#ant decapitating flies

[apsciencebydan]

I suspect this extremely tiny fly has nefarious intent with these sandhill carpenter ants (Camponotus socius). It appears to be attempting to oviposit into the underside of the gaster of one of the ants in the last shot! As you can see from the first shot, the ants were less than pleased by the attention.

Pseudacteon, a genus of flies known as ant-decapitating flies due to how the larvae do.

4/7/23. N. Florida

#nature #animals #bugblr #photography #science #entomology #invertebrates #Flies #Ants

[pengychan]

[Good Omens] Flies

Ineffable Bureaucracy Week Day 2: Flies ***

“Can I ask a question?”

“You just did.”

“Well, can I ask another?”

“You just-- heh. Fine, fine. Ask away.”

“Why Lord of the Flies, of all things?”

“Well, I designed them.”

“Ah.”

“You sound surprised. Were you expecting a more sordid tale?”

Leaning back on the wooden bench, idly watching the swarm of flies feeding on the remains of what had been a fish before the small stream dried out in the heat of summer, Gabriel shrugged. “It never occurred to me that someone had the task of creating these… smaller… life forms, at some point.”

A huff, the sting of an elbow against his side. Not a lot of sting, to be honest. Beelzebub could certainly do worse, which meant they were holding back. The thought made Gabriel smile just a touch. 

“They took as much work as bigger ones, you know. There are hundreds of thousands species still in existence, and there used to be more. And besides, I didn’t just work on life forms. I made my fair share of star systems, I’ll have you know, while you were starting out your career as a messenger pigeon.”

The smile turned into a frown. “Delivering messages was vital in order to ensure all of us were working according to the same--”

“Lord of the Pigeons. Has a nice ring to it.”

“No one ever called me pigeon, thank you so very much,” Gabriel informed them. “Although some did refer to me as the Peacock of the Angels…”

“Let me guess. You took it as a compliment?”

Gabriel blinked. “Wasn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of it.”

“Humans like peacocks, don’t they?”

“Symbol of vanity. It does fit you. How did you even live with yourself in the millennia before tailored suits and silk ties were a thing?” Beelzebub asked, and Gabriel was almost annoyed. Except that they causally leaned the side of their head against his shoulder, and he promptly forgot how to be annoyed.

“Well-- I believe we’re getting sidetracked here. You haven’t told me why it’s Lord of the Flies. I mean, you surely made more impressive things you could make your title about, no?”

A soft scoff. “Absolutely not. Flies are my masterpiece.”

“... Because they fly where they’re not wanted, make noise, and are annoying?”

“I’m sorry, when did this conversation turn to angels?” Beelzebub asked, looking up, and Gabriel laughed, placing a hand over… the approximate location where a heart would be, if he had human internal organs. 

“Oh, ouch. A low blow, that.”

“Thanks. I’ve been practicing.”

They both turned their gaze back to the small swarm of flies; Gabriel would have been perfectly content to let the matter drop and focus on nothing but the unnatural warmth against the shoulder Beelzebub was leaning on. Except that he didn’t.

“So, what is it about them?”

“About what?”

“Flies. What makes them so perfect?”

“Aside from being emblematic of putrefaction, death, and decay?”

“Well, yes. Aside from that.”

Still leaning on his shoulder, Beelzebub held out a hand, and a few of the flies separated themselves from the swarm, coming to buzz around their hand, landing on their fingers. 

“First of all, they can outmaneuver any angel or demon. See how they fly, hover, land upside down? I made them some balancing organs to function like gyroscopes. They are the greatest aerial acrobats of all Creation. And this is just one of the families - the parasitic ones are a marvel of their own. There is this genus that lays eggs in ants, and once the larvae is big enough, it decapitates the ant to keep growing--”

They talked, on and on, and Gabriel was all too happy to listen. It had been a very, very long time since he himself had felt anything much about the wonders of Creation; it had sort of grown old, like gorgeous scenery you pass by every day to work and back until it’s really nothing more than a backdrop. He’d even forgotten which parts of it he’d had a hand in making himself. How ironic, he thought, that the Grand Duke of Hell never forgot what they made.

All things bright and beautiful, as a famous hymn went, and they’d all been so very proud of it all, once. All things wise and wonderful.

Nothing had really seemed bright and beautiful in a very long time. Nothing had seemed all that wise, and nothing had seemed all that wonderful.

Until now.

Beelzebub got so animated when talking, and Gabriel found himself marveling at each minute facial expression they made while describing a type of fly that looked like a spider and lived in the fur of bats to feed on their blood. Probably not something that fit most of the known universe’s definition of bright, beautiful or wise, he thought.

But most of the known universe never got to sit under the scorching August sun with Beelzebub’s head against a shoulder, listening as they talked about their most complex and beloved creations, watching said creations dance around their fingers.

No one else but him, and Archangel Gabriel-- I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God --had never felt luckier in his entire existence.

#good omens #ineffable bureaucracy #ibweek2023 #archangel gabriel #beelzebub #didn't think I'd be able to take part #but the idea for this one hit me and I had to write

[iamthekaijuking]

Some sketches of genetically engineered species of guardian society fauna to get back into the swing of things. From top left to bottom right.

An organism meant to be a scavenger highly specialized for consuming limbs and organs. With no distinct front or back, it walks around on caterpillar-like pseudopods in search of a carcass. When it finds a source of food it opens one of its ends to engulf a limb or scoop up viscera until its entire cavity is full. Its catch is sawed away from its source by toothy zooids inside its mouth/stomach that spin on cilia tracks, and once separated it closes both ends so that the rotating array of teeth can churn its quarry into an easily digestible sludge. It will retain the waste from its digestion and barf it at attackers, and will only empty its cavity when it comes across a new food source. Indeterminate growers who have growth spurts after every meal, they never age and don’t stop growing unless killed by disease, predation or cannibalism. Some may even grow so large that they rely entirely on the discarded limbs of guardians that occasionally litter the mega streets of the guardian society for nutrition.

An organism meant to fulfill a niche similar to a hummingbird. It flies thanks to retractable sheet-like ’wings’ that produce electromagnetic fields. Its shell protects them from predation, but their wings are vulnerable, so in the presence of a predator they retract their wings and plummet to the earth. Its internal anatomy is designed to handle these falls. When resting it hangs from its proboscis on the branches of flora.

An oceanic organism, this macroplankton only grows to be a few centimeters long and its organs are housed inside its cephalothorax.

A diminutive swamp dwelling fauna that mimics flora, it sifts around for food on its many leg-like proboscises and retreats under its rubbery cap in defense.

An ambush predator with many similarities to earth octopi. A mostly boneless body and complex color and shape shifting behaviors hide it from prey, which it snags with its claspers to be crushed in its odontoids.

A desert dwelling organism that feasts on the sharp fractal flora in its ecosystem using tough retractable mouthparts. Much like the Saharan silver ants of earth, they are entirely covered in an exoskeleton with unique hairs that let them reflect light.

An organism with a tri-lobed mouth/stomach and a lightning fast tongue that looks like a decapitated alien head. They slither through rainforests on their slug like underbelly, completely camouflaged. They wait for unsuspecting aerial prey to fly by before snagging them with their tongue. If detected by a predator they advertise their toxic flesh via activating bright bioluminescent patches around their eyes.

A nocturnal predator with organic snipers for arms, it kills unsuspecting prey in their sleep. Kleptoparasites are deterred from the carcass during the time it takes the creature to reach its kill via extremely foul odors emitted by the biological ammunition.

#guardianverse #sketches #sketch #creature design #guardian society #endemic wildlife of the guardian society #speculative zoology #speculative evolution #speculative biology

[coolyo294]

being an ant fucking sucks, there’s a species of flies called ant decapitating flies and the actual method of decapitation is way worse than just straight up getting your head chopped off 

[horrormoviecws]

Hereditary

“When the matriarch of the Graham family passes away, her daughter and grandchildren begin to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry, trying to outrun the sinister fate they have inherited.”

Content warnings for Hereditary under the readmore.

Click here to see the database!

animal death (pigeon, which is then decapitated), arm trauma, asphyxiation, burning, child death, dead animal (dog), decapitation, eye trauma, face trauma, insects (ants (SO MANY OF THEM), flies), starvation (mentioned), throat slitting

ableist slur, alcohol, drug use (marijuana), emotional abuse, nudity, suicide (starvation (mentioned), throat slitting)

#horror #hereditary #standalone #ari aster #content warnings #horror movies #requests

[aion-rsa]

Rick and Morty’s Most Gruesome Deaths

https://ift.tt/3m2NOh1

The super-slick, super-sick Rick and Morty brand is known for many things: the warped, borderline-abusive dynamic between its titular characters, its deliciously dark humour, the gleefulness it takes in capsizing the conventions of a thousand genre tropes. Then there are the catch-phrases, and the colourful cast of supporting characters – everything from fatally-depressed Mr Meseeks to embedded family friends like Mr Poopybutthole. What really characterises it though, is death. That it’s not the first association you make with the show is possibly a by-product of there being so damn much of it that it stops registering.

There are long deaths, slow deaths, good deaths, bad deaths, sad deaths, funky deaths, perfunctory deaths, ironic deaths, iconic deaths, horrid deaths, hilarious deaths and hectares of borderline disturbing deaths.

Here are the most gruesome, in all their gory glory, season by season. (It’s a testament to Rick and Morty’s perpetually heavy ante that a little girl having her head sliced off by a Freddy Krueger substitute doesn’t even make it onto the list.)

I hope you haven’t eaten yet.

S1, E3 ‘Anatomy Park’ Come Flay With Me

Morty fails to save a fellow miniaturised man when things go south in ‘Anatomy Park’, a themed pleasure experience situated inside the body of a chronically unwell homeless man. The poor soul is sucked through the dying tramp’s windpipe and out through his mouth, the skin and flesh being stripped from his bones in the process, leaving him a peeled human spit-ball.

S1, E3 ‘Anatomy Park’ Space Guts

Things aren’t any less gruesome when the bloated corpse of the tramp is made giant by science. It ends up floating in space – because of course it does – whereupon it’s blown to smithereens, sending bone and guts spiralling into the void.

S1, E5 ‘Meeseeks and Destroy’ Who You Gonna Kill?

Morty not only finds himself preyed upon by parasite zombie versions of his family, but also has to watch as they’re trapped, burned, squished, melted and pulled into a piece of trapping technology that Rick clearly ripped from Egon’s ghost-busting manual.

S1, E5 ‘Meeseeks and Destroy’ Fairytale Ending

A fairytale giant – in the ‘Fe Fi Fo Fum’ mould – slips in his kitchen and slams his skull on a table-top. He bleeds out, a look of mystified shock frozen in his eyes, convulsing as his life-force ebbs away. RIP childhood.

S1, E6 ‘Rick Potion #9’ RIP and Mortal

In a sequence as chilling as it is gruesome, Rick mishandles some super-dangerous piece of kit and blows himself and Morty to Kingdom Come. Their crumpled remains, spattered with blood, smash against the wall; Rick’s eye pops out. Our own – thankfully unscathed – Rick and Mortys arrive from a doomed neighbouring dimension to bury them and take their place.

S1, E8 ‘Rixty Minutes’ Lepre-gone

You should never watch Inter-dimensional TV on a full stomach. In this advert, a cereal-hocking leprechaun – the mascot of this universe’s favourite breakfast cereal, Strawberry Smiggles – is pinned down on a tree stump by a little boy and girl, who proceed to slit open his abdomen and feast on his spilled-out innards; even squeezing out cereal shapes from his intestines and gobbling them like Pez sweets.

S2, E4 ‘Total Rickall’ Memory Massacre

Morty and family encounter shape-shifting alien parasites that reproduce through implanting false memories in a host’s brain. Their pus-fountained death throes – as their bodies wither, wilt, and burst in a screaming fanfare of tentacles – is pretty gruesome to behold, but thankfully you become desensitised to it pretty quickly.

S2, E7 ‘Big Trouble in Little Sanchez’ Rick Kills Himselves

At least Rick is an equal opportunities murderer. Even another version of himself isn’t exempt from his nihilistic rage. Here he gleefully smashes, drop-kicks and hacks up his own glass-encased surrogates, leaving a pile of bloodied parts strewn across the floor.

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S2, E8 ‘Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate’ Man vs Car

Another Interdimensional TV segment, another stomach churner. Literally this time.  A punkish strongman is crushed to death under the wheels of a car he’d hoped to repel, his blood and body parts thrown from the fast-spinning tyres like fireworks from a Catherine Wheel.

S2, E8 ‘Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate’ Jerrymurdering

Jerry is violently shot to death, leaving his face a drooping, lacerated, blood-dripping husk. Thankfully he’s in a technologically sophisticated futuristic hospital that presumably offers socialised healthcare.

S2, E9 ‘Look Who’s Purging Now’ Mashes to Mashes

When Rick and Morty don robo-suits and enter the Purge, expect blood. When Rick hoists a purgee off the ground and pops his head off like it was a bottle-top, sending a fountain of blood arcing into the air, it’s pretty damn disgusting – and admittedly also a bit cool – but for gruesomeness you can’t beat the sight of two people having their heads slammed together leaving a mess of pink-hued, brain-flavoured mashed potato.

S3, E1 ‘The Rickshank Rickdemption’ Pop Goes the Weasel

In the midst of some inter-dimensional Rick and Morty-based carnage, a poor Morty is crushed to death with one swift trample, as if he were nothing more than a tube of toothpaste. His dead body lies on the ground like a stuffed tiger rug, his hollow eye sockets and melon-mouth aflame with blood.

S3, E2 ‘Rickmancing the Stone’ Bad Beth

Summer flips a Mad Max-style baddy’s death-machine, maiming him horribly. He drags his torso towards her from the wreck, on a slime of entrails, pleading with her to put him out of his misery. ‘OK,’ she says, ‘But not because you told me to.’

S3, E2 ‘Rickmancing the Stone’ Give Him a Big Hand

For maximum yuk, you really can’t beat Morty smashing skulls to a pulp in a Thunderdome-inspired death arena with his beefy, vengeful and murderously sentient replacement arm.

S3, E3 ‘Pickle Rick’ Rat-a-tat-splat

I’m going to condense multiple deaths into one here, all perpetrated by that mighty, vegetable-based superhero, Pickle Rick. First, he slices off a rat’s head with a trap and harvests its bones and sinew to add limbs to his pickle body. Next, he proceeds to dispatch a whole army of rats with his makeshift power-tools in a variety of brutal and ghastly ways: pummelling brains; suspending bleeding corpses from the ceiling; cutting them into strips, and even cleaving them in two. Riotously disgusting.

S3, E3 ‘Pickle Rick’ Laser Tag

Pickle Rick’s human opponents fall just as easily – and horrifically. The best, and messiest, kill is when Pickle Rick bores a laser-shot through the heads of three of his enemies, and then proceeds to stare cockily through the tunnelled lens of charred goo like some pickle-based James Bond.

S3, E4 ‘Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender’ Falling Down

Speaking of Superheroes, let’s say hello and goodbye to Morty’s favourite team, The Vindicators, most of whom met a particularly savage end. First there’s Vince Maximus, who flies into a ceiling vent, and is shot to death in such a spirit of Rambo-esque overkill that his disembodied legs drop to the ground like a downed plane.

S3, E4 ‘Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender’ See You Later Alligator (In a Pile, Crocodile)

Then there’s Croc-u-bot, splatted into a green pulp by a springing trap.

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S3, E5 ‘Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender’ Ants in His Pants

And the perpetually angry Alan Rails, whose gullet is invaded by the shifting, morphing body of Million Ants, who first inflates him then detonates him in a riot of guts.  

S3, E5 ‘The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy’ Game Over

This one if possibly the most viscerally gruesome death in the entire show. A little girl is shot through the head by her giggling boy pal just as Rick deactivates the invincibility shield protecting everyone inside the dome from death.

S3, E5 ‘The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy’ A Bug’s Death

Another death that’s psychologically, rather than physically, gruesome. Three little bug-people sit toasting each other’s health and happiness. ‘Let’s just relax and enjoy our retirement,’ says one, as he’s snatched by a bird of prey and carried to his doom. The last thing we see of him as he’s ferried to his horrible off-screen death is the open portal of his screaming mouth.

S3, E6 ‘Rest and Ricklaxation’ Party Poopers

A furry party-entertainer and a bunch of happy young kids are engulfed in a toxicity field. An angry exchange ensues, which culminates in the brutal beating, beheading and evisceration of the entertainer. They’re also available for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs.

S3, E7 ‘The Ricklantis Mixup’ Morty’s Flush

Thousands of dead Rick and Mortys float eerily through space having been tossed from the airlock by a homicidal Morty.

S4, E1 ‘Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat’ Crystal Death Addiction

When Morty first gazes upon the death crystal we see a shimmering smorgasbord of possible deaths. If you’ve got a fast pausing-hand, or the eyes of a spider, you’ll see such memorably brutal deaths as: Morty being sucked through a spacecraft toilet and ejected into the cold, airless void of space; dropped into a nest of giant baby birds and torn asunder; decapitated by an elevator door; and even falling from a skyscraper and being whisked to death by helicopter blades.

S4, E1 ‘Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat’ Rick’s Crystal Maze

Rick carks it in some hellishly grizzly ways, too. He’s torn in half by Squanch, is eaten by a giant spider, has his head splattered open like a melon by a swinging log, and – in perhaps the most horrific segment – has his body churned through a rectangular aperture in a giant Play Doh maker.

S4, E1 ‘Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat’ Clunk, click. Dead Rick.

Rick soon after dies for real (but not forever) in a spacecraft crash following some death-crystal-related shenanigans, smashing through the windscreen and impaling himself on a spike.

S4, E1 ‘Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat’ The Wasp Factory

Extra points for top tier body-horror gruesomeness with this one. Wasp Rick lays eggs in giant Rick’s eye, causing fast-hatching grubs to spill out from his massive mouth. Seconds later, a horde of Rick-wasps hatches en masse from his face, splitting it open like an overboiled hot-dog. Yuk!

S4, E3 ‘One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty’ Treachery Will Tear Us Apart

Heist artist Miles Knightley is torn apart like a chicken dinner by a medley of bizarre alien creatures – a cross between the ghosts from The Real Ghostbusters intro sequence and something that fell out of Clive Barker’s nightmares – whose piece de resistance is yanking the skin from his wet skull like it’s a bad mask. 

Are there any particularly gruesome deaths you’d like to add to the list? Or would you like to weigh in on which of these fatalities repulsed or horrified you the most?

The post Rick and Morty’s Most Gruesome Deaths appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[speciesofleastconcern]

The genus Pseudacteon, or ant-decapitating flies, of which 110 species have been documented, is a parasitoid of ants. Pseudacteon species reproduce by laying eggs in the thorax of the ant. The first instar larvae migrate to the head, where they feed on the ant's hemolymph, muscle and nerve tissue. Eventually, the larvae completely devour the ant's brain, causing it to wander aimlessly for about two weeks. After about two to four weeks, they cause the ant's head to fall off by releasing an enzyme that dissolves the membrane attaching the ant's head to its body. The fly pupates in the detached head capsule, requiring a further two weeks before emerging.

[ducktracy]

81. how do i know it’s sunday (1934)

release date: june 9th, 1934

series: merrie melodies

director: friz freleng

starring: rochelle hudson (various)

so imdb lists rochelle hudson as a voice credit?? that strikes me as odd, since i tjought she went to mgm with harman and ising to voice honey some more. but, she can always have two different gigs, and if it’s wrong it’s wrong. anyway! the inside of a closed grocery store is as alive as ever, including a swarm of pesky flies.

how do you know it’s sunday? well, people are strolling along to church and there’s an exterior shot of a grocery store that reads CLOSED SUNDAY ALL DAY. a lovely interior shot of the store as we pan to a can of sardines, who sing the titular “how do i know it’s sunday?”, asserting itself to be rather catchy. obviously, there’s a whole genre of things coming to life. this theme will continue even into the 40s—even around grocery stores, such as clampett’s 1941 goofy groceries. it gets trite after awhile, but i suppose if you go to the theater and see these shorts only a few years after each other it’d be different.

like always, all of the groceries make their contributions to the song. a decapitated pig’s head (porky? this IS friz we’re talking about) grunts in a bass voice, a married couple of pickled herring sing, women from the blue ribbon malt extract boxes sing (parodied as pink ribbon malt), an onion makes a potato cry from her multiple eyes (which is actually quite amusing), some blackface caricatures including a parody of aunt jemima named aunt eliza (would be nice if my namesake were attached to anything other than a blackface caricature but).

tamales also contribute—they would make a reappearance in billboard frolics. oysters, which are not at all oysters but in fact clams, click their shells like castanets, as does a flamenco dancing lobster. the animation is good—it turns out the particular print i watched had some sort of error in the restoration, because the animation looked distractingly choppy. it was just the particular restoration, other older prints seem fine.

multiple women from the old dutch cleanser cans (parodied as old maid cleanser) do some clogging, while a man runs a fan like a merry go round and speeds it up to the highest setting! damn!

below a shredded wheat box (threaded wheat) sings the girl from the morton salt box. elsewhere, a little inuit boy who looks startlingly similar to buddy is fishing. he’ll come into play soon. there are two morton salt cans, perfect for the two boys in the uneeda biscuit (uwanta cracker—i have a fondness for this gag only because it was referenced in one of the musicals i was in in high school LOL) packaging to flirt with. the song is very catchy, but so far this cartoon has been rather uninteresting. maybe because i’ve become desensitized to the magic of the singing and dancing cartoons. it’s still cute though! i like the designs of the girl and the boy. i love my vintage advertisements and products, so this comes in handy.

our inuit boy from before runs over to a cookie box and knocks on the door, and his cookie sweetheart (buddy and cookie literally?) joins him happily as they skip away. elsewhere, the villain(s) enter: a swarm of flies. they target a piece of roll cake and tear it to shreds. elsewhere, they devour some russian rye bread, engaging in the prisyadka dance. this would be a favorite of friz’s, he’d use it in cartoons typically revolving around ants and other insects, like in the gay anties.

“buddy” and “cookie” are seesawing via soup can and knife, very safe. the flies spot the girl and kidnap her as always! the boy does buddy’s obnoxious call from buddy of the apes, swinging from a rope and kicking the flies off of his girl as she’s taken hostage. with the flies gone she lands, enough time for the boy to grab her hand as they run away from an angry swarm of flies.

popcorn is used as a machine gun to shoot down the flies, but the flies fashion safety pins and toothpicks into tiny bows and fire in retaliation. the flies circle the frightened advertisements below them, the arm and hammer (harm and ammer) box smacking one of the flies in the head.

the flies grab some matches and light them, setting the surroundings of the advertisements ablaze below them. one of the uneeda biscuit boys relies on the carbonation of seltzer water to put the flames at bay, another character who looks vaguely like mr. peanut using champagne to put out the flames. i don’t think i’d rely on alcohol of all things to put flames at bay unless you have a death wish.

nice, stringy animation as a toy soldier(?) uses syrup to stick all of the flies together in one giant ball. their fate is further sealed when the popcorn from the popcorn gun sticks to the syrup. a homemade popcorn ball falls straight into a box of popcorn balls. a rude awakening for whoever chooses that one.

the boy from before distracts the remaining flies by jumping into a grinder, safely getting out from the bottom as the flies pile up inside. he grinds them and shoots them into a bottle, which he corks and poses on triumphantly as his colleagues cheer. iris out.

not the most entertaining cartoon ever, but not the WORST. it stretched on for a very long time, the climax didn’t feel like it had much urgency to it. it seemed to match the leisurely pace of the beginning half, the only difference being the musical underscore which helped to enhance the mood. not much to really say, because there wasn’t much there. the song was catchy! and the backgrounds were enjoyable to look at, as was counting up all the references, but you’ve seen one, you’ve seen em all. and the “all” will have better entires than this one. but, friz is still new to the directing gig, and he’ll continue to get better and better. 1936 is when things start to pick up, and 1937 will be a great year: mel blanc joins the scene, daffy is introduced, bob clampett becomes director, even ub iwerks directs a small handful of cartoons. i’d skip this one, there’s better groceries come to life adventures in store. nevertheless,

link! (different than the one in the screenshots, the animation is much smoother)

#lt #how do i know it’s sunday #reviews #long post #racism m

[igotstuck]

What is an example of biological pest control?

What is an example of biological pest control?

What is an example of biological pest control? Often, the natural enemies are found in the home range of the invasive pest. Some notable examples of classical biological control include the use of decapitating flies (several Pseudacteon species) against red imported fire ants, and a group of flea beetles, thrips, and stem borers used against alligator weed. What is biological control Explain with…

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#biological #control #pest

[malenvs3000-2018-blog]

The Leaf Cutter Ant: a Super Organism

For this week’s blog post we had to interpret the most amazing thing that I know about nature. I had to choose which amazing thing I wanted to write about! That was the most challenging part of this week’s blog post. I discovered the most amazing thing that I know about nature on the University of Guelph’s 2018 field entomology course in Costa Rica. Our class was very fortunate that we got to the opportunity to go out into the rain forest every day and multiple times a day. Every time that I would visit the rain forest, there were ants LITERALLY everywhere. Ants are so abundant in Costa Rica that when looking at weight, they represent ¼ of all the animals there (nicoyapeninsula.com). There were so many ants around that we had to make sure our insect collections were put away or else ants would take the pinned insects away and eat them.

(My insect collection, taken May 2018 in Costa Rica)

One day a grass hopper died in my room and within 10 minutes, ants swarmed to take away the dead body.

(A dead grasshopper being moved by some ants in my room, taken April 2018 in Costa Rica) 

I know that there’s so many ants in Costa Rica, but while I was there I saw three different types the most. I saw bullet ants, trap jaw ants, and leaf cutter ants. I’m going to spend the rest of my blog post focusing on the last type of ant because in my humble opinion, it is the most fascinating ant that I have ever heard of.  

(A bullet ant, taken April 2018 in Costa Rica)

(A lock jaw ant, taken April 2018 in Costa Rica)

(A leaf cutter ant, taken April 2018 in Costa Rica)

Leaf cutter ants get their name from an activity they are very commonly seen doing – cutting leaves. They use their voracious jaws to cut the leaves apart into smaller, more transportable pieces. These ants can carry up to 50 times their body weight and carry some very heavy objects for an ant, like pieces of a leaf or other plant pieces. That’s like a human cutting off a large piece of a tree trunk with their teeth and carrying it all the way home on their back – not possible for us, but these amazing ants can do it. The most interesting part about it is that the ants aren’t carrying the leaves to their colony to eat it, they’re carrying it back to use as substrate for their ‘farm’. Adult leaf cutter ants only eat the sap of leaves. Leaf cutter ants are farmers of a fungus in the genera Lepiotaceae. The ants farm the fungus by providing it with fresh vegetative material for it to eat and the ants harvest the fungus and feed it to their larvae. This mutualistic relationship between the two organisms is believed to have evolved 15 million years ago! So the ants have perfected their farming techniques.

(Leaf cutter ants and their fungus garden, http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/9094/leaf-cutter-ants-teach-researchers-about-biofuel-production)

Another intriguing part of these ants is their caste system. In most ant families, the castes are queen, workers, and soldiers. In leaf cutter ants, the castes are queen, soldiers, foragers, guards, and farmers. Foragers are the most commonly seen leaf cutter ant because they are have to venture out and get the leaves. The most intriguing caste is guards. There is a parasitic fly that’s called the ant-decapitating-fly because it lays it’s eggs in the neck of the forager ant while it is carrying the leaf back to its colony. When the eggs develop into flies, their burst out of the poor leaf cutter ant’s neck, effectively decapitating the ant. These guards prevent the fly from parasitizing the foragers because they are smaller and sit on top of the leaf and shoo away any ant decapitating flies from laying eggs in the foragers.

(A forager leaf cutter ant carrying a leaf and being guarded, https://www.alexanderwild.com/Ants/Taxonomic-List-of-Ant-Genera/Atta/i-fC79rKP)

Be sure to check out this awesome National Geographic video on leaf cutter ants to see them in action! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emSHL03NkF8

I also visited these links while writing this blog post:

http://www.ticotimes.net/2015/04/03/the-secret-lives-of-leaf-cutting-ants

https://www.dw.com/en/the-superpowers-of-costa-ricas-leaf-cutter-ant/a-19164159

https://nicoyapeninsula.com/wildlife/ants.php

[thecrimsonmonster]

AU: Venit Satana

( Antichrist AU )

This is an AU based roughly on the original The Omen movie series. Therefore, some artistic liberties are being taken based on the original religious interpretation of the Antichrist. (Some information subject to change/revision if needed.)

WARNING: Do not read further if you are sensitive to religious themes. In addition, a friendly reminder that just because I’m writing a super evil character, it does not mean I support said super evil. Although I’m pretty sure if you’re following me, you should know this by now, but religious elements tend to take it to the next level of discomfort for some people. So yeah, if you’re cool with all of this, by all means, go on. :>

—

Born of the union between the Devil and a jackal, the newborn Zolf Jay Kimbley was taken from his cradle by a sect of Old Age Satanists—disguised as doctors and nurses—and given to a politician and his wife in place of their own freshly-delivered baby. (They believe Kimbley to be their own child, though whatever happened to their biological child is unknown.)

The child was raised in a very high class environment, albeit somewhat dangerous due to the extremely important status of his “father,” with the constant threat of assassination hanging over the family’s head. Zolf ended up following in his “father’s” footsteps (both fathers’ footsteps, actually) after going to a private school and military academy, becoming an incredibly influential politician—and he is still very quickly rising the ranks.

He serves as the ultimate False Messiah and the figure of ultimate evil—the one that will attempt to sway humankind into destruction and bring about the End of Days.

Unique identifiers:

Demonic brands located somewhere on his body. Spoiler alert: they’re on his palms. The symbols themselves have never been seen by human eyes, though if viewed, they will be instinctively known to be the epitome of unholiness. This is why Kimbley wears gloves at all times.

His golden eyes. They are almost the shade of a jackal’s, albeit brighter due to being imbued with the evil energy of his Father.

Abilities:

The power of suggestion. While he cannot control minds, he can influence thoughts and emotions in other people. It helps him in getting people to do what he wants.

Telekinesis. Objects can be manipulated through a mental current, though they cannot be lifted directly.

Communication with “demonic” animals. These include crows/ravens, bats, flies/grasshoppers/ants/plague-like insects that move in large groups, cats and dogs/wolves, snakes, goats, and toads. He is able to get these animals to do his bidding—whatever it might be.

Hyper-healing. Any type of wound will heal very quickly. Even in extreme instances of injury—such as decapitation or disembowelment—he can be revived.

Weaknesses:

He is unable to enter holy places, such as churches/mosques/synagogues or graveyards, and holy symbols bother his mental processes. However, a strong belief or blessing must be imbued in the object or place—otherwise, it is useless. Kosher foods also make him ill.

The Seven Sacred Daggers of Tel Megiddo. These are the only weapons that can kill the Antichrist. Information based on the movies here.

#au: venit satana #headcanons #bio #queueblam

[nibenvs3000-blog]

The Tale of the Headless Horse...ant?

One of the most interesting classes I have taken in my university career was Insect Diversity & Biology. Every class I would learn some crazy fact that changed my perspective on insects and I would find myself telling these facts to people close to me, who may have not been as fascinated, but would definitely spur a reaction. It is amazing how little we know about the insect world and how diverse and abundant these species are.  Even today new species are being discovered and most of the discovered ones have never been studied to properly understand their basic biological traits. My prof always said if you want to name a species, become and entomologist.

I knew if I looked through my notes I would find something amazing to share, and I found a lot. In general, I found interest pulled towards ants. I admire the way this group of organisms act as a community to accomplish tasks we would think to be impossible for such a tiny creature. If the human species was half as productive as ants, I believe we could overcome many of daunting issues of today. We as humans overlook the importance and uniqueness of ants because we usually think of them as pests and because they are everywhere, nothing too interesting to look at.  However, as stewards of the land and nature lovers we should always try to take a second look and try to understand every part of nature for its role.

Now maybe it’s because Halloween is around the corner, but I wanted to share one of the more gruesome stories of ants. Well really its about a subgroup of phorid flies that act as ant-decapitators. That’s right, they decapitate ants. This is because these flies are parasitoids, meaning they need ants to complete their life-cycle in order to survive and unlike parasites, which use living hosts, parasitoids kill their hosts – usually from the inside out. Female phorid flies prey by detecting chemical scents (i.e. kairomones) secreted from the ants.1 Once they have found a host, they attack and inject an egg into the ant’s rump. From there, the egg hatches and the larvae begin to feed on the ant making its way to the head where it finally emerges and decapitates its host.­2

Fire ants and leaf cutter ants both have to deal with these pesky flies. However, leaf cutter ants have evolved an interesting defense strategy called “hitchhiker ants.”3 These are worker ants that are too small for the phorid flies to infect and ride on the leaves carried by the larger ants. These ants play an important role of keeping a look out for decapitating flies and to warn their ant brother of any striking females.

I think this tale relates well with our textbook reading this week “The Gift of Wholeness.”4 For me, learning about insects and their behaviour humbled me as a human because you realize humans are not the only amazing species out there. I especially think that by sharing wisdom of everyday critters liked ants, we gain a better appreciation and can begin to see them, and ourselves, as one of the many components of an ecosystem. On a walk, this fact could be used to help express and overarching theme expressing the significance of the small world of insects and the importance of observing phenomena not easily noticed.

Nicole Bitter 

October 22, 2017 10:30pm

References                                                                                                              

1 Simon, M. (2013, December 6). Absurd Creature of the Week: This Fly Hijacks an Ant’s Brain — Then Pops Its Head Off. Wired, Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2013/12/absurd-creature-of-the-week-this-fly-burrows-into-an-ants-brain-then-pops-its-head-off/

2 Jeffs, C. (2015, April 6). The ‘humpbacked’ phorid flies – meet the ant-decapitating brain eaters. Accessible Ecology, Retrieved from https://accessibleecology.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/the-humpbacked-phorid-flies-meet-the-ant-decapitating-brain-eaters/

3 Elizalde, L., & Folgarait, P. J. (2012). Behavioral strategies of phorid parasitoids and responses of their hosts, the leaf-cutting ants. Journal of Insect Science, 12(1), 135.

4 Beck, L., & Cable, T.T. (2011). The Gifts of Interpretation: Fifteen Guiding Principles for Interpreting Nature and Culture. Urbana, IL: Sagamore Publishing.

#ants #decapitated head #nature #wholeness

[arplis]

Arplis - News: La catastrophe: My La Compagnie flight to the South of France that never happened

The United States and France have had a special relationship since the former’s birth. No surprise that the two should be linked by a large, and growing, number of flights. The smallest of the airlines linking the two nations is Paris-based La Compagnie, which began flying in 2014 and operates to less than a handful of destinations in each country on less than a handful of planes with only one choice of cabin, business class. Despite the lack of scale — it focuses only on Newark in the U.S. and Paris and Nice in France with what’s currently a three-jet fleet — La Compagnie takes advantage of that crowded US-France traffic to offer competitive fares in a market built on pricey business fares. La Compagnie has a new Airbus A321neo in its small fleet, though my flight was to be operated by a much older Boeing 757. (Photo by Zach Honig/The Points Guy.) And that’s what drew me to them for a trip this summer. We were long overdue for a visit with a friend and her family in Paris, so early this year, we decided to get a rental house together in the South of France for both our families in August. And why not get there in comfort, I figured, especially since we would traveling with a baby who’d proven to be pretty good about going to sleep on planes? So La Compagnie’s once-daily flight from Newark to Nice, about a half hour by car from our rental house, seemed like the perfect choice, a wonderful way to treat ourselves after nearly a year and a half of changing diapers. The result, however, was easily the worst airline-related experience, as a passenger, of my life — and I’ve flown on both North Korea’s airline and one where the pilot threatened passengers with decapitation. So, like, bad bad, not “they didn’t thank me for my elite status” bad. Here’s why I will never fly La Compagnie again. In This Post A promising start I got our August round-trip tickets for our La Compagnie flight from Newark Liberty Airport (EWR) to, at least theoretically, Nice Côte d’Azur Airport (NCE) all the way back on Jan. 9 two different ways. I used the Platinum Card from American Express to buy a ticket for my wife. Our son, who’d be just over 17 months for our trip, was listed under her fare and got a separate ticket, but there was no charge because he would still be under 2 at the time of the flight. Like the website instructed, I noted that he’d need a kid meal and milk. The fare for my wife and son’s tickets came to $1,543. For my own fare, I redeemed 86,662 points on my Chase Sapphire Reserve card with the help of a specialist at the Chase Travel Portal. My receipt listed $698 for the flight and $601.93 for taxes and fees, minus $1,299.93 in credit from my redeemed points, leaving me with a grand total of zero dollars to pay in cash. We were all booked on the same row, and I was going to hold our child as a lap infant, but when later I called La Compagnie to confirm our seats, the agent said that we might be moved to a bulkhead row with a bassinet on the day of our flight. She also confirmed that they’d have kid meals and milk stocked. I’d chosen a red-eye specifically with the idea that our child would fall asleep soon after the 11:30 p.m. Eastern-time departure, and would wake fresh as a daisy — I’m allowed to dream — not too long before we landed at 1:50 p.m., France time, the next day. Because we were traveling with a very young child, I didn’t look at connecting options. With our flights purchased and pretty much settled, nearly seven months passed without incident, and I let myself start to fantasize about cracking open freshly baked French bread to the sounds of the Mediterranean breaking against the sand. We even bought our toddler tiny black Speedo briefs so he’d fit right in with the older men on European beaches. The day before our flight, La Compagnie emailed me with confirmation of our upcoming trip. Everything was going swimmingly. The next day, it all went horribly wrong. Strike one: Canceled flight … ? I was in the middle of triple-checking that Tickle Me Elmo was turned off inside our checked luggage and wouldn’t prompt a bomb scare with peals of demonic laughter echoing through the cargo hold when something nagged at me to see how our plane was faring the afternoon of our departure. “Delayed,” FlightAware warned. The plane, apparently, was still in Nice. But there was no word of any issues from La Compagnie, so I let it go, at first. But I kept checking, and when there was only an hour or two to go before we had to pack up the car for the hourlong drive from Brooklyn to Newark, it became obvious that the fact that our plane might still be stuck in France could have serious implications for our trip. I never made it to La Compagnie’s gate at Newark. (Photo by Brian Kelly/The Points Guy.) Finally, I got an email from the airline saying the flight had been pushed back about 20 minutes. Then an email came saying my flight was canceled for technical reasons and the company was working on getting me on a replacement flight. Weirdly, though, my wife and son’s original travel itinerary was supposedly still on, according to La Compagnie. I wasn’t about to send my wife off to haul our kid and two weeks’ worth of luggage through the South of France all by her lonesome, so I called La Compagnie customer service to find out what was going on. Repeatedly. I kept getting a recording that kept me on hold for a long time before asking me to try again later and then hanging up on me. So I gave up on them and called the Chase Travel Portal, where a Chase representative confirmed that, yes, the entire flight was canceled. She called La Compagnie on my behalf and actually got through. On a three-way call with Chase, La Compagnie’s customer service said we ought to head for Newark Airport, where there’d be replacement tickets waiting for us. Instead of flying business to Nice, we would be booked on the economy airline XL Airways France, which has since ceased flying. She also promised that milk and kid meals would be available on the XL flight. But we’d land in the wrong city: Paris, around 430 miles from Nice as the crow flies. These are the seats we were supposed to fly in for our flight to Nice. Instead, we flew a now-defunct airline in coach. (Photo by Brian Kelly/The Points Guy.) How would we get from Paris to Nice? They’d have it worked out by the time we landed, the La Compagnie rep, based in Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean, promised. Actually, they seemed to have sorted it out on our drive over to the XL Airways desks at Newark Terminal B, emailing my wife, at least, an itinerary that showed that she and our son were booked for an Air France flight from Paris Orly Airport (ORY) to Nice, leaving the next day at 3:25 p.m. and arriving at 4:55 p.m., or a smidge over three hours after we’d originally expected. None of it was ideal, but it would still put us at the rental house in time to have a pleasant welcome dinner with our friends. I assumed — hoped — that I’d get an email with the same itinerary. At this point, I didn’t really have a choice. These angle-flat seats would have been a whole lot better than economy on XL Airways. (Photo by Brian Kelly / The Points Guy).Strike two: No ticket pour moi At Newark, I learned never to assume anything with La Compagnie: My wife and kid were booked from Newark to Paris Charles de Gaulle (CDG), as expected. I wasn’t. Neither was one of the other guys behind me. After several frantic minutes that involved a snowballing number of bewildered desk staff and management shuffling papers and disappearing behind a door to consult another computer and possibly make calls to Paris, we learned that La Compagnie headquarters had sent XL Airways a list of people from our flight who needed seats on that night’s flight to CDG. For some reason that was never explained, at least two of the people on the list were never actually booked seats, including me. After a few more minutes, though, we were finally all booked on the XL flight to Charles de Gaulle, on Flight SE051, leaving 11:59 p.m. New York time and landing at 1:10 p.m. Paris time the next day. Our seats were even next to each other. I’ll skip most of the description of the substitute flights we ended up having to take — though I’ll point out that the XL crew had no idea what we were talking about when we asked for the milk and kid meal the La Compagnie agent had promised. This was never intended to be a story about XL Airways or Air France, after all. Instead, I’ll skip to our experience once we landed in Paris, where La Compagnie managed to take an unfortunate situation and make it much, much worse. It was like a summer job where you accidentally spill the ice cream while handing a customer his ice cream cone and, instead of throwing it out and getting a new one, picking the scoop of ice cream up from the dirt with your fingers, putting it back in the cone and handing it to your customer, hairy with grass and twigs and wriggling with ants — and expecting them to pay you $2.50 for it. Plus, it’s pistachio or rum raisin or a flavor like that. An XL Airways Airbus A330. The airline stopped flying in September. (Image by CT Cooper via Wikimedia Commons.)Strike three: Impossible connection After landing in Paris at Terminal 2A on the next day, going through immigration and collecting our baggage, we hightailed it to Terminal 2F, only to have our boarding passes for the flight to Nice — we actually had all three of them this time — rejected at the check-in kiosk. The reason? Bag check had closed before we’d gotten there. In buying our tickets, the third-party, evidently France-based, company La Compagnie uses to manage rebookings hadn’t taken into account that we had to deal with customs and immigration after an international flight, not leaving us enough time to get off the plane from Newark, go through the bureaucratic paperwork, get our bags, change terminals and check in with a different airline. So now we were given the choice of either abandoning almost all our bags, including two weeks’ worth of necessities, or finding another way to Nice. More calls to La Compagnie’s customer-service line. More recordings and hang-ups. The incredibly patient woman manning the Air France customer-service desk told us that if we wanted to make it to Nice that day, our only shot was an 8 p.m. flight from Paris Orly Airport (ORY) that landed in Nice at 9:25 p.m. But the seats were filling rapidly, she warned. Strike, uh, four: Forced to rebook myself Finally, a call to La Compagnie found a live person. The agent said that they’d book us on the Air France flight from Orly to Nice. Alternatively, we could find a hotel, spend the night, and try to catch another flight the next day, and La Compagnie would pay for up to 200 euros ($220) for lodging — in other words, enough for a Motel 6 level of hotel in Paris at the last minute. We picked the Nice flight that night, and the agent said I’d get a phone call once it was taken care of. So we ate, tried to relax and waited for the call from La Compagnie, which never came. I called them again, made it through the gauntlet of recordings and hang-ups, and reached the same La Compagnie customer-service rep, who said that the booking company that the airline used was slow that day because it was dealing a whole cruise ship full of passengers who had to be rebooked to the South of France too — and that took priority. But our new, new flight to Nice would be taken care of by the time we got out of the cab to Orly, which they’d pay for. I’d get a call by the time we were at Orly, she said, but we should hop in a taxi now. La Compagnie’s promises rang hollow at this point, so I realized we needed a Plan B. We went back to the Air France staffer who’d been helping us, and one of her eyebrows went up skeptically when we repeated what the plan from La Compagnie was. Behind her, another Air France agent tut-tutted and asked what company we were dealing with, then shook his head. “This doesn’t make sense,” our agent said. “This is something that takes less than a minute. Why would they make you wait to be booked?” So, working with the helpful Air France agent, we worked out the Plan B: We wouldn’t immediately trek with all our stuff and infant to Orly, in case it was all to find out La Compagnie had fumbled again (from CDG, north of Paris, to Orly, south of it, is about a 35-minute ride away in decent traffic but can be more than twice that in heavy traffic). Instead, we’d stick around the customer-service desk at CDG and check in with her every once in a while to see if we’d been booked on that night’s flight yet. After all, the Air France computer would be updated immediately after it happened, and it was clear that La Compagnie wasn’t exactly on the ball when it came to communicating with customers. If, by the time we had to leave CDG for ORY, La Compagnie still hadn’t bought our tickets, I’d buy the tickets myself. Then we’d take a cab to Orly. If La Compagnie still hadn’t gotten us our seats to Nice by do-or-die time at Orly, we’d travel on our self-bought tickets. If, however, La Compagnie actually came through before we had to check in for our flight, I could talk to an Air France agent at Orly for a one-time-only-these-are-unusual-circumstances refund on what were normally nonrefundable tickets. So we gave La Compagnie nearly four hours to buy tickets that should’ve taken them literal seconds to take care of. And they whiffed yet again. With taxes and fees, our tickets for two adults and one infant from Orly to Nice bought directly from Air France cost me 203 euros (about $225), which I put on my Chase Sapphire Reserve. We left CDG at 5:50 p.m. and got to Orly around 6:40 p.m. in an Uber that cost 64 euros ($70). (Photo of Orly Airport south of Paris by AFP/Staff via Getty Images.) Before we got in line for an Air France kiosk at Orly, I checked for messages from La Compagnie. Nada. With bag check and security still to deal with, and not wanting to risk missing a second flight in a row, there didn’t seem to be much point in giving La Compagnie any more leeway. We checked in with the tickets I’d bought myself. Only after we made it through security and to the gate and had waited around a bit, maybe 15 or 20 minutes from the first boarding call, did my phone chime to let me know there was a voicemail from La Compagnie. Their booking company was trying to get us tickets on the Air France flight to Nice but saw our names were already on the manifest. Could we contact La Compagnie right away so they could sort it all out and arrange our seats? One last time, I made the all-too-familiar round of attempts to call La Compagnie. The connection was terrible, and I could barely even hear the recording before it hung up on me. When I finally got through to a live representative, she cut me short as I started to give her my name. “Yes, I know who you are,” she said. It wasn’t the voice of someone happy to hear from me. When I told her we were already at the gate on tickets I’d bought myself, though, she seemed to perk up. “Oh! Then it all worked out! Have a good flight!” “Of course, I expect you to reimburse me for the tickets I had to buy myself,” I said. But she wasn’t having that, and said that because I’d bought my own tickets instead of letting La Compagnie arrange it, I was on the hook for the 203 euros. I could take it up by emailing customer service if I felt I needed to. And then the line went dead — either the poor connection had given out again, or La Compagnie had hung up on me yet again. I didn’t bother trying to raise them again. It was time to board. Air France Flight 6232 landed at Nice Airport around 9:30 p.m. By the time we booked our tickets, adjacent seats weren’t available, so I sat with our son in my lap while my wife was in the row in front of us. After we got our luggage and to the car-rental center, the rental agency was down to a single staffer who could get us the child car seat we’d reserved, so we didn’t make it to our rental home just outside Cannes till just before midnight. Cannes, France. (Photo by Nick Ellis/The Points Guy.) I’d bought tickets for an eight-hour, 20-minute flight that was supposed to get us from door to door in under 13 and a half hours. We ended up on a grueling odyssey that involved four airports, three cities and three airlines and took closer to twice that. Après NCE, la catastrophe For the Newark-Nice flight on La Compagnie, I never interacted with anyone at the airline besides the customer-service telephone agents based in Guadeloupe. Though the woman I dealt with most obviously grew increasingly exasperated as the saga went on, her demeanor remained cool and professional, if not exactly sympathetic, throughout. I can’t say the airline didn’t hire cool-headed staff for their call center. What I can say, however, is that their information was late, incomplete and often incorrect, and if I’d followed their directions the whole way through, we wouldn’t have made it to our intended destination until the third day. For some reason, the emails we received were different depending on whether it involved my wife or me. Whoever did their rebookings flubbed basic travel practicalities not just once but twice and possibly three times (depending on whether it was their or XL’s fault I wasn’t booked on the replacement EWR-CDG flight). That’s not great customer service. In fact, it’s downright crappy. And it took a customer-service agent from another airline to salvage the situation, which La Compagnie should frankly find embarrassing. TPG’s Editor at Large Zach Honig also experienced poor customer service when dealing with the airline on a flight from Paris to Newark a few months ago — but he actually got to fly on a La Compagnie plane in business class. All that was exacerbated when La Compagnie continued to refuse to reimburse me for the Air France tickets I’d been forced to buy on my own to get us to Nice. The day after we landed in the South of France, I emailed customer service with my receipts and explanation, then waited. At least we made it to the South of France, right? (Photo by Nick Ellis / The Points Guy) It only took a couple days for them to email me, apologizing for the technical issue with their plane and offering to refund $261.75 per passenger to compensate for the downgrade in service from Newark to Paris, plus $700 “cash regulatory compensation” per flyer (or a $1,000 voucher per person to be used toward a La Compagnie flight within one year — a nonstarter, of course). But there was no mention of paying me back for the Air France tickets, so I asked them again. Nearly three weeks after the aborted Newark-Nice flight, they emailed again and flatly rejected the idea of paying for the Air France tickets. “First and foremost, we have to point out, though; Regulation dictates when it comes to canceled flights, passengers shall be given the choice between a rerouting at the earliest opportunity or the refund of the unused flight,” the email said in broken English. “Despite, you could have been postponed on another airline and granted with the downgrading compensation, you decided to purchase new flights on your own with Air France. In this instance, you’ll understand we must respectfully deny your request to refund these extra costs.” I repeated my appeal, asked them to bump it up to the higher-ups and once again painstakingly laid out the account, minute by minute, of why I ended up having to buy my own tickets to Nice instead of relying on them to rebook my flight. I pointed out that if I’d waited for them to book the Orly-Nice tickets, it would have been physically impossible, for the second time in one day, for us to make it before check-in closed. One month and two days after La Compagnie had canceled our flight from Newark to Nice at the last minute, they gave in. “Having review your file, we must reconsider our previous email,” they wrote. “Indeed, our record shows the flight we booked was not convenient for your journey. Hence, we will participate to your Air France ticket fee for $222 (203€) and will process the refund on your bank account.” I could finally close the book on my brief but unhappy relationship with La Compagnie. Bottom line It’s tempting to write my experience off as a one-off incident, but whenever there’s a story on The Points Guy about La Compagnie, the comments section is almost invariably filled with horror stories involving technical problems, canceled flights, “inflexible” and unreachable customer service, stranded passengers, sudden downgrades and a litany of ruined trips. When I read those complaints before I booked our flights, I wondered whether it were a case of anonymous-comments-sections histrionics. Now that I’ve interacted with the airline myself, I can verify that the complaints about La Compagnie are spot on. Once we actually got to our rental house, our trip ended up being wonderful, thankfully, but the airline’s operations are clearly seriously brittle, with a tiny, aging fleet, questionable choice of rebooking agency and customer service that’s easily overwhelmed when crisis strikes — so much so that I’ll still be wary of the airline even after its entire fleet is modernized. The airline wants to be known for offering passengers the flying-experience equivalent of entrecôte, but it serves it to them on a paper plate. It’s a shame, too, because our La Compagnie flight back from Nice showed the potential: The flight attendants were thoughtful and kind, there was milk and a surfeit of choices of infant meals, and the seat — well, at that point, I’d already resigned myself to serving no purpose other than human Barcalounger for our kid for nine hours and 45 minutes, so I counted the facts that he was happy and didn’t disturb any of the other passengers and that my spine still worked when I stood up as big wins. (Though it’ll be so much better when they replace the 757 and its angled-flat seats on this route with the A321LR and its true lie-flat product.) And, of course, I never had to deal with the awful customer service or nonsensical rebookings this time round. But a good-enough flight on the return wouldn’t be worth taking the chance of another disastrous outbound trip. If you’re just happy to land in France and don’t really mind where you end up or how many days or hours it takes you to get there? Sure, give La Compagnie a shot. But if you’ve got people counting on you, either waiting for you on land or traveling with you by air? Do not fly La Compagnie. America’s special relationship with France has withstood bloody revolutions, diplomatic spats, mercurial governments, two world wars, the Cold War and Jerry Lewis. But if we depended on La Compagnie to keep the ties between the U.S. and France alive, we’d be better off learning French with a Quebecois accent. Featured image courtesy of William Verguet via Wikimedia Commons. #S-reviews #LaCompagnie #News

Arplis - News source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/la-catastrophe-my-la-compagnie-flight-to-the-south-of-france-that-never-happened

[curlicuecal]

i have a headache :p

D: Do fire ants get headaches, CC? CC: They’re called decapitating phorid flies. D: …….. CC: well I assume small insect larvae developing in your head capsule would make your head hurt. D: There’s a difference between *headaches* and *brain parasites*, C.

#ducthulhu is amusing me in my discomfort #relatively certain I don't have brain parasites #i shall avoid wandering off to a damp place and shedding my head just in case #bugs

[gaiatheorist]

Heat.

This, apart from not holding a passport, is why I don’t go ‘on holiday’. Oh, there’s the fact that I’m a bit rubbish with people, and crowds as well. The ex did make minimal concession to that, with the decades of ‘wild camping’, but I’m also rubbish with midges, crawling around on the floor of tents preparing meals, and not being able to wash properly. And him.

The UK has had one of the periodic ‘heatwaves’ that used to have the decency to clump themselves together into ‘summer’, giving us an extended period to acclimatise to not-wearing-jumpers all in one go, instead of these sudden bursts of being-quite-uncomfortable. I know, I moan when it’s cold, and now I’m moaning that it’s hot, I’m a combination of ginger genetics, and assorted ailments, nothing suits me. My laundry basket has filled itself in the space of two days, and I’m wiping sunscreen-smears off all of the everything. (Top tip, don’t open your eyes before you’re absolutely certain that the cloud of ‘Malibu’ factor 50 spray you’ve just squirted onto your face has settled. In an attempt to avoid the white-circles-around-the-eyes favoured by yonder yanker and shover, I ended up looking like an extra from a horror film about some manner of zombie-virus.) 

4am. I’ve been up for an hour, and it’s still not light enough to check what sort of bird has been left by my back door-step by a visiting cat, or whether it has been decapitated. At least I have a bin to put it in, after a very tense stand-off with the bin-thieves next door. They probably don’t know that I had a catastrophic brain haemorrhage a couple of years ago, and that I not only worry about my functional memory, but also have a horrendously exacerbated sense of smell. They were just being gits, taking the two empty bins, and leaving the one that was full of their never-ending-building-project-detritus out for me. They can’t even argue that they didn’t know the one left out was a full one, because they moved it off their drive onto my front lawn. They also can’t argue that they didn’t know it was THEIR rubbish, because they’ve put other rubbish into it since. How do I know that? Well, at some point on Friday morning, after I’d left to do my grocery shopping, they’d moved the full bin in front of my back gate. I put the two bags of waste I’d generated in a fortnight on top of their not-suitable-for-general-waste rubbish, and hoped for the best. He’d shot out when the bin-lorry arrived, and was told off by the bin-men for having TWO bins. I didn’t start a fight with him, I just calmly and quickly claimed one of the empty bins. There’s no point being deliberately antagonistic, and I was in shorts and vest, fighting would have risked public indecency,  it was too hot for scrapping anyway.

The ex-in-laws LOVE the sun, to the extent that they both look like they’re made of pickled leather, that could do with a quick going-over with the iron. They’d sit out in it for hours, whether on beaches on holiday, or in their massive garden, I’d watch from the shadows, as they’d move their stupid deck-chairs around, chasing the sun. I don’t know, maybe that was rationed when they were children or something. The old neighbour at the last house said that the ex’s ex used to sunbathe in the garden, too. “If it’s ‘ot, she just gets a cover, and lies there all day.” I’m shuddering at the thought, not just of deliberately cooking oneself, but also ants, and corn-flies, and all manner of bitey things. I’ve never been a sun-bather, I can’t think of many things more unpleasant than keeping still in the heat, and basting/turning to ensure the denaturing of dermis is distributed. 

“Is it hot enough for you?” Give me strength. The ex father-in-law was fond of bellowing that at me, as I’d hide, flushed and perspiring in the shade. The checkout-lady at Aldi sensibly stopped her pre-prepared-patter on “Isn’t it lovely?” when I pointed out my hair and colouring. “I’m ginger.” is a superb conversation-killer. “Oh, yeah, I sat out in it for an hour yesterday, and I’m a bit burnt.”, she offered, pointing out her pink arms, and then returning to the usual “Have you tried ‘x’ before?” as she scanned my shopping. Yes, dear, you are burnt, that’s exactly what you are, if you burn yourself while you’re cooking, ironing, straightening your hair, or doing something other than sitting in the sun and electively cooking yourself, you’d treat that burn with first aid, but you sat outside, and deliberately burned.

The forecast for the next couple of days is hot-with-storms, and I’m looking forward to the storms. Less so the scuttling about between patches of shade if I have to leave the house, and a vague whiff of chemical-coconut following me everywhere from the bastard Malibu spray. I’ve put bowls of water out in the garden for the critters, and I have enough sun-dresses to last me a couple of days, before the weather breaks, and drying said coconut-contaminated garments out on the line becomes impossible. Then I’ll complain about it having turned a bit chilly again, and having the damp-smell of laundry drying inside. I’m not impossible to please, it’s just that there’s a knack to it.

[allineednow]

<p>Stone: Bulking anthills for winter survival</p>

The giant mounds construct by some ant colonies offer temperature and humidity control for the ants within and beneath. (Photo: Emily Stone)

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The tunnel of shady conifers felt bitterly cold as I huffed uphill on my fatbike. Our wide tires crackled and popped over brittle leaf litter, sticks, and ice columns pushing up through once-damp soil. Sunshine beckoned up ahead, however, and as I burst into the open area at the top of the mountain I could feel the rays warming my legs directly through thick tights.  

We'd hoped to take part in a post-Thanksgiving "Pie Burner" group fat bike ride at a neighboring city, but icy conditions there deterred us. Instead, we had come to Tioga Pit, a reclaimed iron mine near Cohasset, MN. From 1955 to 1961, the Tioga No. 2 mine shipped over 3 million tons of iron ore. That 3-million-tonhole is now a deep blue fishing lake.

Rolling hills surrounding the pit have grown back into a mix of conifer forests, scraggly young hardwoods, and brushy areas teeming with spindles of aspen and birch. While the forests weren't particularly beautiful, they were interesting. Along one old road bed, a series of half a dozen large old truck tires remind us of this area's industrial past. In a reversed game of giant ring-toss, the smooth trunk of a living hardwood tree grew up through the center of almost every tire.

In a nearby area, several two-foot-tall conical mounds up to six feet in diameter sprinkled the open areas. I understood that the mounds must just be anthills, but those were a few huge anthills! Channeling my inner kid, I gave into the intense urge to go poke one with a stick...in the name of science, of course. My rod only scraped evergreen needles off the surface of the solidly frozen pile. No ants appeared to explore my invasion. I jumped back on my bike and settled for exclaiming about the series of these mounds lined up along the road.

Back home, I was expecting Google could help me figure out what I'd seen. My search for "giant ant hills in Minnesota" quickly turned up a discussion thread with a few good leads. I narrowed my suspects down to two species in the genus Formica. No, they are not associated with Formica® Laminate Countertops. The word "formic" comes from the Latin word for ant. Formic acid, the ants' chemical defense system, also derives its name from ants. Formica is the largest genus in North American, and contains almost one-sixth of all Nearctic species of ants.

In particular, both Formicaexsectoides, and Formica obscuripes construct big mounds and might live in this area. According to a Minnesota ants database hosted by Carleton College, F. Exsectoides was found in Itasca County (where I was), but F.obscuripes hasn't. Ants are notoriously diverse and understudied, so the database may be incomplete.

Also known as Allegheny mound ants, the majority of the range of F. exsectoides is centered farther east. Their nest mounds, constructed primarily of sand and soil, have been measured at 2.5 feet high and 9.5 feet in diameter. Several mounds could be interconnected, and tunnels may extend three feet to the floor. Multiple queens produce vast numbers of workers (one colony was estimated at 237,000 workers and 1400 queens), and the larvae grow under ideal temperatures and humidity levels maintained by the mound structure.  

Like most colonial insects, F. exsectoides will defend their nests. Their bites are not very painful, but after breaking the skin, an ant may then curl its abdomen beneath her body and squirt the cut with formic acid. That stings. In another example of their ferocity, these ants have the notorious habit of decapitating equal rodents. Their strength also is useful when they are preying on spiders and flies. On a gentler note, the majority of F. exsectoides' calories come from honeydew, a sugary liquid that they get from aphids, whom they also protect from predators.

The other potential architect of those mounds--Formica obscuripes--also farms aphids for honeydew, in addition to foraging for dead or dying insects and spiders. On the other hand, beetles, springtails, true bugs, and flies are known to carve out their own living spaces in the hills of F. obscuripes. Maybe they occasionally become dinner as well?

Whatever the case, the mounds of F. obscuripes create a excellent short-term rental since they're constructed primarily out of fragments of plant substances called thatch. Once again, the mounds regulate temperature and humidity. When I asked local entomologist Larry Weber about the mounds, he remarked that "I have seen these at Jay Cooke State Park and I have noticed that the needles seem to be a sort of solar panel. The snow melts on those mounds before it does around them. Plan another bike ride there in March and you will see the exact same thing." I think I will! Also, I'd love to go back when I could dig a bit deeper and find out if the thatch was only on the surface, or all the way through.

Like with F.exsectoides, multiple F.obscuripes queens create droves of workers (averaging 19,000 for a large colony). When things get crowded, mated queens and some workers leave the nest to begin a new one in a process called budding. This could explain why the mounds were grouped along the road. Sometimes the queen will only take over the nest of another ant species, in an act called social parasitism. The old queen is pushed, and the host workers help raise the invaders until their month-long lifespans end.

While many worker ants do not live much more than a month and a half, some live the entire winter. In fall, ants synthesize glycerol antifreeze and head to the lowest levels of their tunnels where temperatures remain near 50 degrees Fahrenheit. There they can sew without freezing. The major mound on the surface acts as both an insulator and a solar panel to help protect the ants below.

Sometimes in the darkest, coldest days of winter, hibernation looks like a pleasant option. On a sunny day, however, I would rather be zipping around on my bike, soaking up heat through my tights, and discovering something new.

Special Note: Emily's book, Natural Connections: Assessing Northwoods Nature through Science and Your Senses is here! Order your copy at http://cablemuseum.org/natural-connections-book/. Listen to the podcast in www.cablemusum.org!

For 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to link you to the Northwoods. Come visit us in Cable, WI! Our new exhibit: "Better Together--Celebrating a Natural Community" is now open!

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