| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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something new in my backyard. by back yard, i mean the thin strip of lawn that you can see from the back door of my apartment. anyway--i was out watering my basil plant when i noticed a mound of red dirt piled up next to a bit of monkey grass. it looks like an ant hill, but not as fine-grained. on closer inspection, i could see a small hole - a burrow - leading down under the tuft of grass. i had a feeling. i had hopes it was what i thought it was. so i waited. finally, a head poked out of the burrow. i really didn't know how big these animals were, so i thought it might be a small lizard. but then she came out all the way, i knew what it was: a cicada-killer wasp. i actually shot a little video of her on my ipad while she was tidying up the outside of the nest. this is the female of the species. she digs a burrow in the soil, usually of several chambers, to lay her eggs. but she does something extra. she goes out and finds a cicada (usually more than one), paralyzes it with her sting, then flies it back to the nest - carrying this thing that's twice her weight underneath her like cargo - and places it in one of the chambers. the cicada is paralyzed, but still alive. then she lays an egg in it. when the egg hatches, that's what the larval wasp feeds on until it's big enough to leave the nest. gruesome, i know. |
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out in the fields for a landscaping company. i know they're still around, but i never see them in the city. |
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see them all the time, even in the city. i think it has a bit to do with being in a wheelchair. my life is mostly in a paved world. |
I noticed it has a pimple like and tried to pop it out. It was a hard one. |
fire ants. stepping into to a nest and they swarm up your calf. i remember being at local lake and lying down on the beach for a nap. soon i was up and running into the lake because a swarm of fire ants were in my shirt and setting my torso on fire. but fire ant bites are nothing compared to chiggers. i know people freak out when i use that name (it's a corruption of "chigoe flea"), but that's what they're called. google "trombiculidae". |
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of austin, a very large bug shows up. the official name is greater arid-land katydid, but locally they're known as red-eyed devils. they look like huge grasshoppers, and they can grow to the size of small birds. somewhere on the web, there's a picture of one of them eating a lizard (gecko). i imagined passing out in a field on the farm, drunk and naked, and waking up to find one of those things were in the process of eating my penis. |
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