mattiamenchetti's Favorites

so in this G. bicolor colony, I found a queen, quite distinct and weird with smaller size especially in the thorax, uniform brown color and etc. sounds like the typical temporary social parasite but I'm not really finding any reported cases

Check this out. Last year we saw a hummer get caught and eaten by a large mantis. The mantis was sitting on one of the feeders. I never heard of that happening before. We’ve been feeding hummers and have had dense populations of hummers at our feeders for 25 years now, and we had never seen this before last year. We have seen several instances of large female black-and-yellow garden spiders catching and eating hummers, but lots of mantises are around and so far as we've seen, they have never caught a hummer until last year.

Today a mantis caught a hummer and is eating it right now. The mantis with its prey is sitting on the persimmon bush/tree that is right by the feeders.

It looks like it could be the same mantis, but I googled mantis longevity and apparently a year is the maximum lifespan, so this has got to be a new mantis. It is possible, maybe even likely that this is the offspring of the huge female mantis that caught the bird last year, as she was the only big mantis in the area we ever saw. Maybe mantis catch hummers all the time, but we just don’t see them do it, and I think it is a pretty rare behavior. This one couldn’t have learned the behavior from a mother she never saw. Is there an inheritable bird-eating trait in that particular lineage? I guess it's a simpler hypothesis that it's a trait for quicker growth or larger than average size, and that just allows them to include hummers on the menu by late summer.

Scorpions with two metasomae (tails) are extremely rare, with one estimate I saw as one in every 5,000 specimens. This specimen is approximately 3cm long head to stinger and is being maintained in captivity to study its behavior.

I found this using a black light flashlight with BJ Stacey (@finatic) at the Carrie Nation Trailhead parking lot at Madera Canyon, Arizona.

Read a detailed account of this specimen's discovery and observation updates at the journal post linked below:
http://www.inaturalist.org/journal/jaykeller/7020-rare-arizona-bark-scorpion-with-two-metasomas-tails-and-stingers