The Smaller Majority

They grow so fast

The Chinese mantis hatchlings, which quite unexpectedly overran my house a few weeks ago, are growing like crazy. If all goes well, this cohort should be laying eggs by spring, and thus I should be able to return them to my garden (although they are an introduced species, Chinese mantids are already well established in…

Insect-mimicking snakes?

New Guinea has quite a few venomous, really dangerous snakes. Death adders (Acanthophis), taipan (Oxyuranus scutellatus), or Papuan blacksnake (Pseudechis papuanus) are elapid snakes that have caused many human fatalities on the island. But the one thing that New Guinea does not have is coral snakes. The only venomous snake that looks like one is…

Parktown Prawn

Around this time of the year, the lucky inhbitants of Johannesburg in South Africa are often visited by this handsome beast, known as the Parktown Prawn (Libanasidus vittatus). Originally found only in indigenous forests of northeastern part of the country, in 1960’s these cricket and katydid relatives (Anostostomatidae) started appearing in gardens and houses…

Mantidflies

I was busily looking for bark mimicking katydids in Cambodia, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye some slow movement on the trunk of a nearby tree. At first I couldn’t quite grasp what I was seeing – a yellow, wormy thing, wiggling its way out of the bark. But after a…

Weevils

J. B. S. Haldane, the British geneticist, is often quoted for proclaiming, “The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles.” (*) With between 275,000 to 350,000 described species of beetles it is hard to argue with this statement. Of these, about 60,000 species belong to a single family, the weevils (Curculionidae), making…

Mass migration

Annual mass migrations of zebras, wildebeest, Thompson gazelles, and other assorted ungulates on sweeping, dry African plains are the source of some of the most evocative and celebrated images of our world at its finest. Cue in the blazing red orb of the setting sun as the endless string of magnificent, heroic silhouettes passes across…