crevicedwelling

[crevicedwelling]

I've been told that it's #InsectWeek and that I should plug my work.

I'm so bad at marketing... Uhhhhh... Buy my books...!

https://www.owlflyllc.com/publishing

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Do you still do bug IDs on your sideblog? No worries if not!

theoretically I do but I can’t even begin to find the time to look at the asks on this account, sorry

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hi, i found one of your photographs turned into an ai image on facebook

your original post: https://crevicedwelling.tumblr.com/post/701317051823931392/my-darling-creature-i-love-house-centipedes-best

the ai replica: https://www.facebook.com/Insectswars/posts/pfbid02DAXL1QeiufoTPPdTit4DQTR5KFDN3nK7pL18Hoe6ceoxV8gBivmdDomABBt8u4yEl

that’s very unpleasant and thanks for bringing it to my attention… rotten slop went after a mediocre phone photo of mine?

do you think I have any chance of getting it taken down or should I just cry about it

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hello crevicedwelling this morning i found an albino cockroach in my apartment if i wanted to keep it as a little pet what sort of setup would i need. assuming i can find it again when i get home from work. and can i just feed it little veggie scraps and things is that acceptable food for it?

there are no albino cockroaches. if it’s a solid white color, expect it to go back to normal color once it hardens its exoskeleton after it just molted. that, or you live way out in the Central American tropics and found a roach species that is normally all white, which would be very cool!

while there are pigment deficiency mutations in insects, it rarely looks “white” since the natural color of many arthropod exoskeletons is yellowish-orange even without pigment to give it color. even then insects don’t seem to show these mutations the same way that crustaceans and myriapods do. the closest thing to “albino” that happens is white-eyed mutants, like this strain of the American cockroach.

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bountiful harvests today

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could I get the (checks menu) layer pellets with some scratch grain on the side

spice level? uh idk 5 I guess (cannot taste capsaicin)

uh yeah I’ll have the particle meal and can you put a little extra detritus on that thanks

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it’s exactly like a normal worm just a little bit different

Today, I could see a strange worm.

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uh yeah I’ll have the particle meal and can you put a little extra detritus on that thanks

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Hello !! I was wondering, is AI gonna have a role in your field?

I don't think there's a single knowledge-based profession out there that isn't under threat of being automated by some pig ignorant dipshit beancounting middle manager with a hardon for AI and entomology is certainly no exception. even before the big AI explosion of the last couple years people have been trying for a long time to automate pest arthropod identification, but at least so far they haven't been successful. Especially when it comes to things like bark beetles, which I specialize on, the differences between a harmless native species and an intensely destructive exotic one can be unbelievably subtle, not to mention the fact that new/cryptic species are always being discovered and that's not something an AI would ever be able to detect or understand.

That doesn't mean that our jobs aren't still under constant threat even by an algorithm that would do a piss-poor job of imitating us; the executive perverts that get all hot and bothered by the idea of replacing humans with fancified autocomplete functions have a vested interest in not understanding the nuances of the professions they're killing and as long as it's good enough or even just appears to be good enough, they'll push for it.

Also let's not forget one thing about "AI" which is that half the time it's actually just a marketing term used to cover up the usual outsourcing/offshoring to cheaper workforces that has been ongoing for the last 30 years. My lab was recently and repeatedly pestered by someone selling "AI moth traps" that purported to be able to identify any pest species of moth that flew into it. When we pressed him on it it turns out that part of the service it offered was that the moths would be photographed by a little digital camera in the device and the pics sent to a team of entomologists in Hungary to confirm. Aside from the fact that a lot of small moths need to be carefully examined under a microscope and often even have their genitalia dissected by an expert to be confirmed as a particular species, this is no different then any of the other supposed AI products that have been revealed over the last couple years as just being a shiny veneer over the same old digital sweatshops on the other side of the world.

More importantly though, even if the AI moth traps did work as advertised either through the ~*magic of machine learning*~ or desperate poorly paid eastern european entomologists either way it's yet another thin edge of the wedge designed to put me and my colleagues out of a job by convincing our bosses or our bosses' bosses that there's a cheaper and more efficient alternative and I view them and literally anything else marketed as AI as part of the same anti-human push to deskill and demoralize as much of the workforce as possible. I've never once used chatGPT or any other LLM, I've never used an AI image generator, and I will never, ever fucking use any purported AI entomology tool because aside from being shined up dogshit it is an existential threat to the discipline I've dedicated almost 20 years of my life to.

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I found the strange worm

Today, I could see a strange worm.

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saw a worm yesterday when gardening w my dad, made me think of this blog :3

probably Lumbricus rubellus, common but no less delectable

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Today, I could see a strange worm.

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this doesn't seem to be widespread knowledge around here yet but there's a big trend among dogshit content scraper accounts to grab a real photo (usually of ✨Aesthetic Nature™✨ or something similar, which is why it's relevant to me) somewhere, and recreate it using AI to avoid crediting the photographer. this can even trick people who are somewhat familiar with the subject matter if they're not paying attention but looks incredibly wrong upon closer inspection

here is some complete garbage as an example. because these "photos" are not completely made up by AI, people into spiders know the species and will recognize their features without looking closely, getting tricked in the process. if you know spider anatomy and look closely though, both of those look like utter abominations. the original photos these two were based on are here and here, by the way

these just so happen to be things i'm familiar with and i would probably get easily fooled by AI recreations of plants or fish or whatever. my point is that if you're not an expert on everything that exists you're not immune to these, so i would probably recommend caring about photo sources unless you actively want to look at this repulsive trash

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I would just like to show you this giant worm I found the other day. The big ones get up to around a foot long around here.

Curious where “around here” is—that’s a pheretimoid earthworm, so either in East Asia or if in North America, as an invasive species that I’d be curious about identifying. photos of the underside, please!

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sunguss

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collected some stripy worms to keep today 🥰

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