i just finished reading a great book on bugs and other similar creatures. i see bugs as these super interesting robot-like creatures that have found a miriard ways to survive, mutating and adjusting at an incredible pace just to keep on living. we think they’re ugly but they are actually perfect little survival machines!
they have stuff you wouldn’t believe! asexual reproduction? walking on water? underwater swimming using a bag of air as support? necrophagy? mimetism? the mesmerizing tiny heartless (both literally and metaphorically) creatures have them all and even more!
i’ll give you a list of the omfg! moments i had while going through the book:
* the animal world includes 13-15 million species (and more are discovered every day)
* many bugs don’t have teeth to chew food so they inject their prey with a cocktail of toxins that paralyzes and dissolves the inside of the insect so that in the end the attacker can slurp up the bug soup…
* most spiders have 8 eyes…
* the web of the giant orb spider is so strong tribesmen use it as fishing net…
* the dry wood termites‘ societies are made of workers, soldiers and a royal couple. the blind and sterile workers live for a year as long as the royal life span can reach 50. it’s good to be a king…
* a sea anemone can live up to 70 years
* the sea cucumber can “liquefy” its body to fit into the tiniest rock crevices in case of danger. also, in order to keep an attacker occupied while it escapes, it can vomit out its digestive system! it will take 3 months for it to grow back…
* the hagfish can survive up to 7 months without any food
* the leafy sea dragon gives birth
* i saw my first sea lamprey in the specola museum, in florence. it seemed excessive even for nature to have created such a terrifying being with a face consisting of a mouth/sucker full of concentric circles of sharp teeth. but it actually exists…and it uses its “face” to liquefy the meat of the prey it bites into and then to suck the resulting stuff…
* sometime ago, i found an empty bug: just a translucent shell, even the eyes were empty. i took it home. we couldn’t figure out what it was. i had to get to kanazawa and find an water-less aquarium full of these things to find out that they were the shells of moulting cicadas. yeah, the cicadas are those annoyingly loud insects.
* the opalescent squids‘ intelligence allows them to have a very complex language of light signals they are emitting with their bodies.
* the chameleons change their colour to match the variations of the environment and those of their own emotions, NOT to blend in. also, this superpower is actually shared by many other lizards.
i hope you find this as interesting and inspiring as i do! nature is mind-blowingly amazing!
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CICADA LIFE CYCLE « little-aesthete's Blog says:
Sep 5, 2011
[…] recently told you about insects and how i found an empty cicada larva […]