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#pest species
vanishingsydney · 2 years
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The folks who brought "Pest Care" to the Inner West - revealed: Flora, and collaborators, Crelo & Sleaze. Nobody knows who these people are, or ever seen them at work. The signature ant in various forms has been crawling up and hanging around on walls for a several years now. Here's just some of them, dating from last week back to August 2019, in no particular order. Canterbury, Enmore, Hurlstone Park, Leichhardt, Newtown, Petersham, Stanmore.
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drhoz · 8 months
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#1984 - Rattus rattus - Black Rat
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The name of the blog might be Things I Get To ID At Work, and my work might be pest control, but the work I actually do is almost entirely termite prevention (and there’s only two or three species that are actually threats to buildings in Western Australia). Nearly everything else I see while’s out or about, or that people have sent me for ID. 
That said, I DO occasionally see well known pest species like this one, and used to have to put baits in roof cavities.
The Black Rat, or Roof Rat, or Ship Rat, is a now cosmopolitan species that probably originated in the Indian subcontinent, and subsequently spread along trade routes and in ships. They very likely arrived in Australia on the First Fleet, but are now found in all coastal regions here, both in cites and adjacent bushland. They’re extremely adaptable, feeding on a very wide range or food, and avoid poisoning by only eating a little of each when its available. If one kind of food such as bamboo fruit becomes available in superabundance, rat populations can explode.
Despite the common name, they are also often grey or brown, or even greenish.
Notoriously, black rats and their fleas were a vector for Bubonic Plague during the Black Death, but it now seems likely that most transmission outside of ports and trade centres was human-to-human. That said, black rats are also reservoirs for typhus, leptospirosis, toxoplasmosis, trichinosis, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Corynebacterium kutsheri, Bacillus piliformis, Pasteurella pneumotropica, and Streptobacillus moniliformis, among others.
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I made a little friend last night
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custardfist · 2 years
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SWEET INFESTATION
A few fruit flies in the kitchen shouldn't be a problem, right? 🙄
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Camo-Crops Bamboozle Pests
A trial being carried out in Wymondham, Norfolk is utilising food dyes in the "camouflage" of crops in an attempt to prevent pests from reducing yield. It is hoped that if the trial is successful, the use of so called "Camo-Crops" will prevent the use of pesticides.
The experiments, being carried out on sugar beet crops, aim to deter aphids from feeding on the plants whilst they migrate during the spring. Aphids use the contrast of the colour of the plant against the soil in order to detect a potential food source.
In a bad year, pests can reduce crop yield by 50%, and so far results have been promising, but whether this year's yield has been successfully increased won't be evident until the harvest.
Source: BBC News
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dawnleaf37 · 26 days
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swap au phighting regretevator except we don’t swap them with each other normally and we literally just drop spud in phighting and see what happens
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dizzybizz · 11 months
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Sampo as the met gala cockroach (pwease)
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RIP sampo, you will not be missed 🙏🙏🙏 we're glad you're gone to be completely honest
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hussyknee · 9 months
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"you can't pick most trans men out of a lesbian lineup" have you ever like. met a post transition trans man?? do you not see the transphobia in saying that most trans men just look like masculine women? this isn't even about transmasc lesbians, idgaf how somebody wants to identify but goddamn that's a rude as hell thing to say. like if you reverse it with "you can't pick most trans women out of a lineup of gay men" like obviously theres a problem there.
The majority of trans men and women aren't transitioned. A pre-transition trans woman who doesn't dress any differently than a cis man looks like a man and male-attracted people will be attracted to her! Why the fuck do you think so many marriages both het and gay break up when trans people first assumed to be cis begin to transition?? It's also why most trans women first find community among gay men, why both transvestites and trans people formed the first trans communities to the point that we can't even tell whether Marsha P. Johnson was transgender and why people assumed Storme DeLarverie was a trans masc before finding out that he was a he/him cis female lesbian. But Storme presented and acted like a gentleman, the same way the MAJORITY OF TRANS MASCS DO. This is WHY ENFORCING A GENDER BINARY IN QUEER SPACES HURTS TRANS FOLK THE MOST.
ALSO!!! Even transitioned trans men can still choose to look like women! There's lots of mascs whose gender expression is "boy who looks like a girl". How the fuck are you going to tell whether someone is a pre-op trans masc or a butch cis lesbian?? Or pre-op trans masc who presents femme or cis femme lesbian or a femme post-op trans woman??? Do you submit a questionnaire about their gender identity before feeling attracted to the presentation and aesthetic??
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demi-shoggoth · 1 year
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2023 Reading Log pt. 4
March was hard for me, both in terms of my personal life and in terms of my reading. I started a whole bunch of books that I haven't finished. Some of them I intend to come back to (two monster books, one for RPGs and one reference book). The ones I intentionally gave up on are listed here, as well as the whys of why I gave up on them.
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16. Bestiarium Greenlandica, edited by Maria Bach Kreutzmann. Recommended to me a while ago by @abominationimperatrixx, but I have only been able to get a copy recently. This is the second edition, put out by Eye of Newt Press, which seems to specialize in publishing monster books with previously limited print runs (they also have an edition of Welsh Monsters and Mythical Beasts by C G J Ellis, for example). This book is an A-Z look at mythical creatures from Greenland, which entails a peek at traditional Thule culture. Anggakutt (the equivalent of shamans) use various monstrous spirits to guide them through the spiritual realm and work wonders for them, and these have to be negotiated with or even battled in order to recruit them. So there’s plenty of monsters, many of which are very obscure in English language sources, or confused with other creatures from other Inuit cultures. The book has illustrations for most of the monsters, some line drawings and some full color paintings. All of the art is great, and it doesn’t shy away from the sex and violence in the myths. So a trigger warning is at play if dead and decaying fetus monsters, ghouls with giant penises, or all manner of grotesque facial features are not your thing. But if you’re okay with those, this book is highly recommended.
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17.  Bog Bodies Uncovered by Miranda Aldhouse-Green. This book looks at the various bodies that have been discovered in peat bogs throughout northern Europe, and is primarily concerned with why these people were killed and placed in the bog. After a discussion of the history of finding bog bodies, and about the nature of bogs and how the tannins contribute to preservation, the book is primarily a forensic investigation. Its ultimate thesis is that most of the bog bodies represent intentional human sacrifices by Celtic and Germanic people. The author does a good job of supporting that claim, although her extrapolations and speculations go a little far for my taste (especially when she conjectures that the Lindow Man was sacrificed because of a specific battle written about by the Romans). The book features a mix of black and white photos and illustrations with color plates, which is always appreciated for a book about physical artifacts.
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17a. Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. I gave up on this one around the halfway point—much longer than I typically go into a book I decide not to finish. That’s because I really wanted to like this one, but couldn’t. The subject is how queer history has often been sanitized and gay historical figures made saintly, when in reality there were plenty of unremarkable and some downright evil gay people as well. The book also wants to aim a giant fuck you at respectability politics, arguing for radical queer liberation and that the current state of gay representation is rooted in capitalism and patriarchy. It also also wants to make snarky quips about gay kings and military leaders—this is a very distant priority. I agree with the book’s politics in the broad sense, and there’s just enough quips and history to have kept me interested this long, but the overall feel of the book is very preachy, and not actually that interested in the lives of the individual subjects. There are ways to make a book both stridently anti-capitalist and an entertaining read, and this one fails.
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17b. How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler. I stopped this one a few pages into the second chapter. I was looking for a book about marine life and fun facts, and this has that, but is interwoven with personal memoir and is much heavier on the memoir. The first chapter is about how goldfish are stunted in fishbowls, but can grow to enormous sizes in the wild and can act as an invasive species. And this is contrasted with the author feeling stifled by small town life and realizing that they’re queer upon growing up. That was fine, but the second chapter draws connections between how mother octopuses starve themselves watching over eggs, and the generational eating disorders that the author and their mother dealt with. My mood couldn’t handle that. Maybe I’ll come back to this book when I’m in a more secure mental place, but I didn’t feel like crying while reading again. Not for a while—I think my allotment is one sad book a year.
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18. Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains by Bethany Brookshire. This feels like a companion volume to Mary Roach’s Fuzz. Both books are about how humans behave when animals get in their way, but Fuzz deals more with the humans and Pests deals more with the animals. There’s lots of evolution and ecology material here, including very recent research, like the possible link between the evolution of house mice and the contents of their gut flora, and a modern look at how Australia’s ecosystems are reacting to and coping with the introduction of cane toads. This book is much more the balance of science to personal experience that I was looking for right now, and I had a good time with this one.
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19. Ancient Sea Reptiles by Darren Naish. I’ve been looking forward to this book since it was first announced, so I’m happy to report that it’s as good as I was hoping. The book discusses Mesozoic marine reptiles (with some guest appearances from Permian taxa, like mesosaurs). First, it goes through the history of their discovery and some overview of their anatomy, physiology and evolutionary relationships. Then, it goes through the clades. Ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, marine crocodiles and sea turtles get their own chapter, and all the other groups, from weird Triassic one-offs to sea snakes, are compiled into a single chapter. Naish is one of my favorite science writers, as he combines a phylogeny-centric approach for an appreciation of the novelties and weirdness of specific genera. I would love it if he wrote a similar book about another group for which books for educated laypeople are thin on the ground, like stem crocodiles or non-mammalian synapsids.
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20. Effin’ Birds by Aaron Reynolds. This is the book form of a Twitter feed, which I appreciate from a historical perspective. The feed, and the book, have two main jokes. One, pictures of birds with profanity as captions. Two, faux descriptions of bird behavior and habitats that are jokes about common types of unpleasant people, or people who avoid unpleasant people. I got a few laughs out of it, but I’m glad that I got this book from a library and would not pay money for it. The funniest thing about this book to me is that that selfsame library put it with the books about bird biology and field guides, when there is zero informational content in this book, combined with the book itself making a joke about how you’d never find this book in a library.
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simmonsized · 5 months
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got to draw insects for my art and ecology class and there is a genus of butterflies called anteros, which is the greek god of requited love, and i literally almost cried but didn't because there were other people in the room and anyway i just love how ridiculous some names of things are sometimes it is beautiful sometimes it is silly but it is usually always fun
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thebonewitch · 1 year
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There are reindeer in Alaska tho right? 😓
I looked it up and yes you are correct!
https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=484#:~:text=cousins%20to%20caribou.-,There%20are%20about%2018%2C000%20reindeer%20in%20Alaska%2C%20and%20about%2012%2C000,found%20on%20Nunivak%20Island%2C%20St.
Please forgive the link formatting as I am doing this on my phone. Yes, apparently Alaska has reindeer, which I did not know! North America also has caribou, elk, moose, pronghorn, and SO MANY varieties of white-tailed deer, as well as mule deer. That's just off the top of my head, there may well be even more secret deer that remain unknown to me 👀
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drhoz · 1 year
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#1882 - Closterotomus norwegicus - Potato Mirid
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Was just leaving a rural job when this perfect earthling flew through the window and hung around long enough to get a few photos. 
The AgDept tells me that this species was introduced from Europe or Siberia at least 40 years ago, but is rarely reported. While it’s best known as minor pest of potatoes, it also feeds on clover, carrot, chrysanthemums, and other plants, some of which presumably don’t start with C. It’s not like insects can spell, with the possible exception of bees. 
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k4saneterritory · 10 months
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found a cool non-wikia (that site with the ad-filled poorly cited fandom wikis for EVERYTHING) pjsekai fandom wiki site.
please use it and rb this post. i hate the big Fandom Wiki pages.
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moss-and-marimos · 9 months
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I hate when people shit talk wasps and call them useless and say they want to kill them and “they dont even do anything” and stuff like you really just do not know anything about wasps at all 
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I mentioned the other day doing some deep dives on pesticide impacts. Here's some links to some cool studies I found, I chose links that are less scientific-study sounding for accessibility. The first one has a link to the actual study embedded, and I think is one of the most important since it connects pesticide usage to decreased crop yields.
Originally pesticides with higher toxicity got a lot of backlash for their MUCH understated impacts on honeybees (as they should), but I really appreciate how these highlight other species which are equally important ecologically and economically in different roles.
We're seeing a massive decline in insects in recent years. And its causing a rise in pest species of insects, which in turn leads to increased insecticide usage. If the cycle can be broken and insects in general are allowed to recover, I think many more farmers could significantly reduce insecticide usage because biological pest control would become a more robust option. But there's such a culture of taking the easy way out and decimating insects in fields to protect profits, that so many people don't think about the wider impacts on local environments and other species life cycles. And in turn don't think about how their actions could be negatively impacting their economic situation.
Also implicated in this is the over use of herbicide which has significantly reduced the biodiversity surrounding farm edges. Now more than ever farm edges host invasive and higher populations of weedy pest plants because they have 1) gained herbicide resistance from overspraying and 2) they face reduced competition because native and beneficial plants have been wiped out. The weeds in turn can infest farm fields easier due to proximity and abundance at the edges. And this all of course has a massive impact on insects, as many don't have habitats to live and feed like in the past.
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thethingything · 15 days
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hi! do you have a favorite kind of bug? if so, what is it?
I have several that I really like so I'm gonna make a list of them! they're not really in any particular order, they're just kind of a group of favourites. I think this is gonna be mostly lepidoptera lol.
1. Sphingidae just in general, but especially Elephant Hawkmoths, Death's Head Hawkmoths, and the Pacific Green Sphinx. the two brown caterpillars we had last year were Elephant Hawkmoths and I still can't believe we actually got to raise some
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(image sources: Elephant Hawkmoth, Death's Head Hawkmoth, Pacific Green Sphinx)
2. Lycaenidae are also one where it's just a whole family of lepidoptera we like (a friend mentioned them and we looked them up and were like "oh they're amazing" and they quickly became a favourite). I especially like the subfamily Polyommatinae (the Blues), with some of my favourites being the Friday's Blue, Melissa Blue, Holly Blue, and Western Pygmy-Blue. a lot of them have really interesting interactions with ants, such as relying on them for protection, but I know at least one species (the Large Blue) actually eats ants as a caterpillar
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(image sources: Friday's Blue, Melissa Blue, Holly Blue, Western Pygmy-Blue)
3. Hesperiidae, also known as skippers, are another one where I love them just in general but I think the Fiery Skipper is probably one of my favourites. they're just very cute and they kind of remind me of hawkmoths but they're in the superfamily Papilionoidea so they're actually a type of butterfly
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(image source)
4. the Sargasso Emerald is one of my favourites just because I think it's a cool little dude. look at this funky guy
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(image source)
5. the Vapourer/Rusty Tussock is another one of the species we raised last year and I didn't know much about them before raising one but they have very distinctive looking caterpillars and the adults are sexually dimorphic to the point of looking like completely different species. the caterpillars are known to eat a huge variety of plants which is really convenient when it comes to raising them. I also love tussock caterpillars in general because they're all so fluffy and funky looking
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(image sources: male Vapourer, female Vapourer, caterpillar)
6. I feel like I should include cicadas on the list because I just think they're really cool and I'm fascinated by periodical cicadas especially
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(image sources: aberrant Cassin's 17-year Cicada, Common Cicada)
7. given that we're called the Ant System I think I'm contractually obligated to include at least one ant and I want to introduce everyone to the absolute little weirdos that are honeypot ants. some members of the colony store food in their abdomens and then regurgitate that for the other ants when needed. I think they're just fascinating little guys
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(image sources: Mexican Honeypot Ants, Myrmecocystus)
8. I almost forgot to include these little guys but carpet beetles are going on the list because I see them a lot and I think they're pretty cute little guys
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(image sources: adults, larva)
anyway I feel like this is a good list but I've probably also missed so many species that I absolutely adore and I keep stumbling across new ones that are really cool.
I've also been fixating on aberrant lepidoptera recently which isn't really a favourite kind of insect so much as just me being fascinated by all the ones where the colours or patterns are different to what you'd expect for that species
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