As I spoiled in the last post, Gerald2 died whilst I was in El Salvador. He is now resting peacefully beside Gerald1 in my school's insect collection.
On the vein of morbidness, I also enacted a long-awaited family reunion yesterday:
The bottom specimen is Sticky. The top specimen is his mother. Together at last!
As you can see, Spiky is also doing very well--he emerged from his pupa as a full-grown male Io moth.
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| Shhhh--he's sleeping. |
Right now, I am helping Spiky to "spread his wings" and move up in the world: on the twenty-third he should be dry enough to move to the school's collection.
Since I can't seem to escape the subject of Lepidopterans, here is a magnificent Manduca rustica (the rustic sphinx moth) that I found on some tennis courts. Its wingspan is 12 cm--the longest I've heard of in a sphinx moth.
The other day, my two-year-old niece found a bug for me. She led the way in that weird teeter-tottering run of hers, and I followed closely behind. Tiny, adept hands opened the door to the back porch and she pointed toward a chair. "There, Nate!"
She had found an adult Carolina mantis, Stagmomantis carolina. Within minutes, "Hulk" (so dubbed because of the size difference from Yoda) was in Gerald2's old cage at home. Its then-occupant, a pupating tobacco hornworm, found itself relegated to a smaller container. It was not long until I realized that my brother had botched the insect-naming game badly yet again--"Hulk" was a female. As with the "Geralds," the name stuck anyway.
Before we get into more specifics about Hulk, let me introduce to you Chris (an intentionally gender-neutral name). Chris is a very unfortunate cicada. When Chris was emerging from Chris's larval exoskeleton, Chris was attacked and brutally murdered by a party of wild, Amazonian fire ants. My brother stumbled across the gruesome sight when it was too late for poor Chris. Chris will forever be a freak of nature, frozen in a moment of pivotal time. Other insects do not understand Chris. They have never seen anything like Chris, and so they refuse to accept Chris into their society. Keep that in mind.
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| Chris says "Hello." |
Poor, lonely Chris. Poor, frightened Hulk.
Hulk also was not very fond of my fingers intruding on her personal space. She flashed her eyespots and struck again and again, and finally her valiant efforts paid off and I retreated in disgrace.
Here is a slow-mo of her striking:
Yoda, however, was not about to be one-upped by anyone. Just to prove that size matters not, he absolutely demolished this poor katydid:
Yoda has even began to eat out of my hand--he is quite domesticated.
Hulk is not.
This morning, I awoke to find an empty cage. Frantically, I scanned the room: the closet, the walls, the fan, the shelves, the cage, the bed, the cage, the shelves, my desk, the cage... then I chanced to look up.
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| Yo. |
It took some effort getting her back into the cage, but we got 'er done.
