And this is her song. The female Mahogany Jerusalem Cricket, anyway.

That's disgusting, but also incredibly cool. I had no idea that worms lived inside insects and controlled their behavior.

edit: I see that some 25 species of these nematodes are parasites of mosquito larvae, so they aren't all bad.

DANA! It's the sound of drums, the sound of drums!

The double heartbeat!

That's funny. My 17yr old daughter told me today that this phrase turns her absolutely inside out. When someone says that or "I have to talk to you", she said her stomach turns over, gets all knotty, she breaks out into a sweat and has waves of anxiety. She hates hearing it...

followed by, "close the door, please".

Hee!

I'd let it burn.

Attachment 42658

Absolutely true. The SOB has been following me for weeks.

Don't like snakes?

Don't like spiders?

How about spider-snake?

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18tn.../ku-xlarge.jpg

I don't like spiders and snakes ... and that ain't what it takes ...

Two things:

1. Yee.

2. Ikes.

That is creepy looking. :-X

The love-child of an anglerfish and a rattlesnake. Sweeeet.

I may be wrong - and do feel free to correct me - but it seems that apart from crocs, Australia's rivers don't seem to want to kill people. Which makes them unique in the landscape. So my one guess is the above pic is NOT Australian.

Cue a deluge of photos of Killer Fish From Downunder :)
Or just a deluge of fish.

Same guy and fish. Different angle. Still big, but doesn't appear quite so huge.

Attachment 45004

Still a nopefish, though.

Ayuh.

Definitely not an Australian fish. Keen anglers tried to introduce them, but they kept getting wiped out by the native fish. True story, I swear. ;)

Looks sorta carpish, scale-wise.

xenophobic fish !

I don't think Australian wildlife/ weather/ landscape is necessarily xenophobic.
It just wants to kill anything and everything regardless of whether it's native or imported (Cane Toads excepted - Australian humans did that and they need to do the killing bit too.)

Oz just basically looks at anything and says, "Om nom nom nom."

I've only met one non-Australian Australian.
She was first generation (as we reckon it)
Irish parents moved to Aus, spawned a whiny child, she decamped as soon as she could to come and plague us in England. She hated Ireland (too wet) hated England (not Australia) and hated Australia.
You had to be wary of getting this girl onto the subject of her homeland because she had a list as long as her scrawny arm about how awful it was.

Don't get me wrong, with family and (I hope) friends in Aus I am happy to joke about it.
But this girl was venomous.
She probably wasn't allowed back into Eire because St Patrick got rid of all the snakes.

Gosh - I knew her about 20 years ago. Turns out I hold a fierce grudge.
Actually, no. She was a nasty piece of work. So there.

Saw this over at The Shack, and had to look twice. WTF??

It's a Spiny Orb-Weaver! The first I've seen wit me own eyes.

The abdomen was about the size of a pea (¼-inch-ish).

Attachment 45125
Attachment 45126

Now that is pretty.
If it was the size of a golfball it would be yuck.
Size matters.

You are a strange bird sometimes, Sundae megirl.:eyebrow:

So you fall asleep dreaming you're in Louisiana
... standing at the edge of a slough


LA Times

Note to other Dwellars: read the article first.
Not a criticism, more an admission of ignorance, I expected spiders and couldn't work out what I was seeing.

Blimey.
That's... sucky.

See it yet?

Attachment 45353

My knees are locking just looking at this...

Attachment 45883

Rock climbing makes me consider the fact that a cliff face is is the exposed surface after a bunch of rock broke off.

And that chair is probably fastened by sticking into an existing crack a device which attempts to widen that crack, and relies on the hope that it is unable to do so.

Optimist.

My throat. It got me in my throat.
I can breathe now I can't see it.

The fringe is a nice touch... flutters in the breeze on the way down

Amanda would lose her shit

Anybody seen my shit?

Close enough.

They are kind of cute, but there are far too many of them, and if they were inside, I would be unhappy.

Did not expect...

When I was a Cub Scout (yeah, I was a Cub Scout, wanna fight about it?) I saw a wolf spider about this size in the corner of the men's room on Trooper's Island.

I took the toilet paper and shat in the woods. True Story.™



Any you Aussies know what that spider is?

I hear ya, man.

I've heard of parasites but fucking hell that one looks a handful!

Yep, gonna need a bigger boat, fer damn sure.

Attachment 46625

GAH!!

Attachment 47308

He's a big guy.

http://media.independent.com/img/pho...-Trains-05.jpg

A long time ago I had several nightmares where I'd get hit by a train.
Still would fuel nightmares for me, though I haven't had any in a few years.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Evolution! Defecation's about to commence upon to rotating oscillater!

Reminds me of this one.

Yeah, I've seen ladybugs fly often, but the flying spider would demand a coordinated world wide extinction.

Anyone who's read Charlotte's Web knows that spiders can fly. But that one's a hoax.

French naval vessel Latouche-Tréville, in the English Channel, in heavy seas.

No, no indeed, hell no.

I've been in worse seas than that. Twice. At night and in the rain.

I'm pretty happy staying in sight of shore these days.