Hey, Fedi.
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@benroyce @ShaulaEvans
"Big fleas have lesser fleas
Upon their backs to bite'em
Lesser fleas have lesser fleas
And so ad infinitem"Sorry I've forgotten the author
@annehargreaves @benroyce @ShaulaEvans
It's a punched up part of "Vermin", by Jonathan Swift. Can't say who is responsible for the rephrasing. https://libquotes.com/jonathan-swift/quote/lby8o4e
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Hey, Fedi. I have a favour to ask you. Help me help a friend. (Not financial!)
I have a friend who is all about cool bug facts. They're going through an intense patch in their life, so I would like to send them some bug facts to cheer them up. But this is really their thing, so basic search engine results aren't going to new to them.
If there's a cool bug fact that you genuinely love, could you tell me? I'll save them to share with my friend over time. 1/n
@ShaulaEvans (Haven't read through all the replies, so maybe it has been said before.. )
Mechanical gears used to be thought of as a man made invention, but there is a species of plant hoppers that uses them as part of their jumping technique!
Prof. Malcolm Burrows from Cambridge University explains it in this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8fyUOxD2EA
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@benroyce @ShaulaEvans
"Big fleas have lesser fleas
Upon their backs to bite'em
Lesser fleas have lesser fleas
And so ad infinitem"Sorry I've forgotten the author
@annehargreaves @benroyce @ShaulaEvans
Augustus De Morgan
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@AdamStuartSmith @inj4n @lavievagabonde @ShaulaEvans I believe it was one of her students, but yeah, finding a grasshopper in your mainframe would be a hell of a bug
@WizardOfDocs @inj4n @lavievagabonde @ShaulaEvans It was a moth. But it would have been perfection if Grace Hopper had found a grass hopper.
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Hey, Fedi. I have a favour to ask you. Help me help a friend. (Not financial!)
I have a friend who is all about cool bug facts. They're going through an intense patch in their life, so I would like to send them some bug facts to cheer them up. But this is really their thing, so basic search engine results aren't going to new to them.
If there's a cool bug fact that you genuinely love, could you tell me? I'll save them to share with my friend over time. 1/n
A bug that's sometimes called the rarest in the world, and also happens to be HUGE, is native to a remote 1,877' rock pyramid way out in the ocean, east of Australia.
Not a lot of interesting facts about the bug itself (though there are some!), it's the story of the presumed extinction, rediscovery, subsequent preservation and breeding, and the extreme location that makes this an interesting bug story.
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@annehargreaves @benroyce @ShaulaEvans
It's a punched up part of "Vermin", by Jonathan Swift. Can't say who is responsible for the rephrasing. https://libquotes.com/jonathan-swift/quote/lby8o4e
@CurtAdams @benroyce @ShaulaEvans Ah, thanks! The version I remember is how my mother used to tell it.
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@annehargreaves @benroyce @ShaulaEvans
Augustus De Morgan
@cptbutton @benroyce @ShaulaEvans Thanks!
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Close to my recollection...
"Big fleas have lesser fleas
Upon their backs to bite 'em.
Lesser fleas have smaller fleas
And so ad infinitum"I did a Wiki search, and it came up with this...
<wiki>
"Siphonaptera" is a name used[1] to refer to the following rhyme by Augustus De Morgan (Siphonaptera being the biological order to which fleas belong):Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.[2]The rhyme appears in De Morgan's A Budget of Paradoxes (1872) along with a discussion of the possibilities that all particles may be made of clustered smaller particles, "and so down, for ever", and that planets and stars may be particles of some larger universe, "and so up, for ever".[2]
</wiki>All here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonaptera_%28poem%29?wprov=sfla1 -
@Mux @afewbugs @ShaulaEvans real life tribbles
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Hey, Fedi. I have a favour to ask you. Help me help a friend. (Not financial!)
I have a friend who is all about cool bug facts. They're going through an intense patch in their life, so I would like to send them some bug facts to cheer them up. But this is really their thing, so basic search engine results aren't going to new to them.
If there's a cool bug fact that you genuinely love, could you tell me? I'll save them to share with my friend over time. 1/n
while I'm sure you'll get plenty of ant-facts and your friend likely already knows about the bullet-ant, but it's an amazing creature with the (purportedly) most painful sting of any insect. These suckers grow to over an inch and are unsettling to watch. I saw them plenty of times as a tween when our family lived in Peru (they were called "Izula ants" there, with a smaller "cousin Izula ants" also in the area). Word-of-mouth cautioned me from ever interacting with their business-end.
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Hey, Fedi. I have a favour to ask you. Help me help a friend. (Not financial!)
I have a friend who is all about cool bug facts. They're going through an intense patch in their life, so I would like to send them some bug facts to cheer them up. But this is really their thing, so basic search engine results aren't going to new to them.
If there's a cool bug fact that you genuinely love, could you tell me? I'll save them to share with my friend over time. 1/n
@ShaulaEvans
@StrepsipZerg should be able to help you out! -
@mossesandbees @inj4n six legs and four wings. Huh. They actually have ten limbs, like lobsters.
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@growfediverse @ShaulaEvans How we learned that bees experience time like humans do:
- teach them that food will be available just outside the hive at the same time every day
- once they've figured that out, move an entire hive from Paris to New York
- bees come looking for the food when it would be available in Paris, not the same time of day in New YorkAnd that's how we learned bees get jet lag.
@WizardOfDocs @growfediverse @ShaulaEvans And jet lagged bees are probably not in a very happy frame of mind.
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Hey, Fedi. I have a favour to ask you. Help me help a friend. (Not financial!)
I have a friend who is all about cool bug facts. They're going through an intense patch in their life, so I would like to send them some bug facts to cheer them up. But this is really their thing, so basic search engine results aren't going to new to them.
If there's a cool bug fact that you genuinely love, could you tell me? I'll save them to share with my friend over time. 1/n
@ShaulaEvans Gryllotalpidae likes beer: we used empty cans with a bit of leftovers as traps to prevent them from eating our carrots
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@inj4n we often call every small arthropod a “bug”, but actually that’s not true. Because taxonomically there is an order of insects that is commonly called true bugs, the order Hemiptera. Some groups that belong to Hemiptera are cicadas or shield bugs (Wanzen in German) for example.
To list the differences between “bugs” would be too much for this post, but when we stick with beetles and flies for example, we can say that beetles have two pairs of wings, of which one is hardened (elytra). Flies on the other hand have one pair of wings and a pair of reduced wings (halteres). This also distinguishes a fly from a bee, which has two pairs of wings.
(Of course, there are many more differences, but as I said, this would be too much to put in a post like this :D)@mossesandbees so... if it's not a bug... is it a feature?
@inj4n -
@WizardOfDocs @inj4n yes! but let’s not think about the antennae
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Hey, Fedi. I have a favour to ask you. Help me help a friend. (Not financial!)
I have a friend who is all about cool bug facts. They're going through an intense patch in their life, so I would like to send them some bug facts to cheer them up. But this is really their thing, so basic search engine results aren't going to new to them.
If there's a cool bug fact that you genuinely love, could you tell me? I'll save them to share with my friend over time. 1/n
I was intrigued by this post that I saw recently. Maybe your friend would like it.
myrmepropagandist (@futurebird@sauropods.win)
Attached: 1 image @goaty@meow.social Ants haven't figured out pottery that we know of yet. But they do sculpt clay: Indian Harvester ants, Pheidole sykesii create levies around their nest entrance so that when it rains the flood waters do not enter, but rather flow around it while they stay dry underground. They build in response to the water so you can tell which direction the water comes from during the rains based on the height of the walls.
Sauropods.win (sauropods.win)
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Hey, Fedi. I have a favour to ask you. Help me help a friend. (Not financial!)
I have a friend who is all about cool bug facts. They're going through an intense patch in their life, so I would like to send them some bug facts to cheer them up. But this is really their thing, so basic search engine results aren't going to new to them.
If there's a cool bug fact that you genuinely love, could you tell me? I'll save them to share with my friend over time. 1/n
@ShaulaEvans This is an amazing thread. Thank you for asking the question and thank you to the good fedizens of the Fediverse who have shared so many cool bug facts. (I hope your friend is OK and that times will be less intense for her soon)
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Hey, Fedi. I have a favour to ask you. Help me help a friend. (Not financial!)
I have a friend who is all about cool bug facts. They're going through an intense patch in their life, so I would like to send them some bug facts to cheer them up. But this is really their thing, so basic search engine results aren't going to new to them.
If there's a cool bug fact that you genuinely love, could you tell me? I'll save them to share with my friend over time. 1/n
@ShaulaEvans this sounds like a job for @futurebird !
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Hey, Fedi. I have a favour to ask you. Help me help a friend. (Not financial!)
I have a friend who is all about cool bug facts. They're going through an intense patch in their life, so I would like to send them some bug facts to cheer them up. But this is really their thing, so basic search engine results aren't going to new to them.
If there's a cool bug fact that you genuinely love, could you tell me? I'll save them to share with my friend over time. 1/n
@ShaulaEvans mud daubers, my favorite kinda wasp, are incredibly docile and not very territorial (they'll usually only attack you if you mess with them directly or their nest while they're in it. i lived somewhere with like 4-5 mud dauber nests on my back porch and just hung out with em). they hunt spiders, but not only that, they are known to show preferences towards specific kind of spiders, with black widows being a particularly common fave. i assume because they're so bright and obvious with the big red hourglass!
additionally, wasps can recognize individual humans to the best of my knowledge. unreliable old anecdote here, but i'm 90% sure i saw a... tumblr user i think? posting about befriending a wasp who became increasingly chill with their presence after being regularly given sugar water, and it was specific to that person more than others who visited or lived with them.
