Crickets are some of the oldest and best studied singers of the animal world. Their ancestors were probably some of the first animals to break the silence of the dry land in the Permian and the Triassic (acoustic communication underwater had probably appeared long before that, albeit fossil evidence for that is scant.) The ubiquity…
Category: Insects
Mozambique Diary: Demons in the dust
When the fuel line under a car breaks and starts spewing a highly flammable liquid, the chances of something good coming out of such a situation are usually slim. And so I was not looking forward to having to crawl under my Landcruiser to try to fix the leak after the car had stalled again….
Ghost hunting
I have been working in Africa for quite a while and during this time I have seen my share of iconic animals that epitomize the awesome continent’s fauna. There are still, of course, many that I yet need to meet in person – aardvark, “hairy” Trichobatrachus frog, Acridoxena katydid, to name a few – but luck…
Mozambique Diary: Snug as a bug
“There is a strange ecto on this vesper”, said the mammalogist, a sentence that only recently would have been difficult for me to comprehend. But now, after a few years of rubbing shoulders with mammalogists in Gorongosa I osmotically absorbed enough jargon to understand that she had noticed an interesting parasitic insect on a bat…
Dermatobia Redux
Raising two dipteran children was an interesting experience. It was embarrassing on a few occasions, when both of my arms started bleeding profusely in public; painful at times, to the point of waking me up in the middle of the night; and inconvenient during the last stages of the flies’ development, when I had to…
Puppy-killing scientist smuggles rainforest babies in body cavity
I almost got away with it – for five days I had covered my body and slathered insect repellant onto my skin with an almost religious zeal, but on the last day I faltered. I was in Belize, teaching macrophotography at the Bugshot workshop. The course was almost over, and so I relaxed and decided to…
The Smaller Majority 