Rare insect found at Arkansas Walmart
phys.org
phys.org
If I remember correctly it's thanks to showing the picture to the doctor, which had it sent to a zoo (!), that they realized how dangerous it was and thankfully another zoo (?) had the serum.
My memory is fussy but it happened, in the UK.
Turns out the spider traveled all the way from Brazil into... Bananas.
Another common name for the brazilian wandering spider is the "banana spider" : )
Too lazy too google it so I posted what I remember ; )
I feel like that sentence gives very little actual information while giving readers' imaginations the opportunity to run amok.
"The spider's name means "murderess" in Greek, which is appropriate for the deadly arachnid. And it's no wonder why — it's one of the most venomous spiders on Earth. Its bite, which delivers neurotoxic venom, can be deadly to humans, especially children, although antivenom makes death unlikely."
https://www.livescience.com/41591-brazilian-wandering-spider...
Spiders carried phones back then? And lent it to a human? By the gods.
Kind of wonder how common that is nowadays, since traditionally I would think people could take it as an insult where they're being referred to as a thing less than human. Tone can generally disambiguate intentions, though.
[0] This kind of thing is never absolute. We can surely find counterexamples if we dig hard enough, but rarely enough that we can ignore them for discussions like this.
We had a screen door on our house and no porch light. I was heading into the house from the driveway when I saw a cockroach fly up and onto the screen, evidently attracted to the lights from inside the house and intent on getting inside. I grabbed a baby food jar from an outbuilding and went back to the screen door where I found the cockroach, still pondering the issue of how to gain entry. Cockroaches usually don't seek out the light but this one did so that was interesting enough for me to want to capture this insect.
After capturing the cockroach and sealing it in the jar I noticed that it was light to medium green colored. It was clearly a cockroach but all the ones I had ever seen were various shades of brown to red. I dialed in to my internet at the time, probably AOL, and searched for cockroach pictures hoping to identify it.
I finally found a photo and write-up about this insect. It was a Cuban cockroach. Evidently they had only been noted in the United States in a few places in Florida, probably brought in during one of the refugee waves of the past few decades. They were not common at all and had never been found on the Texas Gulf Coast. There probably had been a lot of Florida men moving to the Houston area and they carried their insect bros with them, probably inadvertently, though you never really know.
I contacted the University of Houston entomology department and reported it. They were interested but not enough to need to see it.
I ended up keeping that cockroach inside that sealed jar until it died since I didn't want it to spread. After more than 30 days alive inside, a large collection of dots appeared on the inside of the jar. I wondered what the heck those things were since they were not excreta as the insect had run out of that a while earlier. Eventually the question was answered as the jar suddenly filled with activity from dozens of small cockroach kids, each looking for a way out of their predicament. The adult died shortly after the little ones hatched.
After more than 3 months, the last one of the baby cockroaches died. I eventually threw the jar out, I think. It may still be in a box of crap I have hauled around for unknown reasons though.
People in southeast Texas living near the sweltering bunghole of the state and the universe can thank me for the small contribution that I made to preventing the spread of an invasive species. The last thing we need is a cockroach that loves to mix and mingle in a well-lit kitchen.
- You can afford to live here. Real estate is attainable, even fairly close in.
- The arts here are on par with our status as the 4th largest city in the country.
- The people are awesome -- friendly, helpful, and generally from all over the damn place. That leads to ...
- The food is RIDICULOUS. There's a great meal to be had in this town at any price point you care to name.
- It's immensely un-snooty. Unlike lots of nerds, I don't mind putting on a suit, but in Houston there's almost nowhere that polices dress codes beyond "no jeans, collared shirt". And even that's rare. Superficial snobbiness is just not much of a Thing here (vs., say, big parts of Dallas, or Atlanta).
- The flip side of the summer is that it's almost NEVER cold enough to deter outdoor activities. You don't store your bike for the winter here. You just keep riding.
- Finally, if you're a traveling sort of person, being centrally located makes hitting either coast possible pretty quickly. This has been handy for me in both business and personal contexts for sure.
So yeah, step off. Houston's awesome. It might not've been YOUR favorite place, but maybe crapping all over it in your post about a roach wasn't the best move.
I didn't come by my assessment by reading about Houston and latching onto someone else's observations. I lived in Houston, west of HWY6 for 5 years before buying a place out northwest on 290 and commuting from there for 5 more years.
Then, after moving up near FtWorth and just when I thought I was done with it for good, I ended up commuting weekly to Houston for 18 more years. I saw and had the opportunity to enjoy all the interstate construction on I-10, 45 towards Galveston, 59, 610 loop, Grand Parkway, Beltway 8, and finally 290. It has been in a state of constant change down there. Some changes improved things, others appear to be boondoggles.
I totally agree on the people and the food. I'm in the O&G industry so I had the opportunity to work with people from every continent including a guy who spent a season in Antarctica. Culture, arts, like you say is first class.
Since I watched many of those subdivisions being built, especially on the southwest to northwest side of the city, I am less impressed by the housing. My family has been in the building business since the Depression and I grew up on job sites. I would be pretty persnickety about what and where I bought. When I first moved there, and likely when you did too, the Katy Prairie was a nesting area for migratory geese and ducks. Now they have lost all that so that developers could build huge subdivisions in the old rice paddies and interrupt rainwater drainage that formerly prevented a large part of the major flooding in Houston proper. I spent days down there after Harvey trying to help people who had lost all their stuff.
Basically, I come by my overall negative impression of Houston honestly. We don't have to agree about everything and indeed we don't. That won't change my assessment though since that is based entirely on my own experiences and observations.
I've never lived in the suburbs here - I'm in Montrose - but yeah, a lot of the new stuff is badly built, but it's the same anywhere. The part that WAS uniquely Houston is that they literally built on the flood plain, and many people bought there and weren't aware of the risk.
It's true we needn't agree, but it's also true that beginning your post by describing a city as "northwest of the asshole of the universe", and ending it by calling it a "sweltering bunghole," is needlessly derogatory, inflammatory, and pointlessly rude.
I agree that Houston has no monopoly on wanton destruction of nice places.
I'm a visual person and appearances help me navigate the world that I live in.
In real life, have you ever seen anything that looks more like a wrinkly anus than the network of roads radiating from downtown Houston? Add to that the stinking, petrochemical soup of the Ship Channel and I think you may see why I feel the way I do about the place.
If I needed to live there again I would carefully scout everything so that I had an easy way in and out and to and from work. That more than anything would help make like in Houston manageable.
Knowing from experience the many things that can go wrong on a downhole survey leaves me wondering why the survey data from those past generation of tools was taken as acceptably accurate. It was not standard practice at the time to take a multishot to verify hole geometry and once it all went horizontal you had to trust the MWD/LWD. In many cases that was fine but in some situations that was dicey. Some of those MWDs were notoriously bad as engineers pushed them past the limits of signal decoding in order to avoid being charged for the trip to retrieve, especially the one I worked with.
That's how I remember it all anyway. Email is in profile if you want to chat. Good luck in your endeavors!
It claims to be a social network, but it's user interface isn't engineered to keep your attention like others do - so there's a little bit of a learning curve to really figure out how to get the most out of it, but I'm a total addict now.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-california-t...
iNaturalist claims “seek” uses on device “ai” to help find species.
It might sound silly, but I'm approaching it like Pokemon - gotta catch em all! I'll identify some taxon and then try to go get as many species as possible. For example, I'm now aware of at least 5 species of Sea Urchin local to me - I've got 3 on iNat. I've seen the other 2, but didn't get a photo, but I know how to find them so I'm headed back out. I didn't even know there were at least 5 here, let alone be able to name them. It's intellectually really addicting....
Something that surprised me is how many subspecies there are of checks notes everything! It almost seems like in the narrowest sense, almost everything is endangered (if you're considering subspecies and phenotype). Very interesting stuff. I promise I'm not a paid promoter!
The Seek app is slow to start and has a warning dialog every time.
Another buried feature is being able to view your observations and species in a tree view. Go to Dashboard -> Profile -> Species (under your profile picture)
Here's mine [0]. I really like how I can drill down the taxon tree and filter to see just species and/or observations at any level of the tree.
Edit: Oh, and be careful if you're worried about metadata in your pictures. iNat doesn't strip it out. I actually kind of like that -- after poking around, it helped me identify my next camera purchase. But Somebody could totally dox me (well, de-anonify me) with the metadata in some of my pictures....
[0] https://www.inaturalist.org/lifelists/dolfindave?view=tree&t...
For some fun with geogson and unintended precision - https://rapidlasso.com/2019/05/06/how-many-decimal-digits-fo...
> Recently I came across this tweet containing the image below and it made me laugh … albeit not in the original way the tweet intended. The tweet was joking that “Anyone is able to open a GeoJSON file” and included the Microsoft Word screen shot seen below as a response to someone else tweeting that “Handing in a project as @GeoJSON. Let’s see if I get the usual “I can’t open this file” even though […]”. What was funny to me was seeing longitude and latitude coordinates stored with 15 decimal digits right of the decimal point.
Also of interest in precision - https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/8650/measuring-accur...
I've been seeing the same bugs, birds, etc my entire life and I can name practically none of them.
I use the Cornell bird app from time to time, but having something for plants and insects as well sounds awesome!
https://www.reddit.com/r/whatsthisbug/comments/1180uq8/comme...
It sounds like they had an extraordinary finding in 2020, and it depends on the specimen having been misidentified in 2012. Rather than any other explanation for how this could've happened over the 8 years and various people who handled it.
For example, could the labeling have been mixed up at some point during maintenance of a collection and its storage? Could a drunk student have pulled a prank, but it got out of hand as soon as the professor told others, and now there's no way the student is going to tell anyone?
I'd guess it's legit, but would be nice to understand how researchers in that field can have the apparent level of confidence.
Although this has not been established as the cause of demise of this specific species, over-lighting is a huge problem. It is expensive cargo-culting, and the fact that LED lighting is so much more efficient to run, just makes the cargo-culting of lighting up everything all the time that much worse.
We really need to stop it, it screws with the lifecycle of almost every plant & animal including us. Dark skies aren't just for stargazers.
Whenever you get the chance, advocate for minimizing and shielding lighting.
So assuming that, I think it's a good idea to ask the question: If people general prefer a dark sky at night, why do we have so much lighting?
There are probably a lot of benefits that people get from lighting that would be lost with less of it. If we don't understand what those are, it's hard to weigh the pros and cons.
Because it's been too gradual of a thing for most folks to really notice.
Take someone to a dark sky site and they'll likely have their mind blown. I was in Freycinet National Park in Tasmania last year, and you could step out of a lit room with no time for eyes to adjust and still see the Milky Way laid out in the sky.
I'd first point to the Tragedy Of The Commons. For anyone to put up one extra light or string of lights, is only a small extra cost to the installer. But the externalized costs and cumulative effect is insanely destructive.
If we think about it, it makes no sense to screw up the lifecycle of almost every plant and creature on the planet.
But most people are entirely ignorant of the harms, and cognizant only of their naive preferences and fear of the dark. So, they put up a light, or string of lights, or entire parking lot or city of lights. Without considering the consequences, perhaps beyond the budget.
Just because something has been built does not mean that there was a good justification for it.
It only means that there was a bad but sufficient justification for the immediate cost and that the externalized costs are ignored.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it is because your assumption is incorrect. Or perhaps more specifically, it is too narrowly focused. People may generally prefer a dark sky, but clearly they don't generally prefer it over having a well lit landscape.
Other ideas: Landing strips. Safety (perceived?) in public spaces. On streets. Around homes. Etc.
I'm not arguing these are good tradeoffs or not, just that they ARE tradeoffs for some people, and there's no moral imperative one way or the other.
There is a section of I-5 between Portland and Seattle, perhaps a couple miles long, that has blue streetlights. Like, really blue, not just blue-ish white. It's like driving under a blacklight. The Internet tells me this is the result of a manufacturing defect and the effect is not intentional. I hope they replace them soon, they're kinda distracting when you're driving.
Also, what could prevent us to have lights that are turned of when there is no-one around and for the other cases, have our own source of light (like for example... a mobile phone or a head-light) ? Big optimization.
There are like "four or five people in town" with the skills, bibliography and interest to identify them at species level and resist the urge to smash them so, rarely seen. It toke eight years to identify correctly this specimen.
> the specimen was not an antlion, as Skvarla had mistakenly labeled it.
I suppose someone need to scour those backwoods for new species.
In fact, they could probably publish an app and have kids in the area scour the woods for insects and take pictures of them. I'm sure lots of them would do that for some robux.
Backwoods? Fayetteville is part of "NWA" - Northwest Arkansas. Between Washington County (including Fayetteville) and Benton County to the north (including Bentonville, home of Walmart) there are >500k people living there.
The Ozarks as a whole is less populated, but most of that is to the east.
> In fact, they could probably publish an app and have kids in the area scour the woods for insects and take pictures of them. I'm sure lots of them would do that for some robux.
Most of the relatively untouched areas of the Ozarks Plateau don't have consistent cell reception, unfortunately. That said... I'm going to do some thinking about that. There might be a way to work with the federal agencies that manage those areas to market something like that. At least in theory, building out the app wouldn't be terribly difficult. Organizing, curating, and getting the resultant dataset to the right people would be harder.
> Skvarla found the specimen in 2012, but misidentified it and only discovered its true identity after teaching an online course based on his personal insect collection in 2020.
It was one thing a century and a half ago when wildlife was still close to plentiful. Now, take some photos and videos, log the location & conditions, and let it live...
Killing & mounting isn't science anymore, it's a snuff fetish.
EDIT:
Yes, I get it, it was one insect and in this case he didn't even realize it was rare until years later, and often getting hand-on DNA helps, and overlighting, pollution, habitat destruction are far larger drivers.
But teaching the habit of collecting and mounting bugs goes far beyond the handfuls of PhD entomologists. I remember being taught about it and encouraged in something like 6th grade. It's not harmless like collecting stamps and, unless you're going to actually do DNA analysis on that sample, still seems to me like more of a cargo-cult/fetish activity, so I'd hope we could get beyond it.
From the article, a microscope and DNA testing were required to confirm:
> "We were watching what Dr. Skvarla saw under his microscope and he's talking about the features and then just kinda stops," said Codey Mathis, a doctoral candidate in entomology at Penn State. "We all realized together that the insect was not what it was labeled and was in fact a super-rare giant lacewing. I still remember the feeling. It was so gratifying to know that the excitement doesn't dim, the wonder isn't lost. Here we were making a true discovery in the middle of an online lab course."
> For additional confirmation, Skvarla and his colleagues performed molecular DNA analyses on the specimen. Since confirming its true identity, Skvarla has deposited the insect safely in the collections of the Frost Entomological Museum at Penn State, where scientists and students will have access to it for further research.
And in this case the collection was done for a valid scientific purpose, not just for funsies.
Well, the point here is that this was a "rare" insect. Comparing the number of a particular rare insect to the number of common mosquitoes doesn't make sense.
He only realized it was a rare insect 8 years later.
Pesticide use and loss of habitat make that carrying capacity smaller. Smashing bugs on your car windshield and collecting specimens just makes room for more juvenile bugs to survive to adulthood in a few hours/days.
Anyhow, if you study these, and I have done so, then yes, you absolutely will notice any unusual insects around you, to the point where I can remember pretty much every time I ever saw a Buckeye butterfly, any sort of giant silk moth, mole cricket or Queen.
When it is "a rare, surviving eastern population of giant lacewings that evaded detection and extinction. ", it is very much like a panda, and a single premature death can make a difference in the survival of a population.
You add nothing with such a vague comment, only distraction. If you have a problem with what I wrote, state the problem or don't bother subtracting value.
(Hint: I did, and yes I understand that he didn't even realize what it was until years later. I also recall being taught in middle school to capture and mount insects, so it isn't just the handful of PhDs doing it who will actually do DNA analysis on it...)
Ten years ago, people thought the same thing about bees.
Today, we're starting to worry about the food supply.
It is mass deaths of bees that are causing the problems, not entomologists taking for collections.
If an endangered insect species is down to a population where single individuals matter, it's already a goner.
> In 2014, an unauthorised climbing team sighted live stick insects near the summit of Ball’s Pyramid, in a thicket of sedge plants rooted in very thin soils at an altitude of 500 metres, suggesting that the insect’s range on the island is more widespread than previously thought, and that its food preferences are not limited to Melaleuca howeana.
That species likely was a goner, barring the human breeding program. Successful reintroduction is going to require humans to finish wiping out the rat population on Lord Howe Island (which wiped the insects out there in just two years after their 1918 introduction).
And to identify it they need to look at things that aren't visible in a photo. Moreover, photos are not a valid proof of anything anymore because they are easily falsifiable.
Individuals are not important, we protect populations. And to detect valuable populations we need to take samples.
https://faunalytics.org/entomology-and-the-ethical-treatment...
Ohhhhh, that kind of AR!