <3 here is another perfection of Nature’s artistry…
Diplolepis polita is the wasp’s scientific name. These galls show up in the California wild rose (Rosa californica) at the Carpinteria salt marsh; I love showing them off to tour attendees. Russo discusses the species extensively in Field Guide to Plant Galls of California and Other Western States.
I’ve always wondered if the spines (which are flexible at first, then become brittle with age) represent the wasp repurposing the genetic code that produces the rose’s thorns.
This reminds me of the galls produced in Coyote Brush (Baccharis pilularis) by a small moth, Gnorimoschema baccharisella. Some googling suggests yours might actually be Urophora cardui, however, a type of gall-inducing fruit fly that has been imported from Europe in an effort to control the invasive thistle.
Thanks for sharing the image! The Tumblr gall fandom: small but doughty.
Scientifically named Viciria praemandibularis (Salticidae), this jumping spider is, by obvious reasons, commonly known as Wide-Jawed Viciria, and can be found in Singapore and Sulawesi.
As you can see in the pictures, this female Wide-jawed viciria is caring her eggs. In the Salticidae spiders maternal care of eggs and recently hatched juveniles appears to be widespread. Salticids spin silken eggsacs and stay with these, presumably guarding them. Exactly what salticid females guard against and how they guard the eggs is unclear, but the maternal female could probably deter many egg predators and parasitoids.
