Bat Fossen

New "quick" insect doodle: a shore bug, Saldula sp. It's drawn from a specimen photo, which is why it only has 3 legs... #entomology

Anyway, here's a little weevil from my backyard that I think looks cool. it even has a cool name: Smicronyx.

A very selfish reason I hope the U.S. sees a massive blue wave in the upcoming election is that MAYBE I'll see slightly fewer posts referring to a country of over 300 million people as if we're a monoculture composed of stinking coils of brain-dead dog shit.

Sorry, weird AI bot, you get a nice block from me!

OK, now it's our turn! Crush all the fucking fascists!

The double-shot of flu and COViD vaccines kicked my ass yesterday. Felt a bit better today, so I did some chores, got groceries, and made sure my insect collection drawers were protected against carpet beetles for another few months. Productivity!

FINISHED!!!

New girl at work: "Your voice sounds like it's from a video game." Me: "It is!" *she giggles, unaware that I'm not joking* Anyway, check out Ghost Hunter Simulator from @prime8.games, on sale now just in time for Halloween!

A good demonstration of how absurdly small insects can get. I was looking at a relatively small (2.5 mm) pteromalid wasp and noticed something stuck to its wing. It was an even smaller wasp.

Another test drawing, this time of a small wasp (Pemphredon sp.)

New MST3K on Friday!!!

More like MIS-Anthropic AI, right? Right? Surely I must be the first person to think of this. 🤣

I must be the only person on the planet who has zero interest in seeing YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING.

I should probably be drawing something, or playing WoW, or pinning/photographing some insects, but depression has its claws in my brain tonight so I think I'll just play some TV episodes and start the 4-hour process of falling asleep.

Take a look at this tiny beetle, one of my last black light collections of the year! #entomology

Take a look at this tiny beetle, one of my last black light collections of the year! #entomology

I really wish I could just fall asleep instead of spending 3-4 hours each night in absolute misery until my body and brain give up out of sheer exhaustion and finally lapse into fitful slumber. I dread the end of each evening because I know I'm going to go through hell every night.

Reposting because I like these photos.

Any good entomologists (good = better than me, which is a pretty easy bar to surmount) want to go through a couple of drawers of bees and flies and tell me what the hell they are? Because I sure can't figure most of them out!

The funny thing about dermestids (carpet beetles) is that while they're household pests and the absolute bane of an entomologist's collection, I can never totally eliminate them because they occur naturally in my back yard. They seem to love hanging out on my native Ceanothus shrubs!

I also put my black light collecting setup away for the season. It's probably warm enough to use it for a few more weeks, but I have a massive curation and photography backlog and I found a dermestid-eaten specimen a few days ago so I can't just leave things sitting out any more.

I got a massive amount of yard and house work done today, so now I'll reward myself by... well, actually, I don't know how to reward myself so maybe I should do some more work.

I see we're having a debate about whether it's okay to go back to "X," the site owned by a trillionaire fascist who is currently bankrolling the GOP's midterm, throttled Ukraine's war effort, and still winkingly allows vast amounts of CSAM on his service Answer: No, what the fuck is wrong with you

Evil Dead for Tax Purposes

The weird thing about taking a Thursday off from work is that it FEELS like tomorrow should be Monday but it's actually Friday. So I've got that going for me, at least!

You’re invited to discover all about fireflies, straight from the experts! Join us this month for a free, three-day virtual symposium on firefly research and conservation in the USA and Canada! 🪲💡 🗓️Oct 27-29 at 9am PT / 12pm ET 🔗Register for this free event: lp.constantcontactpages.com/cu/6GFrtHL

Can I get a fish expert, either illustrator, scientist, or outdoors person familiar with anatomy who I can email my sketch of a Sacramento perch to check the gill cover/facial anatomy of art I’m doing for park signage? Fish are still a new-ish subject for me and I need fresh eyes plz. #SciArt 🐟

Please pause your scroll for this spectacular weevil. You're looking at one of the first two iNaturalist records of Systaltocerus platyrhinus, shared just in the last month!

Curious what the intersection of "using references is cheating/copying/stealing" and "using AI is NOT cheating/copying/stealing" looks like. Curious in a somewhat morbid way, at least.