Mantis or stick?

Thanks again! I have learnt something new today. I thought that earwigs and silverfish had more legs than 6, thats why my own reasoning for her wanting just insects and not arachnids (or another imagined category of my own) didn’t make sense anymore.
I don’t like earwigs and assumed they had more that 6 legs (I must have demonised them in my head or something). After mosquitos and flies for annoying factor earwigs are next on my list of unlikeables. I don’t mind spiders though and scorpians are novel enough not to be higher on the list. I think the whole twitching pinsir thing is what does it. Silverfish stink because they eat papers and thats just not cool!
Praying mantis are so cool, like little aliens. And slaters are fun. And ladybeetles. And many others!

Leave Britney Alone! After all she’s been through!

Hey NH, “8 is too many” for an entomology project because entomology is the study of insects, and all insects have no more than six legs. Arachnology is for eight-legged freaks like spiders, mites, ticks and scorpions.

Save the stick insects, leave them alone.

Thanks for the thought Meconium too bad those microorganisms sucked those dried corpses apart…*barf*. I believe she already has a collection going so I’m not sure what she has so far but I will suggest that. She seemed particularly interested in 6 legged as “8 was too many”.

stonedwookie: its for an assignment so she is required to do this. Valid point about the camera and pictures though.

s-s-a: thats a good sign 🙂 It’s still a little bit warm sometimes!

andy pandy: Thanks! Poor scarab beetle!

I will keep my eye out, but tell her to make sure she freezes them good.
I remember when doing horticulture 15 or 16 years ago a certain person collected a scarab beetle of some description.
When our collections had been submitted there was a strange scraping sound in the room and on inspection it was the said beetle trying to get away while pinned to the display board, it hadn’t been frozen long enough and the poor bugger was only temporarily knocked out, coming too skewered to a styrofoam board.
He was quickly despached with ether.

I’ve had a big green one and smaller brown one in my garden in the last week or so.

NH theres no way this will help future generations of insects.
many species have been endangered or sent extinct by over collection
infact you friend may even help send them extinct.
Study with a camera not by killing

I feel your pain NH! It’s a bit cold to find good insects in Canberra, but your friend can’t say her lecturers didn’t warn her to collect them before summer finished! I got a couple from the family Mantidae near BoZo late in the season, one green and one brown.

I was going to offer you the ones I found, because I pinned and dried them well, and I had two to choose from. Unfortunately I just had a look at my collection, which has been sitting in my wardrobe since I finished the course, and found that every last insect (apart from one of the flies) had been reduced to dust, presumably by microorganisms and insects breaking the dried corpses apart to suck every last piece of nutrient from them!

Sorry I can’t help. When I did it, you had to find representatives from ten orders (there’s 23 orders of insects all up as far as I can remember). Might I suggest that silverfish (order Thysanura) or earwigs (Dermaptera) might be easier to find than mantids or phasmids? Look in wood piles or inside old books stacked in people’s sheds.

Good luck to your friend.

Why does she have to kill them?

Couldn’t she just dart and translocate them?

I wasnt asking for them to be mailed >_>

We are all Canberrans right? I’m sure me or her could organise to meet with the cool person who finds one somehow 🙂

eye_see_ewe[at]hotmail.com if anyone wants to contact me.

Now see, I understand that Ant. I caught a cockroach and she asked me to stick it in the freezer and I couldn’t do it. I’d grown attached to the thing. It had 4 legs and curled up in a little ball and I looked into its eyes and its little feelers wobbled. She really, really wants those 2 particular specimens. It would really help her study and perhaps future generations of insects.

Yay bugs!