Personally, praying mantises give me the “creeps.” I am not like a friend of mine who, as a child, kept a praying mantis named, “Barbara” in his bedroom. To me, there has always been something sinister and austere about them. After reading about their reproductive habits, I had more reason to feel this way. As a part of the mating process, the male praying mantis is actually eaten by the female! If a male is lucky, the female will wait until during or after the ritual...
Read MoreBee Dances and Communication
Years ago, I saw a very interesting Moody Science film featuring the Dance of the Bees. Research first analyzed by Martin Lindauer 60 years ago showed that bees actually communicate by doing a type of energetic and vibrating waggle dance. This communicates the direction and the distance to a food source to other bees. (I wondered if they could actually talk but were just having fun doing some kind of charades at a bee party.) More recently, the Sept. 27, 2010, New York...
Read MoreHurrah for Ants!
Many of us are familiar with the children’s counting song, “The ants go marching one by one…” Scientists have now discovered that at least some species of ants do appear to be counting their steps when they go marching out in search of food. After training some desert ants to look for food in a specific location, scientists investigated how the ants could consistently locate the same source of food with seeming ease. It is known that ants will leave scent markers to guide...
Read More