You know, I was stung by a yellowjacket the other day, when all I’d done was try to visit their nest and say hello. It still hurts a little bit, ow ow ow, have pity on me, etc.
Today my wife tells me she put out a water dish for them, in case they were thirsty.
Whose side is she on, anyway?
I told you I’d try to get better pictures of that nest in my yard.
I learned my lesson. I used 8 feet of PVC pipe to increase my reach. Next time, 20 feet.
My front yard is a bit of a scary place — it’s been taken over by cranky stinging insects. Here’s a wasp that has a nest in my front door.
Scarier still, though, is this small cavern that has been excavated in my lawn, and is full of buzzing frantically busy creatures that I could not photograph well, because they were moving so fast to complain about my existence. It might be a swarm of Karens.
I’ve mentioned that I have an endoscopic camera. Anyone want to double-dog-dare me to probe deeply into that mysterious tunnel full of alien life-forms? I’ll do it. I’m not a-skeered.
Today, you get a blazing star against a backdrop of milkweed.
These Maratus jumping spiders are spectacular.
En face of a male peacock spider, Maratus lobatus
Maybe there’s hope with some plastic surgery and a lot of tattooing.
One drawback: I’d never want to wear pants again.
This diagram from Convergent Adaptation of True Crabs (Decapoda: Brachyura) to a Gradient of Terrestrial Environments is going to reinforce the idea that everything converges on crabs…which is kind of cool anyway.
Summary of phylogeny and divergence time estimates for Brachyura (88 brachyuran families, 263 genera, 333 species, 338 individuals plus 6 outgroups). Posterior ages were estimated in BEAST2 using a fixed topology resulting from the concatenated ML analysis in IQ-TREE, 36 vetted node calibrations, a birth–death tree prior, and relaxed lognormal clock model. Shaded circles at nodes represent ultrafast bootstraps. Pie slices are colored by superfamily, with the outermost ring colored by taxonomic section. Line drawings, one representative per superfamily (numbers corresponding to taxa in Supplementary Table S7), by Javier Luque and Harrison Mancke.
Please note, this diagram illustrates the evolution of a single, large, successful clade, the Brachyura. It does not imply that humans and salamanders and spiders are going to converge on a crablike form, OK? The interesting thing is that all the descendants of this Triassic lineage, despite going through multiple independent transitions from marine to terrestrial and back again, have assumed these very similar (superficially, at least) forms, and that tells us something interesting. The Brachyura have some internal constraints that shape their evolution, and studying them help us understand the balance between inherited patterns and external forces. That’s the conclusion of the paper, that there are constraints on evolution.
Herein, we inferred a large molecular phylogeny of true crabs, estimated divergence times that were older than previously thought, and estimated the number of transitions from marine to non-marine lifestyles. We found up to 17 convergent transitions through direct and indirect pathways, with at least 3 climbing to higher degrees of terrestrial adaptation. The most highly terrestrial clades were some of the oldest non-marine inferences in our data, with their common ancestors having diverged over 66 Ma. At least 9 more recent events throughout the Cenozoic led to crabs living in intertidal and marginal marine environments, a shift that is estimated to be much easier based on lower threshold liability and likely fewer traits required. As instances of convergent evolution provide emerging models in the form of “natural experiments,” the framework we have developed to compare the gradient of adaptations will enable future research that aims to “predict” the constraints leading to repeated trait evolution and better understand the drivers of biodiversity across related groups.
We have some little friends making a home near our front door.
We’re leaving them alone and letting them go on about their business, but haven’t informed them of their terrible mistake. They’re building outside our door, but inside the screen door — they’re going to have virtually no protection from the terrible Minnesota winter. I’m figuring they can have their happy late summer endeavor, but later, when temperatures hit the negative 20s, I’ll chip their frozen home free and toss it into a snowdrift a few blocks away.
Today I just saw itty-bitty tiny things that I struggled to photograph.
This is a baby zebra jumper.
Enoplognatha, maybe?
Aaaah! The aphids have discovered our milkweed!
To be honest, I haven’t been bothered by the cicadas this year — maybe they’ve been cacophonous south and east of here, but I’ve only seen a few and haven’t heard any of that shrill trilling. Maybe they’ll be out in force later, but for now, I’m still happy to see the cicada killers taking care of business.
We have a young monarch enjoying a fine meal in our yard!
