[e016] It's Hard to Scream with a Throat Full of Glass

After a satisfying nine hours of work yesterday, I needed a happy break from the tedium that had become photoshopping insects. EJ and I went to Safeway to pick up some milk for my necessary dose of coffee in the mornings, and while we wandered around wide-eyed as usual, I fell in love with a pair of sunglasses. I knew, right then and there, that they needed to glow in the dark. I also knew that I needed to paint something else on them, though I had no idea what.

It's now almost 4:30 in the morning and I'm still up, painting while going back and forth listening to Disma and Combichrist. I can't tell if I don't want to sleep, if I had too much caffeine earlier in the evening, or if my Muse is screaming so harshly in my ear that sleeping never stood a chance of meeting me tonight. Perhaps it's a mix of all three.

Some of my hair is UV reactant now, and I want these sunglasses to match that. I'm tempted to redo my nails again and make them glow in the dark. I'm not sure what spurred my recent obsession with things that glow in the night, but I'm going to take full advantage of it while it lasts.

As for the creature on my glasses? It's a glorious earwig, decidedly yesterday's insect of the day. The Order is Dermaptera, meaning "skin wing", and can be easily recognized by the pincer-like cerci at the bottom of the abdomen. Contrary to popular urban legend, they do not crawl into your ear and lay their eggs inside your brain - that would be, after all, a little bit too cool for reality. Rather, they eat plant matter, be it dead and decaying or live, though some species are predatory. They also look awesome painted on glow-in-the-dark sunglasses.

[e010] Raising Butterflies

About three weeks ago a coworker and I took off from work early to run around campus and collect insects. This is fast becoming a weekly hobby for me, even if the outside temperature does feel like an oven set to broil. Not only is jumping around in the bushes with a net a great way to meet interesting people, but I love looking at the diversity of the things we collect together. On this particular day that we collected, however, I did find something that didn't go straight into a vial of ethanol or a kill jar: two queen butterfly caterpillars.

At first I thought they might be monarch butterfly larvae, but after some fast google searches I found out the difference - the queen butterfly larvae have an extra row of "horns". I've never successfully raised butterflies on my own, so I was hesitant to take them in as a pet project. What changed my mind was that they were both already in their fifth instar (a time in-between molting and growing), which is their last instar before forming their chrysalis. The other turning point was that the bush I found them on was devoid of their normal food source, and both would have potentially died, anyway.


(The second caterpillar - note the three sets of horns and the small, yellow aphids on the branch)

The first caterpillar was larger and formed its chrysalis within a week. The second one, while in its last stage, still needed more food to grow. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any more living desert milkweed plans and thought for sure it was going to starve to death. It got smaller and smaller every day, up until I spotted three more bushes (covered in hemiptera such as aphids) by the light rail station. The diet of the queen butterfly caterpillar consists of milkweed leaves and blooms, so finding three healthy, blossoming plants made me super happy. Overnight the caterpillar seemed to double in size, and within a few days it also formed its chrysalis:



Yesterday night my fiancé and I noticed it starting to darken up, and this morning we awoke to a beautifully emerged butterfly.





Both butterflies were released in memory of my father- the first two days before Father's Day, and the second this afternoon. :)