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shehan-mga2022mi5019 · 11 months

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Alternative ideas.

RED HAT 2: SIX LEGS TO AVENGE.

My first idea for the Red hat topic was the peacock spider. But the topic offered is insects and not invertebrates, therefore I feel like including a creature from the Arachnida class would be problematic. Therefore I have decided to have a back-up idea of the Epomis beetle.

Thoughts to convey.

I think everyone knows that frogs are infamous for insect eaters. In fact they eat a large variety of insects. Unfortunately there is one insect that a frog can never kill and that is the Epomis beetle.

Epomis beetles are fast insects with powerful double-hooked jaws. The larvae act as bait, flicking their antennae and moving their jaws. And frogs like other amphibians are programmed to avoid large animals and hunt small animals. The frog then moves its lightning fast tongue towards the beetle. Bad idea. The beetle is faster. It dodges the tongue and latches onto the frog, eating away at nerve endings and muscle.

The frog tries desperately to flee but more and more beetles arrive and when the adult beetles start swarming in the frog starts praying for life. The adult beetle makes a surgical cut across the frogs back, completely paralyzing the frog. In the end all that’s left is a pile of bones.

In the case of the Epomis beetle (Only the Epomis circumscriptus and Epomis dejeani species specialize in amphibian hunting) there is an almost 100% success rate. And they not only eat frogs, they eat lizards and salamanders as well. In a sense they are the Avengers of the insect world.

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Animation idea

A fly is nestled on a flower. A frog approaches a fly in order to eat it. It gets comfortable to strike and it launches itself into the air. It’s tongue stretches out viciously and it’s too late. The larvae appear out of nowhere and strike. Some attach themselves, some assist and some devour.

And as the frog struggles to break free and the larvae seem to be losing the fight. But the cavalry arrives! An adult beetle arrives and paralyses the frog completely. We then see the fly flying away and settles on a skeleton of a frog.

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hapalopus · 5 years

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In studying invertebrates, we often reach a point where we can’t learn much more from observations in the wild, especially with rarer or more elusive species. In my own book studies (I’ve still not had the chance to participate in field-work), I’ve found that this is a problem with Solifugae, that are notoriously difficult to track, and for which almost all behavioral accounts are based on chance encounters.

While looking at invertebrate galleries and blogs I came across a photo of Epomis dejeani, a type of ground beetle that feeds almost exclusively on amphibians. The photos really stuck with me because they were clearly taken in a controlled setting, and when digging further I realized that the photographer studies Epomis beetles and set up interactions between the predatory beetles and the amphibian prey in his lab.

Gil Wizen is a fantastic photographer, no doubt about that, and reading his blog, I don’t doubt that he loves the animals he studies, which include these frogs, either. Yet to capture the beetle’s feeding strategies and the frog’s defensive behavior, the best method he could find was to set up interactions in the lab, even though it pained him. In his own words: “I love amphibians, and it was disheartening for me to watch them die so many times. Throughout the study I kept telling myself: “I am going to hell for this, no doubt about it”.”

In the study itself (Wizen G, Gasith A. 2011. Predation of amphibians by carabid beetles of the genus Epomis found in the central coastal plain of Israel. Zookeys, (100):181-91), more gruesome photos are featured, for the morbidly curious.

All this got me thinking about how we decide what’s justifiable in the name of science. And know this discussion is endless and there are thousands of opinion pieces already written - I’m not writing this to reach a conclusion, but rather to get some thoughts out.

It’s usually agreed that live feeding is unethical unless the alternative is to starve an animal to death (i.e. in the case of snakes who won’t eat frozen thawed, or spiders who refuse carrion). Is it more justified to keep a wild animal captive and feed it other captive wild animals if we do so to understand how they feed? I can see arguments both for and against this (”if the species becomes endangered we’ll know how to care for it” versus “the suffering caused to the prey animals outweighs the suffering caused by the predator’s extinction” is one example).

A related subject that I’ve seen very few discussions of is the same situation, but with parasites and parasitoids instead of predators. Some parasites are host-specific, like the tick Ixodes heathi that only lives on one species of pygmy possum. If we were to study the life cycle of species like this in captivity, we’d have to also bring their hosts into captivity. And what about the few botflies that kill their hosts or at least cause them significant stress, like the various mouse botflies or nasal botflies in deer? If it can be justified to live-feed in lab conditions, can it also be justified to infect animals with parasites in lab conditions?

#not sure if this is a ramble or not #does anyone else have opinions? pls i'd love to hear it #entomology #ethics #bugblr #txt

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