horse eats a donut

(Tachycines asynamorus)

Tetra got done drying today. they were an intersex (?) Japanese camel cricket I kept last year. not perfect pinning job but I feel like I did them justice

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found Tetra dead this morning, no obvious cause.

they were fairly young, with the typical adult living at least a few more months, so perhaps it was an internal issue related to being intersex.

I’ve pinned and set them in the freezer to dry, which will preserve their beautiful uniqueness, hopefully forever.

was curious how much Tetra weighed

it would appear that Tetra weighs 2

my beloved horrible scavenger cave horse

Stella vs. Tetra:

as an arachnid, Stella (Phrynus longipes) doesn’t actually have true antennae—but she’s more than made up for that with her pair of antenniform legs. highly mobile and bendable in every direction, they allow her to track and target prey entirely though scent, her primary sensory mode since her 8 tiny eyes don’t form complex images.

Tetra (Diestrammena japanica) is a formidable challenger, though. like most raphidophorids (also known as cave crickets or camel crickets due to the characteristic humped backs), they have incredibly long antennae. highly sensitive to air currents as well as scent, Tetra can use their antennae to smell or even touch a predator from several body lengths away, allowing them to make a flying launch to safety.

wandering the miserable wastes of November with a pest in hand

the paralyzed cicadas I picked up from a failed cicada killer nest are the perfect material to show off some cool features of insect anatomy! (although the wasp’s venom would keep them alive for her larvae to eat, I froze them to make sure they’re fully dead for dissection).

cicadas are powerful, fast fliers, and all of their thorax is taken up by a bulk of reddish, stringy flight muscles, which I’ll talk more about later. this cicada is a female, so her abdomen is full of white, elongated eggs that she will insert into tree bark with the bladed ovipositor at her rear.

the male cicada’s abdomen, however, is almost entirely empty, and that air-filled space is used as a resonator for his loud calls. the biggest structure visible there is a curved pair of muscles that deforms the tymbals, producing a click with every contraction.

here’s a view of the complete muscle, and the tymbals themselves which look like overlapping plates on his belly. if you’re curious what the white frosted appearance is, some Neotibicen have a coat of waxy powder or pruinescence; this male N. tibicen is particularly pruinose.

onto the flight muscles:

powered flight is a pretty complex mechanism in any organism, and is never so simple as just flapping wings up and down, but most insects power their flight in a really unintuitive way (at least for us vertebrates): they contract muscles in their thorax that aren’t even attached to the wings!

this method of flight is called indirect flight, in contrast to the direct flight of the dragonflies and mayflies where each of four wings is directly attached to a muscle and can flap on its own.

instead, most insects have a longitudinal (image 1 above, d below) pair and a vertical (2, c) pair of muscles that deform the shape of abdomen, pulling the upper segment of the thorax (notum) up and down, and this moves the wings which are attached to the notum. useful indirect flight gif from wikipedia found here

even if compressed manually, the dead cicadas “flap” their wings due to the motion of the notum:

insect flight is a lot more complicated than this simplified look at them, but I think these cicadas offer a pretty good look at how most insects get around essentially by squishing themselves internally!

if you live in northern North America, the fuzzy bicolored larvae of Pyrrharctia isabella are probably well known to you as a staple autumn insect. I think the adult form is much less well known, but equally adorable! here’s one I found this past spring:

here are some more Biolleyana from the other side of Costa Rica (Pacific). these look like B. pictifrons and B. fenestra adults, and an unknown juvenile with the wax tail.

the Caribbean equivalents in this post below (though I think that species can be found in both regions)