Lately things have been slow on The Smaller Majority blog. This is mostly because I have been crazily busy with preparations for my upcoming trip to Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, where I will be staying until June. While there I hope to be able to make regular updates to the blog and, if my…
Category: Insects
African Tuesday: Beware of the snail
I had always been under the impression that snails defended themselves mostly with their calciferous shells, and that otherwise they were pretty vulnerable creatures. That changed when I ran across an interesting encounter between a pulmonate snail and a predatory ground beetle (Carabidae: Anthiinae) in the rainforest of Atewa plateau in southeastern Ghana. I did…
Coneheads
A fact that entomologists are well aware of, but one that usually comes as a surprise to everybody else, is that most insect species are still unknown to science, and only a relatively small portion of them have been formally named and described. According to recent estimates only about a quarter of currently living species…
African Tuesday: Heelwalkers
After ice crawlers (featured in a recent post) were officially recognized as a new order of insect in 1915, entomologists pretty much assumed that this was it, and no more discoveries of such magnitude were expected. After all, an order is a major unit of classification – elephants, turtles, and flies are examples of orders…
African Tuesday: Duck-faced lacewings
Thread- and spoon-wing lacewings (family Nemopteridae) are related to antlions and similarly thrive in dry, sandy habitats. Although they are known from most parts of the world (with the exception of, sadly, North America), Africa is the real center of their diversity, and this is where over 80% of the 150+ known species are found….
Slipping out of the skeleton
A time-lapse video of a male Chinese mantis (Tenodera parasinensis) undergoing his final molt. I recorded it last night over the period of 5:35 hours; this movie contains 494 individual frames taken with Canon 6D. Note: If the quality of the video clip embedded below is poor, click here to see the uncompressed video.
The Smaller Majority 