Circus of the Spineless #45

Welcome to the 45th installment of the Circus of the Spineless Blog Carnival.

The previous installment of this panoply of boneless metazoans was at Marmorkrebs, and the next edition will be at Life Photo Meme. Please check with the carnival's home for information on how to submit your spineless blog posts.

Trees, Plants and More: Scale Insect Infestation

The scale insect, which has struck all over the city seems to have found its way here as well. It secretes honeydew that attracts ants. Indeed, i saw many big black ones right next to the scale insects.

National Park Service: Native and Exotic Invasive Forest Pests and Pathogens

A combination of data mining and field work will contribute to wide scale and multiagency efforts at understanding and combating the critical threat IFPs pose to our native resources.

Birder's Lounge: Singin' a Song of Spiders

I've been watching a couple of spiders in my native plant garden since late August. I can't say with complete certainty, but I'm hoping this photo shows the next generation of the spider families that have been thriving in my Flame Acanthus

Ecographica: The Tactics of an Egg Tending Lynx

While stomping through a northwest Florida flatwoods community earlier this week, I took pause to admire a couple of swamp sunflowers

A Blog Around the Clock: Spider and Fly

...This spider lives on his desk. He waited several days for the spider to catch a fly and then took this picture...

Sciblogs: Sunday spinelessness

~ A montage ~

Neurodojo: Let your neurons relax, the predators are gone!

...the prediction from evolutionary theory is that in a situation with no bats, you would expect there to be reduced selection pressure to maintain the neurons' sensitivity to high-frequency, bat-like sounds...

Neurodojo: You smell like chicken (to a mosquito)

Although swine flu is the virus of the year, there are plenty of other viruses out there, like West Nile virus. This new paper looks at the interplay between the virus, birds, humans, and the sensory systems of mosquitoes.

Anybody Seen my Focus?: False Katydid: Scudder's Bush Katydid (Scudderia sp.)

This Scudder's Bush Katydid is one of the few larger insects at home now. It was hanging out in the butterfly bush last weekend.

National Park Service: Cave Crickets

The population structure and dynamics of Ceuthophilus spp. and Hadenoecus spp. may be significant to resource managers of government land holdings because in caves without large bat colonies these genera are typically the primary conduits for the regular input of organic matter into the subsurface habitat.

Kind of Curious: That's a Gross Fly (Phorid Fly)

...intrepid entomologists have discovered that fire ants have a natural enemy in the phorid fly, specifically the genus Pseudacteon....

Wild about Ants: Ants and Salt

When my very good friend Deb Sparrow sent me this photograph of a harvester ant collecting a piece of a blue corn chip that had fallen from her lunch, I immediately took it at face value. A harvester ant carrying a corn chip seems like an obvious combination. After some research, however...

A DC Birding Blog: Celery Leaftier

...also known as a Greenhouse Leaftier. Moths of this species are very tiny; this one was between 10 and 20mm long.

Journowl: A Silent Mass Extinction

Who cares about insects? Aren't they just agricultural pests, household nuisances, and harborers of disease?

10,000 Birds: Butterflies and Moths of Jamaica

Jamaica offers predictably potent butterfly watching. For example, the island is swell for swallowtail butterflies, with a number of endemics including the largest swallowtail in the Americas...

Xenogere: Harvestman

What's this lurking in the grass? With all those spindly legs holding up a body that seems too heavy for such frail appendages, of course it's a harvestman...

Dave Ingram's Natural History Blog: Jingle Shells

One of the treasures that we discovered on the beach (in addition to two very dead octopuses) was a near perfect Jingle Shell (Pododesmus macrochisma). This native "rock oyster" attaches itself to the rocky bottom of the ocean with a short, thick byssus...

Wanderin' Weeta: The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out ...

I have at least three fair-sized polychaetes, probably sea nymphs, living in the sand at the bottom of the aquarium.

Wanderin' Weeta: Four and twenty mussels ...

Laurie suggested I remove the flatworm from the aquarium. So, for the third time running, I emptied the tank. This time, I sifted the sand, counted all the live critters I found, removed empty shells. I found only one flatworm.

Beetles In the Bush: Anatomy of a Tiger Beetle Larva

Despite its small size and urban surroundings, the narrow strip of coastal scrub and saltwater marsh along the intracoastal waterway behind my sister-in-law's condominium boasted a robust population of what I took to be a single tiger beetle species.