A Texas "moth man" photographed 550 species in his own yard

I read somewhere that there can be over 10 billion virus particles in a liter of sea water. There's no way we know everything in there. It's easier to see and count larger things, but we're really just point sampling a HUGE space when it comes to looking at living creatures.

And life is kind of a continuum - it's not like one day a neandrathal gave birth to a human and that was that - each new generation is a new level of the tree evolving in a certain direction and slightly different than anything that came before it.

It was cruising around at dusk feeding on nectar.

We get the odd Hercules moth in our backyard. Doesn't look anything like a bird close up, but it's so massive that when they get stuck in the house your first thought is that it's a bird or bat.

Another cool thing we get is jumping spiders that imitate ants so they can hunt them - both green ants (an endemic weaver ant we get here) and another large metallic silver ant species I don't know a lot about. The spiders share the colouring of each species and walk backwards amongst them - their walking style changes and the abdomen looks like the head of the ant. They're rare, I've only observed them a couple of times over the years here, but it's wild to watch them do their thing.

If you find hornworms eating your tomatoes you may be tempted to squash them. Instead of doing that you can remove them and put them to work on any other plant in the Solanacea family like peppers, potatoes, eggplants, or better yet put them on some jimsonweed, or one of the other weeds in the nightshade (Solanacea) family or some of the nettles.

-- Apologies to Fred Brooks

It's close, but it's not quite there [1].

0: https://www.mothmanmuseum.com/

1: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/united-sta...

Interestingly I know two people who are absolutely terrified of moths and cannot stand to even be in the same room.

Hotter than normally springs and falls don't help either; the moth thrives in the warmer weather and can go through as many as four cycles (generations) during a single year.

https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/terrestrial/invertebrate...

https://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant-pests-diseases/box-tree-mot...

On tropical ones the number should be much, much higher.

The other day I spent 4 hours recording baby coho salmon in disconnected pools along a creek bed. Coho have been researched enough so I’m not doing anything particularly important, but in the process I learned some really cool stuff:

- The creek bed is absolutely filled with sculpins. A pool perhaps 3 inches deep and 3 feet in diameter could contain over a dozen of them

- Tiny puddles containing perhaps 500ml of water contained half a dozen fish or so; typically sculpins and sticklebacks but occasionally coho fry as well

- As the water levels were lowering, dozens of huge ravens were staked out and waiting for stranded fish. I returned days later and sure enough, every dried body of water had been picked clean

- The sheer number of nymphs, larvae, and adult arthropods was staggering once I looked closely

- Under every rock on the dried creek bed I could find everything from developing insects to animals like frogs hiding out

The amount of life far exceeded what I expected. And the diversity of life from micro to macro was also amazing. To think the creek bed extends several kilometres and it’s essentially all like this for most of it (though much drier higher up). I can’t wait to explore it more. I’m mostly curious how the coho will manage before rains return, and at this point it looks pretty grim. Some pools with at least 100 individuals will almost certainly be okay, but many more smaller pools containing dozens of fish are rapidly draining. The ravens are having an easy summer, I think.

edit: I have some videos and photos here https://steve-adams.me/coho/ (I don't normally share what I record but recently decided I might as well, because I wish more people did).

They climb grasses to take advantage of the cooling effect of the breeze, search protection on numbers and jail itselves on a protective membrane to sleep during the hotter days.

Probably depends a lot on where you live. I've lived in several US states and climates and snails were fairly common in most of them, of a variety of species.

I was visiting Irvine California once. I was working back from work around sunset and on the sidewalk under a streetlight were hundreds of snails. I've never seen them congregate like that before.