World’s Strangest

(vimeo link) Millions of hermit crabs were observed on the move, carrying their homes on their backs at Nanny Point in the Virgin Islands. The music makes their trip seem like an epic quest! Where are they going? What do they hope to find there? I had no idea, so I looked around and found an [...]

They don’t, technically. It’s actually their larvae, or caterpillars, that eat clothes, not the adult moths. It’s only a relatively small group of moths, the family Tineidae, that have any interest in your clothing. Throughout much of the US, you’ll only find two Tineidae species: the webbing clothes moth (Tineola bisselliella) and the casemaking clothes moth [...]

A team of researchers has been able to turn developing ant larvae in to a new ’supersoldier’ caste. The ants conventionally have two castes – a solide…

Hipsters may consider dogboarding to be way cooler than horseboarding, but both pale in comparizon to “spider-boarding” – a technique that has been used by mantidfly larvae for millions of years. The larvae of most mantidfly species are fussy diners – they only eat the eggs of spiders. That seems like a dangerous enough strategy, for [...]

A botfly is a fly in the family Oestridae. It is one of several families of hairy flies whose larvae live as parasites within the bodies of mammals. There are approximately 150 known species worldwide. Dermatobia hominis, the human botfly, is the only species of botfly known to use humans as the host to its larvae. In [...]