i ❤️ all things nature

i’m hoping to be able to catch more critters and see more bugs soon, but of course it’s still pretty cold and lifeless outside. in the meantime, i ordered some butterflies and set them up in a massive frame, so stay tuned for when i post that 😛

warning- beautiful bugs ahead 😍

My gf and I have started pupating some wormies that we bought from the pet store. Unfortunately only two out of the four have successfully pupated and remained alive. I’m thinking these guys are genetic monstrosities and have low survival rates since they are pretty much only bred to be food. Lets see how this goes!

Some fun creatures from 2023!

1. I would have DIED to have a luna moth but unfortunately it was real musty (my girlfriend was the one who found it already dead while walking one day). I never knew we got them where I live so I was so excited to learn that they’re somewhat common here :D definitely gonna look for some more this year.

2. As for the frogs- there was this big puddle on some dirt road by a friends cabin and there were some frogs and even tadpoles too! Like hundreds of tadpoles….

3. And then I found this massive moth on the ground outside of my work so I picked him up and moved him to safety <3 (not my hand in the pic- my coworker also wanted to see the moth so it was her hand).

4. Last but not least, I have a snail in my fish tank now! She’s just chugging along on an old cuttle bone (mmmmhm calcium) and Im hoping she does good- I had a previous apple snail that lasted for like a year. He was really big and fun to watch but I once went on a road trip and he had died by the time I came back :(

i went on a little trip with my girlfriend over the weekend and we ended up staying at a friends cabin. while we were there, we found a massive spider! We think it’s a wharf spider but we can’t be 100% sure (im still new at this whole bug thing so i have lots to learn). she was already passed away so we figured it would be a great opportunity to add to our growing bug collection :)

im really not used to seeing spiders this big since where i live in the city it’s mostly just little house spiders or jumping spiders that i come across. im amazed at her fur and her colouring and i can’t wait until she’s all ready to be put into a frame.

i’ll get around (eventually) to posting our other bugs too cause we already have a frame full of Hymenoptera >:^]

i went searching for bugs with my girlfriend the other week and we found something arguably way better than creepy crawlies- we found some owl pellets!! this was so exciting because i’ve never seen any owl droppings in the wild before and it was interesting to find out that a park that i used to think was devoid of life besides dog walkers, pigeons and squirrels actually housed some owls!

we bagged up this specimen and took it home, got some protective gear on and separated the bones from the fur. there were six skulls and at least 13 pieces of bottom jaws so it’s possible that there was actually bones from 7 critters in here (2 bottom piece jaws per animal). it was so rewarding and cool to be able to see all the contents that an owl would manage to catch and eat and be able to clean up the bones as well. we think that most of the bones are from field mice and/or voles, but i’ll have to look into identifying them a bit more.

we ended up soaking the bones in some peroxide-water mixture for a day or so in hopes of cleaning the residual fur and removing as much dirt/bacteria/pathogens as possible and it worked out lovely. i’ll post what we ended up doing with the bones in the future so stay tuned for that ;)

i fell in love with swabbing and inoculating all kinds of bacteria during my microbiology course. in the first image: the first plate on the left and the upper plate in the middle are streaked with E. coli and B. subtilis, the bottom plate in the middle was swabbed with a sample from my partners hat, and the plate on the very right was a swab from my phone. the second image is a plate streaked with E. coli and we used the technique when you’re looking for single colonies.