The Mystery Bug

I was at my Mystery Bug Headquarters, when I got an urgent call. It was my Aunt Sandee. I heard screaming in the background, "There is a savage bug attacking my daughter in the bathroom!" she said.

"Capture it! Bring it here immediately!" I said.

That evening we held a meeting in her parents' house. She described a clawed, voracious, eight- legged terror hiding in the bathtub. I asked to see the specimen (I was still curious about the size of this monster.) She handed me the iron box (aka Tupperware) in which it was kept and told me to use the most extreme caution. With shaking hands I opened the package.

............. Inside......

was ......

a....

quarter inch long bug with minuscule pincers and tiny legs? I gave my aunt a "this is your monster bug" kind of look, and said "I'll take the case" and decided to call it a night.

I couldn't sleep that night. I kept thinking I had seen something like it in one of my many reference books. In the morning I got out my textbooks and found a match.

It was known as a Pseudoscorpion. After a quick bit of computer work we sent some pictures and the name to my client, Aunt Sandee. So the case was solved.

Signing off,

Jesse Maretzki, Bug Identifier

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The Hunt

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The Lizard's Day

This is a story I wrote yesterday for an assignment in school. I wrote it using from the perspective of the lizard:

The Lizard's Day

The lizard wakes to a warm sunny morning, but too cold to go get breakfast. He decides he should wait awhile.

After about ten minutes, he is warm enough to start hunting. He looks around briefly to see if there is food nearby; ah, his eyes fall upon a beetle scurrying across the rocky terrain and the chase is on!

He chases that beetle till he is just about on it. As he opens his mouth to engulf it a horrible sting burns his tongue. This is no breakfast, but a bombardier beetle! YUCK!!

Soon, luckily, a suitable breakfast comes along, and he enjoys his meal.

The lizard continues to bask on his warm, beautiful, rock, taking in the sun's warmth. But oh no, what does he hear? It is the screech of an eagle and the beating of wings; this is no time to bask in the sun. Full of energy and fear, he dashes for a crevasse in the rock. Just as he reached it, the eagle's sharp beak rips his tail off, but that's all the eagle gets - the tail, and the lizard's tail end closes up so not much blood is lost.

In the early evening, the lizard is once again basking, waiting, and being hungry. He hears a rustling sound in the nearby grass. Thinking it another meal, he crawls curiously towards it, but to his surprise it's another lizard, a rival lizard. The two reptiles aggressively size each other up, wondering who will attack first. The rival lunges at his enemy inflicting wounds into his tail. But the current ruler bites back at the attacker's neck hard enough to discourage his opponent and then he chases it away. Thus the owner keeps his territory. And the lizard retires for the night and slinks back to his crevasse.

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Spiders in Hunting

Spider study continued. I recently found another large orb spider outside on a window under the deck. It is larger than mine and is more active too. I will tell you how spiders catch and eat their prey. The Wolf spider chases its lunch down while the Spitting Spider shoots out streams of goo at its prey to trap it then it goes to it and bites. Trapdoor spiders dig a burrow and wait for an insect to walk near and it darts out and grabs it. Spiders do not actually eat there prey, skeleton and all. BSSut inject them with things that digest there insides and they drink it out like a soda. spiders who have webs sometimes can not see very well so they rel on vibration. When and insect gets into a web such as an orb spiders it senses the movements in the web and rushes out to grab it and then it injects it with venom. This movie will show how orb spiders hunt. And watch closely and you might see little flashes at the ends of its body that is the silk its wrapping it up with

My Arachnid ( arak- nid )

A little while ago, I got a spider as a pet, to be exact it is an Orb Spider. In my eyes it is a beautiful creature, designed by God himself. I acquired this interesting pet by walking by the fence, and to my my surprise, I saw a giant spider! This one is around an inch long and an inch across including the legs. This spider is in the arachnid family, which includes scorpions, mites, and spiders. You can classify an arachnid by how many legs it's got and how many body sections, which is usually two. Spiders are not in the insect family because insects have six legs and three body sections. I take care of my spider by putting them in a terrarium and adding the kinds of things they would have in the wild. If you want to have a pet spider try to make it's habitat as realistic as possible. I even make it rain in his cage by dripping water on and in the cage. My spider very amazingly made a web the same way it would have in the wild and it's web works. Taking the advantage of this awesome thing: I feed flies to the spider and it catches the flies in the web and then attacks it, sometimes wraps it up and sucks it dry. I marvel at how God took time to make this small spider and it just ends up being a thing people run from when they see it.

Fake eyes, and the swallow tail

This morning I was looking for a grasshopper to feed the praying mantis. In doing that I found a dark coloured swallowtail. Besides the the fact that it had dark colours it was still beautiful, it appeared to be be cold, because on my second try I caught it in my bare hands! And even after my hands were not cupped it didn't fly away at first. It was really amazing. After a while it it did fly away to a sun full spot it was beautiful. I read in a book the the name of this magnificent species check in the the next posts for it. Another amazing thing that happened was actually before the swallow tail encounter even though I wrote about the butterfly first. Anyway earlier in the month Davy and I witnessed some animal behavior thats possibly new to science! Well at least in our perspective.

Bird Kingdom

Yesterday we went to bird kingdom as a family it was a nice Sunday morning when we headed out. Bird Kingdom is a Aviary where lots of bird fly free around the place. With over four hundred species of bird alone not counting the individual birds them selves! That means the building is the the biggest aviary in the world!! They didn't have just birds there but also numerous species of reptile and a few amphibians. ( The frog and toad family) and like the birds a few of the the lizards looked like they could roam where they liked and didn't even have a cage!!! And one of the first places we went to there was a bird who would land on our heads and rip some of your hair out to make a nest!!!! And after we went to the place where the bird would pull your hair out we came to the biggest area of all and off to a little section of that there was a enclosure withe lorikeets in them. What we did was we paid some money for some nectar which was inl ittle cups I got to hod one of the cups and just like that my arms were covered in lorikeets all after the nectar. I had one on my right arm that peed in me.