Rest Day! St Davids Aug 5

Rest day today spent mostly at Dr. Beynon's Bug Farm.  It is right up there with the Swannery at Abbotsbury and the Sub Tropical Gardens, also at Abbotsbury as best-rest-day-things-to-do.  (Comment: boat rides to see sea life and birds might rank high on the list, but they have been rained out, so can't get a vote.) 

 The facts presented below, just a few of the many you would read about if you went your very own self, are taken from the exhibits.  All credit goes to the writers and researchers!  [My comments are in square brackets.] Oh, and you should know that they know that "data" takes a plural verb.  For this alone, they get stars!

Some female grasshoppers and many other insects can taste with their ovipositors (egg laying tubes).  By doing this, they make sure that they lay their eggs in the tastiest, most nutritious bit of a plant for their offspring to feed on when they hatch out.

[Such a thoughtful mama]:

The male burying beetle Nicrophorus investigator, also calla sexton (gravedigger beetle), can locate the decaying corpse of a small animal by smelling it with its antennae.  He flies to the corpse, climbs on it, sticks his abdomen up in the air and releases a pheromone which calls in female burying beetles.  When his partner arrives, the two beetles work together to strip the corpse of hair or feathers. Next they embalm it with saliva and finally bury it underground.  Once [the corpse is] buried, the female lays eggs next to the corpse and waits with them until they hatch into larvae.  She then calls her larvae to the corpse and feeds them until they are big enough to feed themselves.

Spiders are extremely sensitive to touch.  Web-spinning species have hairs all over their bodies which allow them to distinguish between different things hitting their webs.  It is  quite useful being able to tell the difference between a fly (a safe supper), a honeybee (a dangerous meal) or another spider (a potential mate or dinner, depending on the day!)

Bees are particularly good at seeing UV light, so flowers look very different to them than they do to us.  Bees are likely to see landing strips on flowers that are only visible to them.  These landing strips guide them in towards the pollen and nectar in the center of the flower.

 If you have ever accidentally squashed a house fly Musca domestica or a bluebottle fly Calliphora sp., the red stain produced isn't its blood; it is the red pigment from its eyes. [Ewww, who knew?]

Male scorpionflies often steal an insect from a spider's web and then present a female with the dead insect prior to mating.  The gift distracts the female during copulation but also provides her with a nutritional boost at a vital time.  It's a win win situation:

If you book an up-close session, you can have Dave, a big fat Madagascar cockroach, crawl on you:

And stick insects, too [And they really are sticky]:

 But this beetle larva (?) is only for showing.  And you know what?  It doesn't use its wee little legs while it is the larval stage; it stays on its back and just eats for many months:

This is a must visit site!

The end!