Thread by i bless the rains down in castamere

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my dad is an entomologist, so I often find that something I have basically always known about bugs totally blows regular people's minds. I'm gonna start a thread of sick bug* facts that normies may or may not know.

*using bug in the colloquial sense. entomologists stand down.
sick bug facts #1: all (adult) scorpions fluoresce under a blacklight. even some scorpion *fossils* have been known to glow this way.

baby scorpions, however, have not yet developed the reactive protein layer in their exoskeletons, and so do not glow.
Horseshoe crabs and harvestmen (Opiliones, you may know them as daddy long legs, although that name is applied to a few different arachnids) also do this.
baby scorpions are called scorplings, btw.
we had a pet emperor scorpion named Napoleon and I would bust him out with a blacklight at Halloween parties and everyone would hold him and be like WHOAAAAAAAA and it made me weirdly popular
sick bug facts #2: when a caterpillar goes into a cocoon, it doesn't just like change shape like an Animorph in there. it releases enzymes and digests almost its entire own body into liquid.
the only cells that are spared are special ones that do nothing in the caterpillar stage. their whole purpose is to divide and turn into a butterfly. in order to get the energy to do this, they absorb the remaining caterpillar ooze.
in spite of this, the caterpillar isn't dead in the sense that you might be thinking. caterpillars who have been conditioned to avoid certain smells will still avoid them as butterflies, so somehow some memories live on even after they have quite literally eaten their own brains.
sick bug facts #3: in the 1800's, someone found this orchid in Madagascar that has its nectar alllllll the way at the bottom of this 10-to-17-inch-long tube. Charles Darwin wrote about it in a letter and predicted that there must be a moth with an incredibly long proboscis.
Darwin's exact words in a letter were, actually, "I have just received such a Box full from Mr Bateman with the astounding Angraecum sesquipedalia with a nectary a foot long. Good Heavens what insect can suck it!"
Five years later, Darwin's friend Alfred Russel Wallace came to the same conclusion, writing:
"That such a moth exists in Madagascar may be safely predicted, and naturalists who visit that island should search for it with as much confidence as astronomers searched for the planet Neptune, – and they will be equally successful."
21 years after Darwin's death, but ten years before Wallace's, someone finally found the moth, Xanthopan morganii praedicta.
sick bug facts #4: you probably already know that bees communicate the locations of flowers, water sources, and potential new nest locations through a complicated "waggle dance" that includes specific movements describing distance from the hive and position relative to the sun.
However! What you may not know is that different honeybee species have different dances, and that when you put multiple species together in one colony, they will gradually learn to understand each other's dances, just as if they were in an immersion program!
Sick bug facts #5: All monarchs outside of one population in south Florida migrate south for the winter (gradually; not every generation lives through to the winter, but their children/grandchildren will make the journey). Different populations go to different places.
Some Eastern monarchs go to south Florida. West of the Rockies, the monarchs head to the California coast. The majority of monarchs go to one location in southern Mexico.
If you breed two of these populations, which typically don't cross paths, together, their offspring will try to migrate to some point in between their parents' overwintering locations. And if you take a monarch to Europe and raise it, it will try to migrate across the Atlantic.
(my dad told my mom this particular sick bug fact on their first date and she thought it was super cool so it might be why I'm alive)
sick bug facts #6: there's a scene in A Bug's Life where a leaf falls in front of an ant and he starts yelling that he's lost. that's accurate. if anything breaks the pheromone trail, the ants following it are stuck. they go back the way they came and take another branching path.
They essentially follow an algorithm to decide which path to take. In many ways, individual ants are like little robots.
sick bug facts #7: this one probably pushes the limits of what a bug is but it's also extremely sick so whatever.
there's a species of marine isopod (like a roly-poly but in the ocean) that cuts out a fish's tongue, then replaces it. it attaches to the stub of tongue muscle and helps the fish eat food for the rest of its life, feeding on the fish's mucus.
It enters the fish through the gills, so once it has reached adulthood it is probably stuck with one fish. They have been seen climbing outside and clinging to the heads of their dead hosts after the fish has passed away, most likely doomed as well.
sick bug facts #8: mosquito larvae swim around like this...
but after they turn into pupae, they keep swimming around. they just do it like this. (yes, the best premade gif I could find is literally from 1928, idk why either)
sick bug facts #9: there is a parasite called the horsehair worm that infects crickets, grasshoppers, and mantids. there are multiple species who may accomplish this in various ways, but long story short, they trick their hosts into jumping into water so they can leave to breed.
Some of them impact the eyesight and make the host attracted to water. Others are believed to release proteins that act on the neurotransmitters, effectively directly piloting the host. In any case, once they hit the water, this happens. CW: it sucks A LOT
youtu.be/Df_iGe_JSzI
the host usually dies, but not usually because of damage the worm did to their bodies. just because it fucking drowned them on the way out.
oh also even though they live inside a lil bug they can be like three feet long
sick bug facts #10: you probably think earwigs are gross, but they are devoted mothers. they can spend months carefully tending their eggs and picking off any mold spores that threaten them. after they hatch, they feed the babies. only 1% of insects demonstrate parental care.
(i also think earwigs are gross, for the record)
sick bug facts #11: the bombardier beetles are about 500 species of beetle who have two glands in their abdomens. one holds hydroquinone and one holds hydrogen peroxide. when threatened, it releases them together, causing a loud pop and spraying caustic gas at 100°C/212°F.
It's not much, but it can kill other insects, and it doesn't look like it's too pleasant for humans either.
I've been on the internet a while, but I did not anticipate all of you immediately getting horny for the bombardier beetle. i see now that that was my own naivete
sick bug facts #12: there are an estimated 20 quadrillion ants in the world, roughly 2.5 million individual ants for every single person on earth.
sick bug facts #13: sometimes army ants are in one place and they want to be in another place, but there's no direct route there. most all ants can't jump. so some of the ants will climb out into space, cling to each other, and construct a bridge... with their own bodies.
almost. almost all ants.
This army ant bridge into a wasp nest went viral a couple years ago because you'd think they'd just go across the ceiling, right? wrong. they're raiding that nest and taking the eggs, larvae, and even some unfortunate adults back to eat, but the ants can't carry them upside down.
ok Elon might have broken this one because all I'm seeing on my end is
bug facts #13(a): any arthropod would be better at running a website than Elon Musk
sick bug facts #14: in addition to honey, bees also make something called royal jelly. All bee larvae are fed this protein-rich food for their first three days of life. After that, most of them, who will become workers and drones, are switched to nectar and pollen.
Some, however, are selected by the workers to keep receiving only royal jelly (the white waxy stuff around the larvae here). As a result of their diet (specifically thought to be a *lack* of certain sterilizing chemicals found in pollen), these larvae will become queens.
Unfortunately, the first new queen to emerge will quickly attempt to find and sting the other new queens to death. Sometimes they rally some workers and escape to form a new colony, but generally they fight to the death until only one new queen remains.
You can tell it's the queen bee because of the way it is. Neat!
brief thread break for the new people. did you know I have a giant pet pig named Rufus who lives inside with me? well now you do. ok back to bug facts
sick bug facts #15: many insects can see wavelengths of light that we can't see, and many flowers have hidden UV patterns. What looks plain to us may look extremely fancy and delicious to a butterfly or bee! (These are approximations; we can't ever truly know how they see them.)
Sick bug facts #16: Blowflies lay their eggs on corpses. They can smell a corpse up to a mile away, and have been known to arrive on a body within fifteen minutes of death. This makes their larval age very forensically important, as they can be "synced up" to when someone died.
This is unfortunately very dependent on other factors, however, so it's not always reliable. For example, if it's too cold, they may not arrive at all, while if it's too hot, they may decide it's too hot to hang around.
Even if eggs are laid, temperatures similarly slow and advance the growth of the larvae, which can dramatically affect estimates of time of death.
personal fact: maggots gross me out a lot! I don't think insects should have such soft and squishy bodies! it's not right!
sick bug facts #17: the order Hemiptera are the TRUE bugs. they include a whole lot of things, but cicadas, stink bugs, assassin bugs, aphids, and bed bugs are some you may know. They're mainly characterized by their piercing and sucking mouthparts...
which they use variously on plants, other insects, and vertebrate blood (that's us 😱).
They also tend to have these big goofy sticky-outty eyes, and I assume that's where we get the term "bug-eyed," but I can't find any confirmation of that.
Shortly after pupating, the male stalk-eyed fly looks like a normal fly, but then he starts pumping air into his head until its eyeballs stick way out. He does this because chicks dig it, apparently.
youtu.be/bGX7zZk0Eo4
Oops, that was #18.
sick bug facts #19: we have these guys here in Kentucky and I see them fairly often. They are called scorpion flies for obvious reasons, although they are completely harmless and cannot sting. Only the males have the intimidating "stinger," which is actually, uh, their genitalia.
sick bug facts #20: because tarantulas have all their eyes on the tops of their heads, they are very susceptible to ants marching in under them and taking their eggs. some species have formed symbiotic relationships with tiny frogs who eat ants in return for protection.
and also in return for ants. when you're a tiny frog, ants are their own reward.
Anyway, the tarantulas never eat their little frogs. Even young tarantulas will sometimes pick them up in their mouths, but they seem to be merely inspecting them before putting them down unharmed.
Various species of tiny frogs and tarantula have been found doing this from Peru to Sri Lanka.
sick bug facts #21: Chagas disease is transmitted by the kissing bug, so called because it bites your lips while you sleep to drink your blood. This doesn't actually transmit the disease, though; the fact that they turn around and poop into the wound afterward does.
they're not all winners, people.
just saw the swype-o. oh well
sick bug facts #22: when you walk into a big swarm of gnats that was all in one place and they all get in your eyes and mouth and stuff? they were mating, sorry
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