Injecting a Little Colour

This is pretty Darned cool!

Via:The Daily Mail

Through mixing coloured sugar solution with a paraffin base (in order to allow the drops to retain their shape), Scientist Dr Babu managed to change colour of some ants in his back garden, owing to the translucent nature of the ants abdomens, apparently the ants had a preference for lighter colours favouring yellow and green over darker red and blue...
thank god he's not wasting his time on curing cancer...

There is nothing more fantastically awesome to an invertebrate keeper when their insects shed ESPECIALLY when they shed to adult and ESPECIALLY when they are female (more often than not) because females are on the whole bigger, more epic (especially in the case of mantid's and phasmid's (stick insects) ) and are more productive (they make babies) and it is usually much  better to have a high female to male ratio for this reason :D

So when my sub adult female shed to adult and finally earned her wings i was more than ecstatic :D

she looks so much like a leaf!:D  males on the other hand look a bit weedy in comparison having functional wings that spoil the leaf illusion somewhat...
also i love the females facial features...

they just look a bit clueless, like a confused Tusken Raider

Vis some obscenely long blog thing

These things literally scare the crap out of me, but my little leafy is like a raider crafted from marshmallow, with a hint of green ^_^

Also my mantid's have all been shedding too, which means they are happy :D but they show no noticeable difference apart from longer legs...bless

Things I Find at Work Pt. 3 Nature Addition!

Today I have been Gardening and so we have nature making an appearance :D YAY! My favourite :D
My first Find was this chappy,

and would you believe it? another bloody Toad! 22 years its taken me to see an example of Bufo bufo and in the space of a month I find 2! And s/he's Miniature! Really laid back just chilled out on my hand whilst i took a picture:D AWESOME!

Next on my list is this Badman Magpie checking out his reflection in car windows...

he was making the most awsfull racket ever, and i managed to sneak a little closer

I find magpies get a bad press (my mum despises the things - especially the bald one in the garden, despite me trying to convince her its a monk), I on the other hand admire Corvid's(magpies, crows, ravens ect) despite the plural for crows being a 'murder of crows', I admire their intellect, and the amazing self awareness they (can) exhibit, despite the lack of cortical structures within the brain (these are linked with self awareness and Theory of mind in mammals). I would totally own a Corvid.

Now for some invert's (Yes)

Found these guys when i was digging up the flower beds, they are without a shadow of a doubt beetle larvae but i have no idea what species at all, my first thought was some sort of chafer beetle (think may bugs) but the colouring just isn't right (chafers have white bodies and orange heads) they look nice tho :D

The last think i found was that nature is stronger than metal after hitting a tree root...

 I was down a Tool... well thats it for today :D

Bramble: Bain of my Life

It's happened by letting some invertebrates into my house i have inadvertently released the addiction within, i want to buy more, breed more, convert a shed, get some more species and use obscene amounts of scientific names. This has been catalysed through the conversations with fellow bug lovers both within my social circles and at the AES show on sat ...
One thing I had to do today was collect bramble for the leafies. I had forgot how crap that was.
You end up getting cold, turned into a walking freak of a pincushion and look as perverted as humanly possible without actually doing anything perverted.
In the process of going into the woods cutting bramble and putting it into my bag, i have in essence become an escaped tenant of B... then you have to wash the stuff then put it in the cage and remove the old stuff, which in the process of dying has become as hard and brittle as weathered glass with a hint of malice, waiting to stab my unsuspecting digits at the earliest opportunity. Even when wearing rubberised gloves, somehow covert spines manage to locate any available loose seams and shoot to kill. often i take my gloves off to find there are more thorns inside the glove then there were on the out side... i mean seriously...did i put them on inside out or something.
Bramble is the main reason that i have never kept obscene amounts of stick insects (its the cheapest universal food around), I'd rather have hoards of escaped crickets then a handful of biological nails in my hand, that's for sure!
To make my ongoing battle aaginst the dreaded blackberry traps, i have been gardening at work, and guess what lurks in the bushes? BRAMBLES! like enraged rabid squirrels it strikes...

Bramble: The silent killer

The Spoils of War

Ok so as promised here are my purchases from the AES :D
first off are the leafies Phyllium siccifolium for all you geeks :D
ive kept leaf insects before but never this species but paying £10 for 8 (when they usually go for £4 each (trade price) you can't be too picky, so i snatched up these bad boy's (and girls)

as you can see they are a nice size and as i have a few friends within the 'animal show' sector im planning to breed some and flog them to make some cash :D leaf insects generally go quite quickly as they are uber desirable within collections and who can blame collectors for wanting them?
This lot are a bit battered (even if I exclude the one that lost a limb yesterday when she decided to shed in transit- she will be fine, it will grow back in her next shed :D ) i imagine these critters (wow that sounds really American)  were probably kept in high densities and when that happens they tend not to differentiate between food (i.e leaves) and each other, and it is for this reason that you should never keep leaf insect species with other stick insects ;)


My Favourites however are my Deroplatys dessicata (Dead leaf mantis) ive kept these before and they are gorgeous however i sold them before they reached adulthood :(
they are only little at the moment but adult females are pretty damned bulky and im planning to have one free range in the front room (its almost a tradition in our house) 
here are the little fella's :D

in the last pic you can really see the shape of the protonum (the back bit behind its head) and as they mature it becomes more pronounced and arrow shaped in this species (this is why i love them... i cant wait till their markings appear on the inside of their 'arms' 
like this one:D

(old skool picture)
they have all been fed and put to bed now :D so they have no chance of eating one another 

lets hope they don't cark it on me ...i'd be gutted

More things out to get me...

First the sewing Machine, then i saw this little lady bopping along the floor...

and i thought... that looks a bit Widowy to me, had a further little peek...

im pretty darn sure this is a false widow, Im not a massive spider boff (mantids are my forte) but i have an intermediate knowledge of them and have a rough idea of types.
So had a little gander on the web to see if there were any other species that looked similar. I at this point say that false widow spiders are Britains most venomous spider although there are 3 species that look very similar with only 1 being any threat.
 Steatoda nobilis is the nasty one that is to have reportedly of originated from the canary islands, and has been cotching down south (like the stick insects) for around 100 of years now, but due to warmer summers they have come alot more south and people have started running around screaming and making babies cry and the tabloids to go mental (as per usual) 

"False widow spider bite reports include symptoms such as chest pains, swelling and tingling of fingers."

This one however seems to be a similar species called Steatoda grossa judging by the semi circle abdominal markings, so my slight alarm as it ran under the sofa was in vain *phew*

"Their bites are known to cause pain and discomfort for a small portion of the population, however for most people, their bite produces no side effects"

so its only an issue if you are allegic, to be fair, even if you are bitten by a real widow (Latrodectus sp.) even untreated you still only have a 1 in 8 chance of dying unless you are old or really small

in other news, the post man came and delivered this...

Oh yes! 16 Kg of dead chicks my mum ordered for the harris hawk, in the freezer. That goes next to his dead rabbits, the bread rolls and ready meals. a popular game in my house is making unsuspecting guests get things from the death freezer-thats always guarented a laugh! although to be fair the first time i saw the rabbit foot poking out of the freezer as i rummaged for some burgers, i thought a cat had fallen in and died (its a massive chest freezer-no mammory jokes please:D ) and THAT scared the bloody shit out of me.
Its weird really i can deal with a box of hundreds of dead chicks, but not a frozen cat. Figures

Sources: greennature and Natural History Museum

The Second Surprise of the Day

This came home with my darling mother...
she gets massive brownie points

I love how terrified he looks 'AAAARRRRGGGHHHHH'
aparently mum went to a conference meeting thing and they all had one of these to eat, when i run a business these will be served at meetings!