[HN Gopher] Rare insect found at Arkansas Walmart
___________________________________________________________________
Rare insect found at Arkansas Walmart
Author : rntn
Score : 78 points
Date : 2023-02-28 14:27 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Back in about 1998 I lived northwest of the asshole of the
| universe, Houston, Texas.
|
| We had a screen door on our house and no porch light. I was
| heading into the house from the driveway when I saw a cockroach
| fly up and onto the screen, evidently attracted to the lights
| from inside the house and intent on getting inside. I grabbed a
| baby food jar from an outbuilding and went back to the screen
| door where I found the cockroach, still pondering the issue of
| how to gain entry. Cockroaches usually don't seek out the light
| but this one did so that was interesting enough for me to want to
| capture this insect.
|
| After capturing the cockroach and sealing it in the jar I noticed
| that it was light to medium green colored. It was clearly a
| cockroach but all the ones I had ever seen were various shades of
| brown to red. I dialed in to my internet at the time, probably
| AOL, and searched for cockroach pictures hoping to identify it.
|
| I finally found a photo and write-up about this insect. It was a
| Cuban cockroach. Evidently they had only been noted in the United
| States in a few places in Florida, probably brought in during one
| of the refugee waves of the past few decades. They were not
| common at all and had never been found on the Texas Gulf Coast.
| There probably had been a lot of Florida men moving to the
| Houston area and they carried their insect bros with them,
| probably inadvertently, though you never really know.
|
| I contacted the University of Houston entomology department and
| reported it. They were interested but not enough to need to see
| it.
|
| I ended up keeping that cockroach inside that sealed jar until it
| died since I didn't want it to spread. After more than 30 days
| alive inside, a large collection of dots appeared on the inside
| of the jar. I wondered what the heck those things were since they
| were not excreta as the insect had run out of that a while
| earlier. Eventually the question was answered as the jar suddenly
| filled with activity from dozens of small cockroach kids, each
| looking for a way out of their predicament. The adult died
| shortly after the little ones hatched.
|
| After more than 3 months, the last one of the baby cockroaches
| died. I eventually threw the jar out, I think. It may still be in
| a box of crap I have hauled around for unknown reasons though.
|
| People in southeast Texas living near the sweltering bunghole of
| the state and the universe can thank me for the small
| contribution that I made to preventing the spread of an invasive
| species. The last thing we need is a cockroach that loves to mix
| and mingle in a well-lit kitchen.
| UberFly wrote:
| I'm sure they miss you...
| doodlebugging wrote:
| It's probably true that some do and others don't. That seems
| to be the way the world works.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 7 million people appear to disagree with you about Houston.
| I've lived here -- by choice! -- for 28 years. It's true we
| have no scenic vistas, and our summers are notoriously hot and
| muggy, but
|
| - You can afford to live here. Real estate is attainable, even
| fairly close in.
|
| - The arts here are on par with our status as the 4th largest
| city in the country.
|
| - The people are awesome -- friendly, helpful, and generally
| from all over the damn place. That leads to ...
|
| - The food is RIDICULOUS. There's a great meal to be had in
| this town at any price point you care to name.
|
| - It's immensely un-snooty. Unlike lots of nerds, I don't mind
| putting on a suit, but in Houston there's almost nowhere that
| polices dress codes beyond "no jeans, collared shirt". And even
| that's rare. Superficial snobbiness is just not much of a Thing
| here (vs., say, big parts of Dallas, or Atlanta).
|
| - The flip side of the summer is that it's almost NEVER cold
| enough to deter outdoor activities. You don't store your bike
| for the winter here. You just keep riding.
|
| - Finally, if you're a traveling sort of person, being
| centrally located makes hitting either coast possible pretty
| quickly. This has been handy for me in both business and
| personal contexts for sure.
|
| So yeah, step off. Houston's awesome. It might not've been YOUR
| favorite place, but maybe crapping all over it in your post
| about a roach wasn't the best move.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Thanks for your insight. I actually agree with a lot of it.
|
| I didn't come by my assessment by reading about Houston and
| latching onto someone else's observations. I lived in
| Houston, west of HWY6 for 5 years before buying a place out
| northwest on 290 and commuting from there for 5 more years.
|
| Then, after moving up near FtWorth and just when I thought I
| was done with it for good, I ended up commuting weekly to
| Houston for 18 more years. I saw and had the opportunity to
| enjoy all the interstate construction on I-10, 45 towards
| Galveston, 59, 610 loop, Grand Parkway, Beltway 8, and
| finally 290. It has been in a state of constant change down
| there. Some changes improved things, others appear to be
| boondoggles.
|
| I totally agree on the people and the food. I'm in the O&G
| industry so I had the opportunity to work with people from
| every continent including a guy who spent a season in
| Antarctica. Culture, arts, like you say is first class.
|
| Since I watched many of those subdivisions being built,
| especially on the southwest to northwest side of the city, I
| am less impressed by the housing. My family has been in the
| building business since the Depression and I grew up on job
| sites. I would be pretty persnickety about what and where I
| bought. When I first moved there, and likely when you did
| too, the Katy Prairie was a nesting area for migratory geese
| and ducks. Now they have lost all that so that developers
| could build huge subdivisions in the old rice paddies and
| interrupt rainwater drainage that formerly prevented a large
| part of the major flooding in Houston proper. I spent days
| down there after Harvey trying to help people who had lost
| all their stuff.
|
| Basically, I come by my overall negative impression of
| Houston honestly. We don't have to agree about everything and
| indeed we don't. That won't change my assessment though since
| that is based entirely on my own experiences and
| observations.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| To be fair, slapdash spec builds from developers and
| overbuilding in wetlands and prairies are not a uniquely
| Houston phenomenon.
|
| I've never lived in the suburbs here - I'm in Montrose -
| but yeah, a lot of the new stuff is badly built, but it's
| the same anywhere. The part that WAS uniquely Houston is
| that they literally built on the flood plain, and many
| people bought there and weren't aware of the risk.
|
| It's true we needn't agree, but it's also true that
| beginning your post by describing a city as "northwest of
| the asshole of the universe", and ending it by calling it a
| "sweltering bunghole," is needlessly derogatory,
| inflammatory, and pointlessly rude.
| flandish wrote:
| I love the app "seek" by iNaturalist for finding out more about
| bugs and plants and such.
|
| https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app
| daveslash wrote:
| I am completely addicted to iNaturalist. I haven't discovered
| any new species, but I've learned a lot. Not too long ago there
| was some news about some high school kids having used it to
| discover two new species of scorpion.
|
| It claims to be a social network, but it's user interface isn't
| engineered to keep your attention like others do - so there's a
| little bit of a learning curve to really figure out how to get
| the most out of it, but I'm a total addict now.
|
| [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-
| california-t...
| flandish wrote:
| I totally agree! I use both of their apps and sometimes the
| bird apps by Cornell.
|
| iNaturalist claims "seek" uses on device "ai" to help find
| species.
| daveslash wrote:
| I have the app on mobile, but I really don't use it... I
| shoot all my photos with a traditional camera and upload
| them to the website.
|
| It might sound silly, but I'm approaching it like Pokemon -
| _gotta catch em all!_ I 'll identify some taxon and then
| try to go get as many species as possible. For example, I'm
| now aware of at least 5 species of Sea Urchin local to me -
| I've got 3 on iNat. I've seen the other 2, but didn't get a
| photo, but I know how to find them so I'm headed back out.
| I didn't even know there were at least 5 here, let alone be
| able to name them. It's intellectually really addicting....
|
| Something that surprised me is how many subspecies there
| are of _checks notes_ everything! It almost seems like in
| the narrowest sense, almost _everything_ is endangered (if
| you 're considering subspecies and phenotype). Very
| interesting stuff. I promise I'm not a paid promoter!
| flandish wrote:
| Oh neat idea! I am most often mobile - but might try this
| approach.
|
| The Seek app is slow to start and has a warning dialog
| every time.
| daveslash wrote:
| Pro-tip: If you're uploading on the web browser and your
| pic doesn't have GPS coordinates, set the location
| _before_ trying to identify the species. Setting the
| location helps the AI limit it 's suggestions to the
| geographic area.
|
| Another buried feature is being able to view your
| observations and species in a tree view. Go to Dashboard
| -> Profile -> Species (under your profile picture)
|
| Here's mine [0]. I really like how I can drill down the
| taxon tree and filter to see just species and/or
| observations at any level of the tree.
|
| Edit: Oh, and be careful if you're worried about metadata
| in your pictures. iNat doesn't strip it out. I actually
| kind of like that -- after poking around, it helped me
| identify my next camera purchase. But Somebody could
| totally dox me (well, de-anonify me) with the metadata in
| some of my pictures....
|
| [0] https://www.inaturalist.org/lifelists/dolfindave?view
| =tree&t...
| flandish wrote:
| Ohh cool. Thanks for the insight! Yeah a photo in a park
| is fine... a photo in a home, maybe different lol.
| shagie wrote:
| When I've done GPS stuff with photos in houses, I've
| lopped off decimal digits until the circle which it
| represented was sufficiently large enough. I typically
| lop to one decimal digit to give "close enough, but not
| exact".
|
| http://wiki.gis.com/wiki/index.php/Decimal_degrees
| daveslash wrote:
| That's interesting... I didn't realize that it worked
| that way. For example, I just assumed that something like
| 32N, saved in an int, would be interpreted the same as
| 32.00000000N -- I didn't realize that the number of
| decimal places implied precision/significant digits. I
| suppose it's not surprising, and it makes sense, but I
| hadn't really thought much about it before. I also
| suppose there are probably systems out there that _don
| 't_ work with Decimal-Degrees and do assume 32 == 32.000
| because the devs weren't aware. Thanks for sharing!
| shagie wrote:
| Relevant XKCD - https://xkcd.com/2170/
|
| For some fun with geogson and unintended precision -
| https://rapidlasso.com/2019/05/06/how-many-decimal-
| digits-fo...
|
| > Recently I came across this tweet containing the image
| below and it made me laugh ... albeit not in the original
| way the tweet intended. The tweet was joking that "Anyone
| is able to open a GeoJSON file" and included the
| Microsoft Word screen shot seen below as a response to
| someone else tweeting that "Handing in a project as
| @GeoJSON. Let's see if I get the usual "I can't open this
| file" even though [...]". What was funny to me was seeing
| longitude and latitude coordinates stored with 15 decimal
| digits right of the decimal point.
|
| Also of interest in precision -
| https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/8650/measuring-
| accur...
| toss1 wrote:
| >>Scientists hypothesize the insect's disappearance could be due
| to the ever-increasing amount of artificial light and pollution
| of urbanization;
|
| Although this has not been established as the cause of demise of
| this specific species, over-lighting is a huge problem. It is
| expensive cargo-culting, and the fact that LED lighting is so
| much more efficient to run, just makes the cargo-culting of
| lighting up everything all the time that much worse.
|
| We really need to stop it, it screws with the lifecycle of almost
| every plant & animal including us. Dark skies aren't just for
| stargazers.
|
| Whenever you get the chance, advocate for minimizing and
| shielding lighting.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I think that, in general, people will agree with you and would
| prefer not too have so much ambient light at night.
|
| So assuming that, I think it's a good idea to ask the question:
| If people general prefer a dark sky at night, why do we have so
| much lighting?
|
| There are probably a lot of benefits that people get from
| lighting that would be lost with less of it. If we don't
| understand what those are, it's hard to weigh the pros and
| cons.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > If people general prefer a dark sky at night, why do we
| have so much lighting?
|
| Because it's been too gradual of a thing for most folks to
| really notice.
|
| Take someone to a dark sky site and they'll likely have their
| mind blown. I was in Freycinet National Park in Tasmania last
| year, and you could step out of a lit room with no time for
| eyes to adjust and _still_ see the Milky Way laid out in the
| sky.
| edhelas wrote:
| From what I read from it, it is driven by the "fear of the
| dark" in a lot of cases.
|
| Also, what could prevent us to have lights that are turned of
| when there is no-one around and for the other cases, have our
| own source of light (like for example... a mobile phone or a
| head-light) ? Big optimization.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > If people general prefer a dark sky at night, why do we
| have so much lighting?
|
| At the risk of stating the obvious, it is because your
| assumption is incorrect. Or perhaps more specifically, it is
| too narrowly focused. People may generally prefer a dark sky,
| but clearly they don't generally prefer it over having a well
| lit landscape.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| And there you go right there. That's exactly what I'm
| talking about. One reason people might light things up is
| that they prefer X (a well lit landscape) more than they
| value a dark sky at night.
|
| Other ideas: Landing strips. Safety (perceived?) in public
| spaces. On streets. Around homes. Etc.
|
| I'm not arguing these are good tradeoffs or not, just that
| they ARE tradeoffs for some people, and there's no moral
| imperative one way or the other.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| We are slowly making some progress, new streetlights are
| generally shrouded better than they were in the past. But
| then LED lights tend to be harsh, towards the blue end of
| the spectrum. I'd like to see shorter lights with warmer
| color temperature, at least.
|
| There is a section of I-5 between Portland and Seattle,
| perhaps a couple miles long, that has blue streetlights.
| Like, really blue, not just blue-ish white. It's like
| driving under a blacklight. The Internet tells me this is
| the result of a manufacturing defect and the effect is
| not intentional. I hope they replace them soon, they're
| kinda distracting when you're driving.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I think it would be better to understand more clearly
| what light sources are contributing to keep things
| focused on the more substantial contributors. Is it
| streetlights? Indoor home lighting? Landscape lighting? I
| really don't know, but I think it's important to look at.
| How is it different at 9pm vs 2am?
| manv1 wrote:
| Traditionally new/old animal species are discovered in the meat
| markets in Asia, so this is a step up.
|
| I suppose someone need to scour those backwoods for new species.
|
| In fact, they could probably publish an app and have kids in the
| area scour the woods for insects and take pictures of them. I'm
| sure lots of them would do that for some robux.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| > I suppose someone need to scour those backwoods for new
| species.
|
| Backwoods? Fayetteville is part of "NWA" - Northwest Arkansas.
| Between Washington County (including Fayetteville) and Benton
| County to the north (including Bentonville, home of Walmart)
| there are >500k people living there.
|
| The Ozarks as a whole is less populated, but most of that is to
| the east.
|
| > In fact, they could probably publish an app and have kids in
| the area scour the woods for insects and take pictures of them.
| I'm sure lots of them would do that for some robux.
|
| Most of the relatively untouched areas of the Ozarks Plateau
| don't have consistent cell reception, unfortunately. That
| said... I'm going to do some thinking about that. There might
| be a way to work with the federal agencies that manage those
| areas to market something like that. At least in theory,
| building out the app wouldn't be terribly difficult.
| Organizing, curating, and getting the resultant dataset to the
| right people would be harder.
| achandlerwhite wrote:
| Reminds me of this recent reddit thread wherein a person found an
| extremely rare velvet worm in their potting soil:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/whatsthisbug/comments/1180uq8/comme...
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Entomologist: "ah, a rare insect! I will kill it and mount it in
| my insect collection! And then, I will write about how I
| discovered it. Brilliant!"
| reborned wrote:
| The insect was on the exterior wall of a Walmart - it was
| likely not long for this world. That's the nature of science
| though. The story does remind me of a documentary I saw on a
| researcher of rare lizards in the Australian outback. Over 30
| years he collected thousands of specimens. The interviewer
| asked if he might be harming the population of the various
| lizard species he was studying. The researcher thought about it
| for a second and said he used to believe the populations were
| large enough that it did not matter, but then admitted he isn't
| so sure now.
| korroziya wrote:
| I assure you, entomologists have done more to help insect
| welfare than you ever will.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| That could be true, if you knew anything about me. But the
| fact is that like all science, there are ethical
| considerations to be considered. Here is an article that
| attempts to address this issue:
|
| https://faunalytics.org/entomology-and-the-ethical-
| treatment...
| korroziya wrote:
| You made a cheap glib remark about an entire scientific
| group and now you want to try and backtrack with a link as
| though you weren't acting like a pretentious teenager. Just
| take the loss and move on.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Is there any indication that the insect was alive and
| reproductively relevant when he plucked it off the side of the
| building? I've lived in areas where swarms of dead & dying
| mayflies (aka fish flies) appear on the sides of buildings
| every year.
| Cpoll wrote:
| Well, what else do you do with it? Insects aren't pandas,
| there's no world where killing one will have an ecological
| effect.
| toss1 wrote:
| Photograph & video it, log the location data, and let it
| live.
|
| When it is "a rare, surviving eastern population of giant
| lacewings that evaded detection and extinction. ", it is very
| much like a panda, and a single premature death can make a
| difference in the survival of a population.
| water-your-self wrote:
| It helps to read the article
| he_is_legend wrote:
| You could say the same for humans, yet for some reason its a
| crime.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Insects aren 't pandas, there's no world where killing one
| will have an ecological effect._
|
| Ten years ago, people thought the same thing about bees.
|
| Today, we're starting to worry about the food supply.
| blendergeek wrote:
| And still, killing one bee will likely not have an
| ecological effect.
|
| It is mass deaths of bees that are causing the problems,
| not entomologists taking for collections.
| unixgoddess wrote:
| it's the opposite actually. Insects are incomparably more
| important than highly complex highly specialized animals when
| it comes to biodiversity.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Insects _as a whole_ , yes. A _single_ insect, generally
| not.
|
| If an endangered insect species is down to a population
| where single individuals matter, it's already a goner.
| atkailash wrote:
| [dead]
| myself248 wrote:
| "Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black,
| was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead."
| ceejayoz wrote:
| To be fair...
|
| > Skvarla found the specimen in 2012, but misidentified it and
| only discovered its true identity after teaching an online
| course based on his personal insect collection in 2020.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| Still odd one's reaction to seeing a neat living creature is
| to immediately kill it and mount it.
| sliken wrote:
| Heh, well driving a car at 60 mph during on the wrong day
| on the wrong road would kill 100x more bugs than a
| entomologist does in their entire career.
| subsubzero wrote:
| As an aspiring entomologist (when I was younger) its very
| common. I would have put it in a jar when I got home and
| observed it but you have to know that insects have very
| short lives and one in a polluted urban setting would not
| live long anyways. I think people conflate insects
| lifespans with mammals(which can be as long or longer than
| humans).
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Reminds me of the guy killing the oldest extant tree
| specimen to get their core sampler out.
| https://www.radiolab.org/episodes/91722-be-careful-what-
| you-...
| toss1 wrote:
| Yes, especially these days when we are driving the 6th mass
| extinction event, and we have all kinds of other options
| for documentation.
|
| It was one thing a century and a half ago when wildlife was
| still close to plentiful. Now, take some photos and videos,
| log the location & conditions, and let it live...
|
| Killing & mounting isn't science anymore, it's a snuff
| fetish.
|
| EDIT:
|
| Yes, I get it, it was one insect and in this case he didn't
| even realize it was rare until years later, and often
| getting hand-on DNA helps, and overlighting, pollution,
| habitat destruction are far larger drivers.
|
| But teaching the habit of collecting and mounting bugs goes
| far beyond the handfuls of PhD entomologists. I remember
| being taught about it and encouraged in something like 6th
| grade. It's not harmless like collecting stamps and, unless
| you're going to actually do DNA analysis on that sample,
| still seems to me like more of a cargo-cult/fetish
| activity, so I'd hope we could get beyond it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Now, take some photos and videos, log the location &
| conditions, and let it live...
|
| From the article, a microscope and DNA testing were
| required to confirm:
|
| > "We were watching what Dr. Skvarla saw under his
| microscope and he's talking about the features and then
| just kinda stops," said Codey Mathis, a doctoral
| candidate in entomology at Penn State. "We all realized
| together that the insect was not what it was labeled and
| was in fact a super-rare giant lacewing. I still remember
| the feeling. It was so gratifying to know that the
| excitement doesn't dim, the wonder isn't lost. Here we
| were making a true discovery in the middle of an online
| lab course."
|
| > For additional confirmation, Skvarla and his colleagues
| performed molecular DNA analyses on the specimen. Since
| confirming its true identity, Skvarla has deposited the
| insect safely in the collections of the Frost
| Entomological Museum at Penn State, where scientists and
| students will have access to it for further research.
| adrianN wrote:
| I bet there are a lot of sciency things you can do to a
| specimen that you can't do to a photograph of a specimen.
| And it's not like a few thousand specimens in museums are
| driving mass extinction. It's habitat destruction and
| climate change.
| atkailash wrote:
| [dead]
| AlexandrB wrote:
| When it comes to insects, I think your anger is
| misplaced. Capturing and mounting a specimen hardly makes
| a dent compared to how many die on car windshields, due
| to pesticide use, or from loss of habitat. Adult insects
| also tend to have a short life - for many species only
| one season.
|
| And in this case the collection was done for a valid
| scientific purpose, not just for funsies.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Capturing and mounting a specimen hardly makes a dent
| compared to how many die on car windshields_
|
| Well, the point here is that this was a "rare" insect.
| Comparing the number of a particular rare insect to the
| number of common mosquitoes doesn't make sense.
| blendergeek wrote:
| And when he captured and mounted it, he thought it was a
| common insect.
|
| He only realized it was a rare insect 8 years later.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The predation load on the insect population from all
| entomologists worldwide is infinitesimal. Capturing and
| mounting an insect will almost surely not change the
| course of that species' survival.
| positr0n wrote:
| Plus, most insects lay thousands and thousands of eggs.
| Whatever the carrying capacity of the local environment
| is, insects will fill it quickly.
|
| Pesticide use and loss of habitat make that carrying
| capacity smaller. Smashing bugs on your car windshield
| and collecting specimens just makes room for more
| juvenile bugs to survive to adulthood in a few
| hours/days.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Yup, professional entomologists study insects all the time. Is
| what they do.
|
| And to identify it they need to look at things that aren't
| visible in a photo. Moreover, photos are not a valid proof of
| anything anymore because they are easily falsifiable.
|
| Individuals are not important, we protect populations. And to
| detect valuable populations we need to take samples.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Not that that long ago (10 years? 15 years? Phones with camera
| were already common), a very rare brazilian wandering spider bit
| someone in a supermarket in the UK. It then looked ultra
| aggressive, which is uncommon for spiders, so someone took a
| picture with its phone.
|
| If I remember correctly it's thanks to showing the picture to the
| doctor, which had it sent to a zoo (!), that they realized how
| dangerous it was and thankfully another zoo (?) had the serum.
|
| My memory is fussy but it happened, in the UK.
|
| Turns out the spider traveled all the way from Brazil into...
| Bananas.
|
| Another common name for the brazilian wandering spider is the
| "banana spider" : )
|
| Too lazy too google it so I posted what I remember ; )
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneutria
| zamnos wrote:
| Is this it?
| http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/somerset/4489033....
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| From the wiki article, "Phoneutria venom is potentially
| medically significant to humans".
|
| I feel like that sentence gives very little actual information
| while giving readers' imaginations the opportunity to run amok.
| undersuit wrote:
| And the citation points to a news article that doesn't even
| make the claim.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Oh it's seriously bad I think:
|
| _" The spider's name means "murderess" in Greek, which is
| appropriate for the deadly arachnid. And it's no wonder why
| -- it's one of the most venomous spiders on Earth. Its bite,
| which delivers neurotoxic venom, can be deadly to humans,
| especially children, although antivenom makes death
| unlikely."_
|
| https://www.livescience.com/41591-brazilian-wandering-
| spider...
| pvaldes wrote:
| Phoneutria can be suspected or discarded looking at its face.
| Eyes arranged in a square
| silisili wrote:
| When we were kids, my brother worked produce at a Winn Dixie.
| He'd told us more than once about finding giant spiders in the
| banana boxes, so I'm guessing it's not an ultra rare
| occurrence.
| pvaldes wrote:
| An adult antlion. They have (probably) short lives as adults
| adding a lot of difficulty to watch them
|
| There are like "four or five people in town" with the skills,
| bibliography and interest to identify them at species level and
| resist the urge to smash them so, rarely seen. It toke eight
| years to identify correctly this specimen.
| euroderf wrote:
| A friend brought back a big potted leafy-tropical plant from Ikea
| and it yielded a big centipede, about 4"/10cm. AFAIK large
| centipedes tend to be fairly poisonous, so yeah we did not adopt
| it as a pet.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Venomous?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Walmart was a red herring. Most interesting was how disrupting
| life via the lockdown led to a more mindful examination of what
| you've collected while careening through normal life led to a
| discovery a decade after collection.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| It probably came in on a truck
| joelfried wrote:
| An Augmented Reality Walmart? We're there already?
|
| Ohhhhh, that kind of AR!
| cptcobalt wrote:
| haha, I thought along the same lines, but more like it was a
| "Walmart" (used a colloquial term) for digitally scanned assets
| that can be used in AR projects
| stuff4ben wrote:
| My biggest takeaway from this article was how excited the
| processor and his students were, when during the Zoom online lab,
| they discovered that it was an extremely rare specimen. That
| giddiness and excitement of discovery and just nerding-out
| resonates with me.
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