it-lives-in-between - Tumblr blog

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I collected these snails the other day and they must have been pretty old, because I had them in water in my warm apartment for just a few hours and SO MANY cercariae started crawling out of them! The snails looked hairy with the amount of larvae coming out of them! 

I haven’t identified the snails or the fluke yet (and I might not be able to id the fluke) but it was so cool to see I had to share!!

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White Admiral, 

Limenitis arthemis ssp. arthemis

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Just some mountains

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Yellow Diplostomum metacercariae for when I want to learn about trematodes but also want to do art.

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Even just in taking a jar of water from a ditch you can find aquatic snails, diving beetles, true bugs crustaceans, nematodes and other worms..honestly there is SOO MUCH!!! And they're really easy to keep. I keep mine in a cool area with moderate sun and sometimes feed them lettuce.

An interest in collecting and rearing small organisms is truly the real-life Pokemon experience. There’s literally just one stretch of sidewalk I always know is the hotspot for tiny garden snails when it is over 40f and damp outside. There’s just one lake where every few scoops of sunken, rotten leaves yields like 100 pond snails but just one snail-eating leech. The lake has too many fish and birds for me to find a lot of tiny, swimming crustaceans but a loosely connected grassy pond a ways down is teeming with seed shrimp in the summer, daphnia in the fall, and copepods in the winter. On only the brief window of both wet and hot weather each year I can find carnivorous subterranean slugs but they are most abundant, for some reason, at one particular apartment complex I discovered back when I was doing food deliveries. 30 minutes into the mountains is a vernal pool, what most people would just call a “rain puddle” in what’s almost just a parking lot, but there’s no easier place for me to find caddisfly larva and another kind of seed shrimp.

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First evening of February break so I painted a triceratops

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I love meadows! But usually when I think of meadows I imagine of a small patch of tall grass prairie surrounded by a deciduous forest...not a barley field or pasture of Crested Wheatgrass...

Let's run through the medow and never look back

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I thought is was a vole or a shrew at first

Megalopyges are cute but beware, they are danger boys as well

(Florida, 12/27/18)

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Wonder what happened to the dinosaurs? This is a baby Blue Heron.

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That may be true if you’re looking at household and wood cockroaches, but if you expand your view to sand and cave cockroaches, Heterogamodes are the best!

Just look how round and cute it is!!!!!

Photo by andrasz, inaturalist

You know, I’m just going to say it: German cockroaches are really boring to look at it. American cockroaches are waayyy prettier. Like, look at this:

This is the German cockroach. A thin, unremarkable silhouette, with a washed-out yellowish-tan color. The stripes on the pronotum are a little interesting, but they blend in too much. Not to mention, overall, it doesn’t even particularly scream “roach”–at a glance, you could easily mistake this for a house cricket.

Now, check out this beauty:

That iconic yellow pronotum with the two big spots (adorable!). The dramatic dark wings, a clear silhouette apart from the pronotum, with the lacy veins all lit up, showcasing that signature cape-like overlap of the wings they share with their relatives, the mantises. The moody red undertone, so you know there’s no other insect than a roach you could possibly be looking at (and half an inch longer, so you can really see it)! It’s a figure that is at once humble and majestic, mild and imposing.

Sorry, German roaches. You just can’t compare.

That’s not entirely fair, though. From the side, they are both delicate, pretty little deer:

Anyway guess who’s a prominent character in the idea I’m working on right now?

*(Incidentally, neither cockroach actually came from Germany or America)

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I still don’t know that this is.....

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What are you?????!!!!

Some kind of insect larvae I assume

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Parasite I’ve found recently while dissecting fish.

First three are Ornithodiplostomum trematodes, the fourth is a nematode.

Not drawn to scale

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Drawing muscular men :)