#curiumworks

[curium-killedthecat]

look at this beautiful emerald jewel wasp - or Ampulex compressa. (order Hymenoptera and family Ampulicidae)

also called the emerald cockroach wasp, it’s found in tropical regions like africa and south asia - and is known for its freaky reproductive behaviour. no, not freaky in that way.

this wasp preys on cockroaches, quite literally hypnotizing them into a state of hypokenesia - the general slowing of movements. after this, the cockroach is led to the wasps burrow for its larvae to feed on its LIVE BODY.

the wasp is referred to as a parasitoid and the cockroach is its host - upon encountering it, the wasp will attack the roach and this attack consists of two stings:

the first is a swift sting in the thorax (the area between neck and abdomen) which leads to transient paralysis of the prothoracic legs. these are the front legs closest to the thorax.

the second sting is directed to the head cavity - targeting the subesophageal ganglion in the brain. this region controls the movement and escape reflexes of the roach - making it no longer feel the need to escape.

this second head sting is extremely precise - the wasp is able to detect the location of the cephalic ganglia (a region which encompasses the subesophageal ganglion) through neural signals in its stinger. CRAZY!

the second sting makes the paritisation process easier for the wasp by rendering the roach submissive to manipulation by the wasp, docile and sluggish (due to hypokinesia).

dragging it to it's burrow using the anntenae as a sort of leash, the wasp lays a single egg on the roach's abdomen and seals it inside - remember, the cockroach is still alive but completely passive. once the larvae hatch after a few days, they start to eat the cockroach from the inside out, starting with non-essential organs to keep it alive as long as possible.

it has also been shown that the A. compressa larvae secrete antiomicrobial compounds into the cockroach as it is being eaten to santitise and perhaps preserve the host.

this wasp looks sick, but its intentions might be even sicker.

[curium-killedthecat]

HAPPY PI DAY!!

yes, it is finally that time of year, where 3.14 is put into date form - it is 03.14.2025! (or 14.03.2025 if you’re european like me)

i have had to physically stop myself from telling everybody i know, but on the hellsite i must ramble: a pi fact especially for pi day!

did you know bees use pi to store their honey?

beehives are made of hexagonal cells because hexagons are the most efficient shape for storing honey, while using the least wax.

the Honeycomb Conjecture by Thomas Hales states that a regular hexagonal grid (honeycomb) has the least total perimeter when dividing a plane into regions of equal area.

building using squares or triangles require more wax for the bees, and circles would leave gaps when storing honey.

hexagons naturally fit together perfectly, making the most efficient beehive.

the best way to pack circles together is also in a hexagonal pattern (if you can’t tell, i love mathematical packing problems), called the Kepler Conjecture when in a sphere but this is how it looks in 2D circles as shown below:

look at the gaps! look at how they disappear!

the density of an optimal circle packing is given by pi, as pi is included in the area of a circle - meaning bees naturally evolved to use pi in one of the most efficient engineering applications centuries before we even knew what it was!

it’s days like these that remind me without pi, circles would just be… pointless…

[curium-killedthecat]

what's your favorite scientific tidbit of knowledge?

MYCORRHIZAL NETWORKS!!! i am TIRED of hearing that plants are the worst part of biology from my peers because there is so much to them, and i genuinely find them more interesting than humans because of things like these.

yes, plants CAN talk! obviously, fungi are playing the important role of connecting the plants and trees together, kind of like a telephone wire system or plant internet - i heard someone call it a wood-wide web!

mycelium are tiny threads in the soil part of the bigger fungal organism, kind of like the roots of plants, but on a microscopic level (although some can be of great size!). each branching filament is called a hypha. hyphae will penetrate into the cell wall (not entering into the membrane) of tree and plant roots to allow - communication!

the motivation for fungi to establish these connections is what i like to think of as commission - they get around 10 - 30% of the output, whether this be carbon or sugars. and the plants get to share their own resources with each other, often older and bigger trees will help the younger recently established plants who may not be able to get as much sunlight.

this intensifies competition between plants of the same species, while alleviating competition between plants between species by promoting smaller/less adapted competitors - thus increasing biodiversity!

just because trees don't talk to you, doesn't mean they aren't talking to each other! i like the idea of a community not only in us humans or animals, but plants, with an older, more 'knowledgable' tree passing on resources to the younglings, like a grandmother telling bedtime stories to a young child.

[curium-killedthecat]

i learned this fact a while ago, and it’s still one of those good ones i go back to and think about:

if you took all the matter in the universe (that is estimated to exist) and turned it into a black hole, the size of that black hole’s event horizon would be the size of..

our observable universe.

yep, that’s right. this is because the schwarzchild radius - that is, the radius of an event horizon of a black hole - is proportional to is mass. so we can figure out how large an event horizon would be using its mass - thanks to general relativity.

imagine our universe to be a fluid of constant density - which is a good approximation of our universe on a large scale, since matter is spread out pretty evenly.

if we take a sphere out of our universe with a radius, the mass inside it depends on its volume - this volume of a sphere is proportional to the cube of its radius. since density is constant, the mass grows with the cube of the radius.

so essentially, the schwarzchild radius grows faster than the actual radius of the sphere. because of this directly proportional nature, if you start with a small sphere of the universe, its schwarzchild radius is much smaller then a the sphere itself. but as you take larger and larger regions of space, the schwarzchild radius grows at a faster rate than the spheres actual size.

this means at some point, if the sphere is large enough, its schwartzchild radius can become bigger than the sphere’s own radius. funky, i know. but it gets weirder. our universe has a density very close to the critical density, which is the average density needed for the universe to gather enough force to halt its expansion. i digress.

for this critical density, the schwarzchild radius turns out to be equal to the size of the observable/visible universe.

so, do we live in a black hole? ….probably not. this thought experiments doesn’t take things like dark matter or energy into consideration, and we don’t have a special centre of sorts to form the nucleus of our supposed black hole.

also, this ignores that we live in a wonderfully expanding universe, where the only measurement of an observable universe is a classical, non accelerating one. if we did live in a black hole, we could only see in one direction which would be opposite to the singularity, and everything would be crunching towards the singularity.

alas, it is fun to think about on a late night. maybe we do live in a black hole.

[curium-killedthecat]

hundreds of thousands of bats die every year in north america after slamming and colliding into wind turbines — and it’s not clear why. the bats seem to have an unusual attraction to wind turbines — they’ve been seen loitering next to turbines and spending a lot of this time near the turbine blades for reasons unclear.

over 75% of bat death by turbine worldwide are from species known as “tree bats,” which tend to migrate long distances and roost in trees. examples of tree bats include the hoary bats and silver-haired bats, which were included in the study done on this.

could bats be mistaking wind turbines as potential roosting, foraging, or lekking sites? it’s important to understand why this is happening in the first place, so we can prevent bat deaths.

we do know that bats have evolved to use the brightness of the sky to navigate — and one hypothesis is that moonlight reflecting from turbine blades could be replicating this. so, brighter patches in their blurry vision seem to indicate the direction of the sky, making the bats orient towards them in that unusual way — given the sensitivity of bat vision to dim light, and the high reflectivity of the turbine surfaces (white surfaces especially), this could be the case.

light is an important compass for bats — and artificial light at night (ALAN) brings out bizarre behaviors in them, acting as an “ecological trap.” attraction to ALAN doesn’t only create ecological traps for bats, but also for insects, fishes, reptiles and birds — ecological light pollution, specifically ALAN has been impacting the vital biological functions of insects since the early 1800s.

when testing this hypothesis, the study was conducted on the aforementioned hoary and silver-haired bats (Lasiurus cinereusa and Lasionycteris noctivagants) which were two of the biggest victims of wind turbines in north america.

one of the experiments conducted included the bats being released into a dark maze with two exits: one of which was blocked by a white turbine blade reflecting artificial moonlight, whereas the other had no obstructions — three quarters of the hoary bats and all but one of the 31 silver-haired bats went towards the white blade.

however, bats are famous for having echolocation! but, in this case it would be signaling an entirely open exit away from turbines, and they still go towards them. so, sight seems to take precedence over other senses like echolocation which could be because of the loud noise of the turbines interfering: the stimuli may disrupt their orientation — for example, acoustic noise and turbulent airflow act as sensory pollutants.

although there’s still some confusion surrounding the topic, this could be a big step to preventing bat deaths worldwide. changing the colour of turbine blades could be a start — bats were at least twice as likely to fly towards white turbine blade sections compared to less reflective black ones. although, black wouldn’t work, as the wind turbines themselves might get too hot, hope is emerging.

read the full paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsbl.2025.0242#B2

[curium-killedthecat]

my favourite pokémon is actually flygon, which is a little cutie dragon and ground type pokémon and it is so so so cute BUT did you know it’s based on a real insect called the antlion?

both flygon and many antlions (order Neuroptera, family Myrmeleontidae) are commonly mistaken for dragonflies or even damselflies. you can distinguish an antlion from a dragonfly because of the similarly shaped wings, while dragonflies have uneven ones, and a longer hypostygmatic cell.

you can distinguish them from damselflies, which they are also commonly confused with, by the clavate antennae, while damselfly antannae are fine like hair and so small you can barely see them.

the picture is of an adult antlion, particularly the Glenurus gratus which are found throughout Florida. the adult antlions unfortunately only live for a few days as they cannot feed and rely on sustenance from when they were larvae. interestingly enough, larvae antlions do not have anuses - quite unusual for an insect! they store this waste for multiple years (until they turn adult) so they can use it for other things, like spin silk for cocoons, or rid of it as waste.

but the larvae are very interesting, and very dangerous! they dwell under the sand, so are hard to be seen. they'll make funnel-shaped pits in the sand and wait for ants to fall inside. therefore their name - a lion among ants! the family name myrmeleontidae actually translates to antlion from greek - myrmex meaning ant and leon meaning lion. antlions will shower the prey with sand, causing them to lose coordination and fall like a landslide right where the antlion has positioned its jaws! scary. these pits are affectionately refferred to as 'pits of doom' and for good reason.

in places like north america, they are also affectionately refferred to as 'doodlebugs', because of the squiggly patterns and lines made by them while they're hunting or looking for a trap site. look it up, its really cool!

and of course, they're important to the ecosystem, adult antlions eating caterpillars and pesky aphids. there is so much more i could say about antlions but i wanted to keep it short, just know they are insanely cool!!