maggots and cream

as you might guess from the name, Milesia crabroniformis is a mimic of european hornets (Vespa crabro) and does a surprisingly good job of it, from the size to the buzzing, often giving me false hopes that i've found an actual hornet since they're not common here. ironically, what tends to give them away is their overly aggressive behavior - only a hoverfly would divebomb your face repeatedly the way they do

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

Systropus macer is a species of beefly (Bombyliidae) that mimics a sand wasp in the genus Ammophila. This gives it a strange appearance for a beefly, as most other species are round and hairy.

S. macer is a parasitoid of slug caterpillars, which is also somewhat unusual since bombyliids typically target ground-dwelling hosts like burrowing bees and beetle larvae.