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Ceriodaphnia dubia

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Daphnia ==> real one eyed cyclops

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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 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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I still don’t know that this is.....

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 :) 

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I want to kiss bugs but they're so small 😭

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

Some kind of insect larvae I assume