Today I met this Phidippus putnami in my yard hanging from a tree and eating a GIANT meal she had caught! The insect shes eating is called a Giant Leaf-footed Bug, Acanthocephala declivis
(source: Sherwood & Hatchard, 2026. A case of gynandry and intersexuality in Phidippus regius C. L. Koch, 1846 (Araneae: Salticidae))
Sherwood and Hatchard describe the life history of a bilaterally gynandromorphic regal jumper in fascinating detail here, including some behavioral trials -- though near-perfectly split into male and female halves, overall this captive-bred regal exhibited more male-typical behaviors, though without much interest in courtship, and lived a two-year lifespan more expected from a female.
One of the things I really like about Tumblr is there seems to be a healthy appreciation for invertebrate biology here, which I don’t always see as much on other social media websites. Tumblr users overall seem to love bugs, and it’s important to me that every person who loves bugs knows the name Charles Henry Turner. If you’re not yet familiar with this man, I’m delighted to introduce you to one of the most remarkable minds ever born of this earth, and a true pioneer in the field of entomology and animal behavior.
Charles Turner was born in the United States just a few years after the end of the civil war. His brilliance was evident from the start, and after graduating valedictorian of his high school class he quickly went on to earn his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in short order. While in school, Turner’s relentless curiosity became his greatest advantage. He was drawn to and fascinated by topics that were largely ignored by modern science at the time, namely the cognitive behaviors of insects and other invertebrates. While many of his colleagues believed insects to be mindless automata acting on instinct alone, Turner felt deeply that the brains of these oft overlooked animals were far more complex than the scientific community suspected. He performed extensive experiments to test his theories and found overwhelming evidence of problem solving and individualism among organisms as small as ants and spiders.
By the time Turner earned his zoology pHD in 1907 he had published dozens of papers in highly esteemed journals and had even co-authored a book. It is likely that Turner was the first African American to earn a pHD from the University of Chicago. With such a sparkling academic reputation and enormous body of research, one would expect this candidate to have no issues obtaining a professorship at a prestigious school. Though by every right Turner should have been head of science department at a top university, the systemic racism that permeated academia meant that doors a white man would have walked through were locked and bolted shut for Charles Henry Turner.
Turner did not allow this prejudice to dim in any way his blindingly bright passion for knowledge. He took a job as a high school teacher, and continued to perform and publish research on his own all while he instilled his students with a love for zoology. He published more than 70 papers in extremely respected journals and he remained passionately curious for the entirety of his life. If I tried to list here all of the incredible discoveries Turner made in his lifetime it would take me days to sufficiently express the impact he had on the field of invertebrate behavior. His experiments were so ahead of their time that entomologists today marvel at his research and wonder how much more we would know if Turner’s work had been given the attention and respect of other scientists working at the time. Turner’s mind was about a century ahead of those entomological contemporaries who had no interest in giving him a seat at the table. His tombstone simply reads “scientist”
Like many people of color throughout history, Turner’s exceptional contributions to our world have been unfairly overlooked by many. His name has historically been left out of entomology textbooks and courses, despite laying down groundwork that is still used today. I really recommend that anyone interested in entomology or even biology in general read up on Charles Henry Turner and his works. This is an excellent article that discusses his many challenges and triumphs in the field.
why do americans think everyone on the internet lives in the same place as them. just saw someone say honeybees are "not native". not native to where????? the entire planet?????
saw a photo of garlic mustard somewhere on the internet once and americans in the comments were like "fun fact this plant is invasive so you should definitely tear out any you see, WITH THE ROOTS so it won't spread!" whole fucking time i'm living in garlic mustard native range. i don't think i will be doing that.
This drives me absolutely up the wall in r/birdfeeding. Every time there's a picture of a house sparrow, the entire comments are filled with americans talking about them being invasive and how they should be basically killed on sight. But often OP has not provided a location, and house sparrows have a HUGE native range. Here in the UK they're not only native birds, they're on the decline, they need our help and protection.
Hrmm, well there’s plenty to choose from but I’m going to go with the lifecycles of the telephone-pole beetle, Micromalthus debilis. They’re a tiny little beetle, the larvae of which live in rotting hardwood and are rarely seen because only the adults leave the wood and most of them never become adults. Why? Well because they do things weird.
Almost every single larva is female, and after two moults becomes reproductively mature, while still a larva. These give live birth to more female larvae through parthenogenesis. That’s it, they’re larvae that give birth to more larvae, all female parthenogenic species of insect aren’t exactly super uncommon though. However, while larviform adult females are kinda common in beetles, these are not that, they’re straight up larvae, no pupation involved.
Things change though when you turn up the heat. See, when conditions get way too hot most of them will die, however some of the second instar larvae, instead of turning into reproductive larvae, pupate and turn into adult female beetles. Some of the reproductive third instar larvae though produce an egg, which they do not lay nor give live birth to. Instead this develops inside her and eats her from the inside out, before pupating and becoming an adult male.
This in itself is weird but still not exactly unheard of in insects, the little freaks. Nah where this gets weird as shit is that, as far as we can tell, this is an error that shouldn’t happen anymore. Because, at least according to the one paper that really studied this (though I’ve a few thoughts in the read more), these adults are broken. They hatch out, leave the log, mate and…oh that’s it. They’re not actually able to breed. They show mating behaviours, complex mate competition and choice, dispersal behaviour as you might expect, but these adults don’t actually have functioning reproductive organs. The males are not capable of fertilising anything, the females do not produce eggs.
They’re evolutionary ghosts, a remnant of a past when under conditions of stress they could produce adults that left the log, mated and colonised new wood.
I love this beautiful and extremely weird beetle! This family has preserved the characteristics most ancestral to all living beetles. We had beetles that looked like this back when the griffenfly (two-foot-long relative of dragonflies) still flew the Earth!
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