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Are you interested in insects?
Yes, they interesting 76%  76%  [ 16 ]
No, I hate them 19%  19%  [ 4 ]
...meh 5%  5%  [ 1 ]
Total votes : 21

Fern
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24 May 2020, 7:01 pm

quite an extreme wrote:
I like wasps. They are mostly nice in opposite to bees except you cause them really trouble. Sometimes I put some sweet stuff on a finger if they are around and let them eat. It looks quite cute if they do. :wink:


I like wasps too :heart:



Fern
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24 May 2020, 7:07 pm

blazingstar wrote:
My favorite from the other side of earth, are the Morpho butterflies. I actually got to see some on the Rio Pacuare in Costa Rica. They looked like sparkling blue jewels sprinkled over the river.


Yeah! I get to see them a lot when I do my field work in various New World tropical field sites.



Tim_Tex
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24 May 2020, 7:12 pm

Not particularly a fan


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CockneyRebel
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24 May 2020, 8:09 pm

I love insects. I like the different varieties and colours of all the insects that there are.


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Fern
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24 May 2020, 8:55 pm

Mountain Goat wrote:
My Mum told me why wasps ans bees have stings and flies don't. Wasps and bees have specific homes to return to and it is important that they get back to them. Flies don't. They can move and not worry where they go.
The conversation came up because a wasp flew into the house and into our living room, had a little explore and flew back out knowing exactly which way to go. Flies fly in and can't get back out as they have no real sense of direction.

It is interesting.


"Why" is an interesting question, isn't it? Unlike "how" it really beckons some kind of evolutionary answer more than a mechanistic one. I think your mom was on the money to a large extent, although there's a bit more to this as well. For instance, termites have a specific home and are even very social just like paper wasps, but they don't sting. Why not? Well the long and the short of it is that stingers (at least of the type used by wasps), so far as we know, only evolved once. Bees, ants, and stinging wasps are all closely related, and are all descendants of gall wasps that had skinny waists and strong ovipositors (egg laying organs) that allowed them to lay their eggs deep in woody plant stems and trunks. You can still see some extant species that do this to this day. Some gall wasps kind of evolutionarily "repurposed" their ovipositors to be stinging organs that can be used for defense. From such stinging gall wasps were descended all bees, ants, and stinging wasps. That's also why for these species only females can sting (males don't have ovipositors).



naturalplastic
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25 May 2020, 4:50 am

Fern wrote:
Mountain Goat wrote:
My Mum told me why wasps ans bees have stings and flies don't. Wasps and bees have specific homes to return to and it is important that they get back to them. Flies don't. They can move and not worry where they go.
The conversation came up because a wasp flew into the house and into our living room, had a little explore and flew back out knowing exactly which way to go. Flies fly in and can't get back out as they have no real sense of direction.

It is interesting.


"Why" is an interesting question, isn't it? Unlike "how" it really beckons some kind of evolutionary answer more than a mechanistic one. I think your mom was on the money to a large extent, although there's a bit more to this as well. For instance, termites have a specific home and are even very social just like paper wasps, but they don't sting. Why not? Well the long and the short of it is that stingers (at least of the type used by wasps), so far as we know, only evolved once. Bees, ants, and stinging wasps are all closely related, and are all descendants of gall wasps that had skinny waists and strong ovipositors (egg laying organs) that allowed them to lay their eggs deep in woody plant stems and trunks. You can still see some extant species that do this to this day. Some gall wasps kind of evolutionarily "repurposed" their ovipositors to be stinging organs that can be used for defense. From such stinging gall wasps were descended all bees, ants, and stinging wasps. That's also why for these species only females can sting (males don't have ovipositors).


Mom does have an interesting hypothesis there. Probably some truth to it.

Flies can bite. In some parks Ive picnicked at regular old houseflies can vicious. But yes - bees, ants, and wasps, have homes, and family units to defend. And flies don't-as far as I know. But I didn't know about that egg laying organ being the evolutionary origin of the stinger.



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25 May 2020, 11:51 am

dragonsanddemons wrote:
Lone star ticks actually are different from deer ticks and are unlikely to carry Lyme disease (I got bitten by one at summer camp last year and looked them up, since they’re pretty easy to identify). But yeah, my mom’s parents live in Arkansas, and there are a ton of ticks there (quite possibly literally, if they were all gathered up and weighed together). My grandma got some sort of tick-transmitted disease (I think it was ehrlichthiosis) and had to go to the hospital (she and my grandpa were visiting my uncle and his family in the Chicago area at the time symptoms started and ticks are far less prevalent there, so it took a while for her to get a proper diagnosis). My brother also got a tick in his ear (yes, inside his ear) once, but didn’t have any problems once it was out. If we visit them again this year and my service dog comes along (which we’ve been considering doing), I’ll have to make absolutely sure he doesn’t miss his flea and tick prevention that month (it works well enough that one time my parents and I took him along on a nature walk, and the dog was the only one who didn’t come back with any hitchhikers, the humans each had at least one tick). I can say I have no great love for the blood-suckers like ticks and fleas.

Yes I stand corrected about the name of the Lyme-carrying tick. I rather wish the ones in Arkansas were gathered together and destroyed. Frankly I don't know why people haven't moved out in droves to somewhere less dangerous, or why the place ever became inhabited in the first place. Still, I used to say the same thing about England (on account of the frequently cold, wet weather), so I guess everything's relative. Most of the natives of Arkansas I've met seem to act as if dangerous insects don't exist, and will readily walk off the tarmac onto moist, lush grass without batting an eyelid.