The big ? around here is Raven vs Crow. An Ornithologist is studying them around my part of San Diego, I’ve heard. Seems some have taken to cohabitating with each other. Sign of the times, I guess.
Wasp attractant? ANYTHING YOU WANT TO EAT.
If it absorbs your mind and soul and leaves your body as an empty husk, it was probably a Slakemoth.
If it has evolved yellow-and-black stripes, but is wingless and bipedal, it is probably a Borussia Dortmund team supporter. AVOID.
I have a couple of mp4s of thousands and thousands of solitary miner bees, taken while sitting in the middle of them, but I don’t know how to get it onto bOINGbOING.
The buzzing is very soothing.
I believe yellowjackets are just shitty drunks.
Their most aggressive time is in the season in which they mainly eat overripe, fermenting fruit.
I feel that wasps of the yellowjacket types, Vespula germanica included, follow the smell of alcohol to guide them to the fruit with the highest sugar contents.
(They may actually seek the alcohol for high calorie fuel.)
In late Summer, when they have no home to take protein rich food to and don’t anymore have a real purpose in life, they turn to alcohol and thrills.
If you feed them beer or cocktails and watch them, you can see their behavior and flying capabilities degenerate as they become fearless, clumsy and mean.
And loud. Their buzzing changes octaves and volume.
If you drink in the daytime they will smell your breath alcohol and pester you aggressively. Another reason not to.
Perfumes, skin products, shampoo, disinfectants and such contain alcohol, drawing in curious wasps.
In the past years I have noticed that sober summertime wasps can tell skin cancer from regular skin and they cut and tear off little chunks off it if one lets them.
I have watched this ‘extensively’.
It hurts a bit and is somewhat disconcerting, but I wonder about medicinal application.
Last year my garden produced a minimum of 7000 individual wasps.
They are such excellent aphid killers.
They serve purposes. I don’t see a need to kill or genocide them.
But I’ve already mentioned aggressive drunks.
They do pollinate. They just aren’t around in spring to pollinate our crops.
Thanks. I tried a bit of hot dog in a bottle trap, but caught nothing. I’ll look for the liquid at the hardware store.
Sheesh, I’d hate to think that du Maurier and Hitchcock were right!
Now let’s talk about hornet vs wasp.
Hm, if the wasps refuse it, i would too.
I think these are related in an odd way. Think of the wide variety of shapes and sizes that all fall under the label of “dog”, or the wide variety of colors and patterns that are called “tulip”, or the wide variety of flavors that are still “apple”. (Not to mention the wide variety of shapes, sizes, colors and opinions that are “human”.) Many of such “everyday” species have had their range of variation expanded through artificial selection. If this forms the basis of your understanding of how the natural world works, then it may be difficult to comprehend that in the world of insects, even a tiny difference in appearance usually means it’s a different species. Why should a bumblebee be distinct from a honeybee when you’ve seen more dramatic differences between puppies of the same litter?
I’d say that for insects, such naive intuitive classification has maybe a few dozen different “kinds”, roughly corresponding to taxonomic orders: there’s the beetle, the butterfly, the bee, the fly, the cricket, etc. Beyond that it’s just different sizes and colors, which surely can’t be a big deal.
I honestly don’t know how someone can confuse a raven with any other corvid. They are far bigger.
It’s a lesson in convergent evolution, maybe disguised as something more “practical”, so as to get the kids interested from the get go,
I found that the thick line animation style was really inappropriate for the subject at hand.
It might have been interesting to consider how these species appear to a would be predator, and not just to human eyes.
As for Robins, Crows, and Cardinals, there’s little evolutionary advantage in mimicry-- and in fact, at least for males, a distinctive appearance that attracts females has a evolutionary advantage. The female of the species comes along for the ride, so to speak.
On close inspection it looks like it, but I’m a bit surprised because ravens aren’t that people friendly in my experience.
Depends. If that’s Canuck then definitely a crow. We don’t have ravens around here as much.
I would not be surprised to find other transit taking corvids, however. I am sure they understand the importance of reducing carbon emissions even if us stupid humans don’t.
