Tender arthropod: mama centipede cradles her young

Seals are not so much a food source though, only for those that hunt them, you can’t sell or buy meat thats been “hunted” - but seal oil though… gotta get those omega-3 fatty acids from somewhere right? :wink:

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“gotta get those omega-3 fatty acids from somewhere right?”

Because its not like we don’t get them from salmon as well, which are largely farmed these days.

We have both centipedes (small and larger) and scorpions where I live. Scorpions are generally small and retiring; they will run away and hide rather than assault you unless you provoke one. Centipedes, OTOH, are ill-tempered all out of proportion with their size. They are sufficiently tough that hitting one with anything less substantial than a cast iron frying pan, 2x4, or chunk of rebar will only piss them off.

We came home late one night, parked the car, and went inside the house. The next morning DH went out for the mail, and discovered we had accidentally parked the car on top of a centipede about 6" long, trapping the rear third. The front 2/3 was mighty angry, and was striking at anything within range. This is a bug where being run over by a car just makes it mad.

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Ok, yes… I was mostly being sarcastic… sorry I forgot the /s tag.

Well, you’re no fool, so I think sarcasm was implied. But I think @Mangochin was sarcastically riffing off your sarcasm. That’s how I read it anyway, but then I just assume everyone is as big a smart-ass as I am :grin:

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I read and re-read that comment so much before I replied… its entirely possible I missed their /s tag too! But I’m an over thinker like that. :slight_smile:

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a sarcasm tag for posts would be quite helpful. I’m generally good at picking up on it but i’m sure occasionally something rubs me the wrong way when the poster probably didn’t mean it the way i took it. I’ve also had people take me seriously as well, so i try to be as obvious as possible with my sarcasm these days.

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I am suddenly reminded of the Simpsons episode where Homer realizes the hard way that sarcasm doesn’t work well in print

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I believe it. The one time i tried stomping one it kept crawling around like nothing. Was only able to kill it because it crawled inside a pocket in a jacket that happened to be nearby and i kept stomping on it until it was still. It was very unpleasant, i get shivers thinking about it.

Especially for the scorpion!

May dad, who was an Army ranger and all-round outdoors kind of guy, gave me some good advice: bugs with lots of nice bright red tend to be more venomous. It’s not a universal rule, but it’s nice that Mother Nature doesn’t totally ignore our biases when painting the critters in her most prolific animal phylum.

They say the miracle of birth is the most beautiful thing to witness.

People who say that never watched a giant cockroach excrete her brood.

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sob Why did I click on this post? Why did I click on this thread?

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Or when tachinid flies fling their spontaneously birthed young to wriggle their way down the hole that a wasp has dug to protect her baby that she stabbed into a caterpillar and eat both?

Or when a young Strepsipteran male finally escapes from the butt of a wasp?

Evolution is funky.

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curiosity killed the cat

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It’s not about “being taught to appreciate”. Arthropods really don’t have anything to merit empathy. They certainly don’t have any empathy for you, being only slightly more complex than robots powered by Raspberry Pis.

They feel pain, I think that merits empathy.

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That’s an incredibly dishonest demonstration of “pain”. All that showed is that they can learn to avoid negative stimuli. Microbes and even simple robots can do the same equally if not better. So not “pain” in any meaningful sense.

Horrific squeaking? My robots can do that. What else might qualify for [a metric of] pain worthy of empathy?

Fluffy, No!!!

He’s been picked clean! This must be the work of cannibal cats!

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