Invertebrates

They sat there, on the tower, these Trojan elders,like cicadas perched up on a forest branch, chirpingtheir soft, delicate sounds.  –The Iliad, Homer. Cicadas belong to the Order Hemiptera, the true bugs, and most are in the family Cicadidae, with two species in the Tettigarcidae.  Hemiptera are different from other insects in that both the nymph […]

The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every

It must have gone four inches from its tail-tip to its snout. Cried Deacon White with deep delight: “Say, isn’t that a beaut?”  “I think it is,” sniffed Major Brown, “a most disgustin’ brute.  Its very sight gives me the pip. I’ll bet my bally hat, You’re only spoofin’ me, old chap. You’ll never swallow that.”  “The

Scout: “Why couldn’t I mash him? Jem: “Because they don’t bother you, Jem answered in the darkness. He had turned out his reading light.–Scout and Jem discussing their roly-poly encounter, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee. This pill-bug is a common invertebrate found, well, almost anywhere in North America these days but is a native species

Great attention gets paid to rainforests because of the diversity of life there.  Diversity of the oceans is even greater.  Sylvia Earle, Oceanographer he genus Glycera is a group within the Class of Polychaetes that are commonly referred to as blood worms.  They are found in marine sediments in shallow water.  They have a creamy pink