because of the way many illustrations of ancient animals and habitats are constructed with all the organisms in one shot i still have this concept in my head that that’s just what the old days looked like
in the old days everyone just hung out together in or around a ditch like this
Some butterflies migrate thousands of miles a year, yet scientists have
conjectured that most other insects spend their lives pretty much in one
place. Not so. A 10-year study found that more than 3.3 trillion
insects migrate high above southern Britain every year, especially in
spring and fall. “People thought insects were passive and just got
accidentally blown about,” says researcher Jason W. Chapman of the
University of Exeter in England. “That is absolutely not the case.
Insects make active choices about when to migrate and how to use the
winds, often moving fast and over long distances, in beneficial
directions.” What they are looking for, he surmises, is greener
vegetation and better weather for breeding. Initial studies in Texas,
India and China are showing similar patterns. Insect migration, Chapman
says, “is starting to look universal.”
Credit: Jan Willem Tulp (graphic) and Jessica Huppi (illustrations);
Source: “Mass Seasonal Bioflows of High-Flying Insect Migrants,” by Gao
Hu, Ka S. Lin, Nir Horvitz, Suzanne J. Clark, Don R. Reynolds, Nir
Sapir and Jason W. Chapman, in Science, Vol. 354; December 23, 2016
Griffin: You f–k up a whole lot when you start doing a podcast, and you hear from people who really, really, really like you, who let you know very politely that you hurt their feelings and ostracized them, and then you stop doing it. And then after enough of those, you kind of stop doing it to everybody, or you try your f–king best to. Literally, that’s it. I think it’s easy to get defensive, but I just always felt so miserable when I heard, “I’m a big fan of yours and you hurt my feelings.”
Travis: When someone tells you, “Hey, what you just did hurt me,” you have two options. One is to say like, “You’re wrong, and I didn’t do anything wrong.” Or your other option is to say, “Okay, well if you feel that way, let me take a step back and really look at what I did.” Do that second one every time.
Researchers at Oregon State University have
discovered a 100-million-year-old insect preserved in amber with a
triangular head, almost-alien and “E.T.-like” appearance and features so
unusual that it has been placed in its own scientific “order” – an
incredibly rare event.
There are about 1 million described species of insects, and millions
more still to be discovered, but every species of insect on Earth has
been placed in only 31 existing orders. Now there’s one more.
The findings have been published in the journal Cretaceous Research
and describe this small, wingless female insect that probably lived in
fissures in the bark of trees, looking for mites, worms or fungi to feed
on while dinosaurs lumbered nearby. It was tiny, but scary looking.
George Poinar, Alex E. Brown. An exotic insect Aethiocarenus
burmanicus gen. et sp. nov. (Aethiocarenodea ord. nov., Aethiocarenidae
fam. nov.) from mid-Cretaceous Myanmar amber. Cretaceous Research, 2017; 72: 100 DOI: 10.1016/j.cretres.2016.12.011
This strange insect found preserved in amber represents a new species, genus, family and order of insects.
Credit: Photo by George Poinar, courtesy of Oregon State University
