SQUIBOT

Violet-green Swallow (Tachycineta thalassina), family Hirundinidae, order Passeriformes, Western U.S.

Charles Turner was born in the United States just a few years after the end of the civil war. His brilliance was evident from the start, and after graduating valedictorian of his high school class he quickly went on to earn his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in short order. While in school, Turner’s relentless curiosity became his greatest advantage. He was drawn to and fascinated by topics that were largely ignored by modern science at the time, namely the cognitive behaviors of insects and other invertebrates. While many of his colleagues believed insects to be mindless automata acting on instinct alone, Turner felt deeply that the brains of these oft overlooked animals were far more complex than the scientific community suspected. He performed extensive experiments to test his theories and found overwhelming evidence of problem solving and individualism among organisms as small as ants and spiders.

By the time Turner earned his zoology pHD in 1907 he had published dozens of papers in highly esteemed journals and had even co-authored a book. It is likely that Turner was the first African American to earn a pHD from the University of Chicago. With such a sparkling academic reputation and enormous body of research, one would expect this candidate to have no issues obtaining a professorship at a prestigious school. Though by every right Turner should have been head of science department at a top university, the systemic racism that permeated academia meant that doors a white man would have walked through were locked and bolted shut for Charles Henry Turner.

Turner did not allow this prejudice to dim in any way his blindingly bright passion for knowledge. He took a job as a high school teacher, and continued to perform and publish research on his own all while he instilled his students with a love for zoology. He published more than 70 papers in extremely respected journals and he remained passionately curious for the entirety of his life. If I tried to list here all of the incredible discoveries Turner made in his lifetime it would take me days to sufficiently express the impact he had on the field of invertebrate behavior. His experiments were so ahead of their time that entomologists today marvel at his research and wonder how much more we would know if Turner’s work had been given the attention and respect of other scientists working at the time. Turner’s mind was about a century ahead of those entomological contemporaries who had no interest in giving him a seat at the table. His tombstone simply reads “scientist”

Feel free to use it! 🌈🌈🌈🌈

here's a link

beehold:

look at this. look at all these details. bug lovers of tumblr, get over here. experience catastrophic levels of autism. insane amount of work put into this.

I WILL calmly and kindly try to help anyone who is afraid of bugs. I will show them my finds, i will explain their importance, i will tell them just how sweet and gentle and friendly they are. And I WILL shoot down any immature loser who believes senseless killing is the only possible response to not liking something.

Get woke. Love bugs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260515113210/https://www.vulture.com/article/social-media-feeds-chaotic-good-projects-clipping.html

Source

Is the best part that he got doxxed? No.

Is the best part that he got tracked down by a local and beaten? No.

Arrested on state at federal charges, looking at up to 5 years and 50K? Nope.

The best part is the local city council's reaction.

Tag yourself and learn about your bees🐝

I drew 100 bees, but there are over 20000 species of bees! Some bees are moving leaves, scraping plant hair, or sticking out their tongues. Some male bees have hairy faces and unusually shaped legs. There are also baby bees that have just hatched from their petal nests.

Authors set out to correct under-representation of female sounds – and found some surprising revelations

When we hear the beautiful call of a bird from a high bough, we’re told it’s likely to be a male – singing for territory, or belting out tunes to woo a female. But as the annual dawn chorus reaches a crescendo this spring, a new guidebook is urging us to think again – and turn our ears to the hidden world of female birdsong. The songs, sounds and sights of female birds have historically been overlooked in field guides and sound archives. In 2016, just 0.01% of the bird sounds in the global Xeno-Canto sound library were labelled female. Another sound archive was just 0.03% female, according to a 2018 study. But the new book – The Sound Approach to Birding 2 – aims to correct this under-representation and properly explain female birdsong. Female birds sing for territorial displays, to ward off other females and to attract extra males, according to Lucy McRobert, a writer and researcher who studied the issue for the guidebook. The book comes with its own library of 300 sounds from 200 species, accessed via web or app. The clips are drawn from the larger online archive of Sound Approach, a birdsong project founded in 2000 with confirmed recordings of females for 41% of species found in the Western Palearctic, a biogeographical region encompassing Europe, north Africa and most of the Middle East...

Mymaridae is a diverse family of wasps that contains more than 1,400 known species, and these wasps are often described as fairy wasps (or "fairy flies") because they are so incredibly tiny. In fact, these are some of the smallest multicellular animals ever described, with most fairy wasps measuring less than 1mm long.

Above: Lymaenon aureus, a species of fairy wasp, depicted on top of a lime

One species of fairy wasp, Dicopomorpha echmepterygis, is the smallest insect known to science. The adult males of that species can measure as little as 0.139mm (139 microns) long, which is roughly the size of a single human egg.

Above: Anagrus fairy wasp

As this article explains:

Fairyflies are not actual flies at all, but chalcid wasps; they get their name because of their fairy-like wings, and for being tiny and "invisible" like the mythical fairies. Fairyflies have the smallest known adult form of any insect: wingless and blind males of the species Dicopomorpha echmepterygis have a body length of just 0.139 mm, about the average width of a human hair. The fairyfly family Mymaridae consists of many species, including Tinkerbella nana and Kikiki huna, the smallest known flying insect species with a body length of 0.16 mm.

Above: the photo at the top shows a fairy wasp of the genus Anagrus, while the photo on the bottom shows another species from genus Polynema

Most fairy wasps have fully-functional wings that are lined with long, feathery bristles:

Fairyfly wings are not only small, but their structure is comb-like and made of several bristles instead of a planar sheet. Their very small size means that the air around them is more viscous than it would be for larger insects. At such small scale, the ratio of inertia to viscosity, the Reynolds number, is so low that any movement provided to an air packet quickly dampens out. It also means that a single wing bristle drags along with it a boundary layer of a comparable size. Thus, if the bristles are sufficiently close, the comb-like wing can act as a paddle to generate the requisite aerodynamic forces, while reducing the overall mass of the wing.

Above: a fairy wasp depicted beneath a push-pin

All of the wasps in this family are parasitoids, and they lay their own eggs within the eggs of other insects. Their hosts include aphids, scale insects, booklice, thrips, water beetles, and other tiny arthropods; the female fairy wasp inserts her ovipositor into the host's egg and then deposits her own offspring within.

Above: this composite image shows male and female fairy wasps of the genus Polynema standing on a pinhead

This seems like a good time to point out that fairy wasps do not parasitize mammalian ova, nor do they parasitize the eggs of any other vertebrates, and they are completely harmless to humans. In fact, they're actually beneficial, since they often parasitize agricultural pests.

Above: a fairy wasp trapped in a tiny guttation drop produced by a fungus

I posted some information about fairy bees a few weeks ago, so I figured that I should share these little fairy wasps, too.

Above: a Mymar fairy wasp with an aphid standing nearby

Sources & More Info:

Current Biology: Fairyflies

Annual Review of Entomology: Small is Beautiful: Features of the Smallest Insects and Limits to Miniaturization (PDF)

Journal of Hymenoptera Research: A New Genus and Species of Fairyfly, Tinkerbella nana, with Comments on its Sister Genus Kikiki, and Discussion on Small Size Limits in Arthropods (PDF)

Reality:

Capitalism can still thrive with recycling in the mix. You buy Plastic Thing 1, throw it away after one use, and they take that and recycle it into Plastic Thing 2 and sell it back to you. All while continuing to harm the environment.

Reusing puts a damper on things. They can't sell you Plastic Thing 2 when you're still using Plastic Thing 1. Plastic forks, for example- there is literally no reason why you can't reuse plastic forks more than once (aside from maybe microplastics, but it's too late for that)

Reduce what you can

Reuse everything still in working order

Recirculate what you don’t need by sharing or selling onward

Refurbish what’s fallen out of good condition so it lasts longer

Repair what’s broken altogether

Repurpose what can’t serve its original function

Recycle what is unsuitable for repurposing