My Love For This Show Is Stronger Than Tumblr's Insistence To Flag This Post

Pages from the comics in the Chinese A Starless Clan books.

Moths in Disguise: these are all just harmless moths that have developed the ability to mimic wasps, bees, and/or hornets

Top Row (left to right): Eusphecia pimplaeformis and Myrmecopsis polistes; Bottom Row: Pennisetia marginatum

Moths are exceptionally skilled when it comes to mimicry, and there are hundreds of moth species that rely on that tactic as a way to protect themselves from predators. Their disguises are numerous and varied, but hymenopteran mimicry is particularly common, especially among the moths that belong to subfamily Sesiidae and family Arctiinae.

Yellowjacket-Mimicking Moths: Pseudosphex sp. (top and bottom left) and Myrmecopsis polistes (bottom right)

Some of their disguises involve more than just a physical resemblance -- there are some moths that also engage in behavioral and/or acoustic mimicry, meaning that they can imitate the specific sounds and behaviors of their hymenopteran models. In some cases, these moths are so convincing that they can even fool the actual wasps/bees that they are mimicking.

Such a detailed and intricate disguise is unusual even among mimics, and researchers believe that it developed partly as a way to trick the wasps into treating the mimic like one of their own. Wasps tend to prey upon moths (and many other insects), but they are innately non-aggressive toward their own nest-mates, which are identified by sight -- so if the moth can convincingly impersonate its model, then it can avoid being eaten by predatory wasps.

Wasp-Mimicking Moths: Pseudosphex ichneumonea (top), Myrmecopsis sp. (bottom left), and Pseudosphex sp. (bottom right)

There are many moths that can also mimic hornets, bumblebees, and carpenter bees.

Hornet-Mimicking Moths: Eusphecia pimplaeformis (top left), Sesia apiformis (bottom left), Paranthrene simulans (top right), Pennisetia marginatum (middle right), and Sphecodoptera scribai (bottom left)

Bumblebee-Mimicking Moths: Hemaris tityus (top and bottom left) and Hemaris affinis (bottom right)

Moths are some of the most talented mimics in the natural world, as illustrated by their mastery of hymenopteran mimicry. But it's not just bees, hornets, and wasps -- there are many other forms of mimicry that can be found among moths, and the resemblance is often staggering.

Moths deserve far more credit than they receive, to be honest, because they are so incredibly interesting/diverse.

Sources & More Info:

Journal of Ecology and Evolution: A Hypothesis to Explain the Accuracy of Wasp Resemblances

Frontiers in Zoology: Southeast Asian clearwing moths buzz like their model bees

Royal Society Publishing: Moving like a model: mimicry of hymenopteran flight trajectories by clearwing moths of Southeast Asian rainforests

The Admiral dose not like this fucked up cat that smells like human

Meanwhile cat!Jon is devastated he can’t have his cat buddy

Smack smak

Cat!Jon made by @ultramarinaa

“A princess awaits you, and yet you stay waiting for a shooting star.”

so uh about that AU huh…..so @soni-dragon thank you for the AU hmmm I am kinda going crazy over here!!!!!!! cloud princess snorkmaiden!!!!!!! aaahhh!!!!!!!

I fuckin get it girl

The Australian state of Tasmania is being held hostage and terrorized by a single elephant seal and this has been going on for more than a month now.

✦ Sanctuary ✦

and speaking of things I read and forgot about, here’s one I was able to identify a while back with the help of Reddit. Paul Jennings is an Australian children’s author who usually writes about weird events with some gross-out humor for the kids, but he does the occasional story that’s just creepy. Granddad’s Gifts is one of them.

A boy and his family visit his grandmother’s farm, I think to help her prepare it for sale, since the grandfather is dead and she can’t manage on her own any more. The boy sleeps in a room with a locked cupboard, which he is instructed not to open, and of course does, finding a fox skin for wearing as a shawl. Apparently the grandfather shot and skinned it for the grandmother but she was upset by the fox’s death and they locked it away, buried the remains of the fox under a lemon tree, and never spoke of it again.

Anyway, the boy works on the farm every day, and is given two lemons from the bigger of two lemon trees on the property after work. Instead of eating them, he puts them in the cupboard, only to hear moving and chewing noises in the middle of the night. He also dreams about his grandfather, who he can’t remember well, but had striking blue eyes. In the morning, the lemons are gone, and when he touches the tail of the fox skin, he can feel two bones that weren’t there before.

So every day, he puts his lemons in the forbidden cupboard, and every night the fox skin regains two parts, and this goes on for his entire stay. Until the last day, when he finds that his grandmother has taken the last two lemons and made a pie for the family. The boy opens the cupboard to find a complete and live fox, with the exception of its eyes, which are still taxidermy glass, blind and stumbling. He locks the cupboard, then goes and sits on the step and cries, at which point his grandmother says that she doesn’t understand what the problem is, but he can have the two lemons off the small tree if he wants them so badly. The boy knows it won’t work, because it isn’t the tree where the fox was buried, but he takes them anyway.

The next day, he sees a fox run into the woods, which turns and looks at him for just long enough to notice that it has blue eyes.

His grandmother mentions that the small tree has rarely grown any lemons, and it is strange that it never grew well, because that’s where his grandfather is buried.

AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE, EVERYONE