While I can honestly say that there is no animal that I find uninteresting, none is higher on my list of the most amazing animals than the coconut crab (albeit this top place in my ranking is shared by many.) The first thing that you will notice about this crustacean is of course its size…
Category: Macrophotography
The Mystery of Flying Honeydew: A Strange Case of Unabashed Thievery
Yesterday I introduced the amazing lantern bugs and their fast-flying honeydew. I mentioned that ants, animals that often collect honeydew from homopteran insects, were unable to enjoy it because of the speed with which the honeydew drops were expelled. And yet, when Kenji and I started investigating the behavior of lantern bugs in a systematic…
The Mystery of Flying Honeydew
Although my entomological interests focus on katydids and other orthopteroid insects, a few years ago I started paying a closer attention to lantern bugs (family Fulgoridae), large insects remotely related to cicadas, which feed on plant nutrients that flow inside tree trunks. Lantern bugs have very long, stiletto-like mouthparts, which allow them to pierce the…
Leaf-eating leaves
If you ever have a chance to visit a humid, tropical area in South or Central America, make sure to bring a good flashlight or a headlamp with you, because if you go out into the forest at night, you may be rewarded with the discovery of one of the most amazing animals that this…
The benefits of constant rain
I am not a big fan of cold, rainy days, like the one we are having today in Boston, and so I need to remind myself that this type of weather actually produces one of the richest, life-friendly environments imaginable. Not in Massachusetts, however, but in the mountains of Papua New Guinea. In 2009 I…
A record breaker in my neighborhood
When it comes to finding the world’s most [insert adjective] insect, one usually needs to go to some remote, usually tropical location. But it just happens that the world’s smallest cricket lives right around the corner from my house. The Eastern ant cricket (Myrmecophilus pergandei) is a remarkable and highly adaptable little creature. These insects…
The Smaller Majority 