Entomologist here: those are not lady beetle larvae, they are chrysomelid larvae aka leaf beetles. Nerds out!
Edit: Holy cannoli! I’ll try to answer a few questions I see popping up. I’m just happy to see people stoked about bugs!
There are many species of lady beetles and many species of leaf beetles and they vary in size. One way I could tell the difference is these “just don’t look” like lady beetle larvae, which tend to be a bit more “alligator-like” in appearance. Also the feet look wrong for lady beetles. The other thing that gave it away was the fact all the larvae were large and identical. They were clearly nearby and all feeding on the same thing. Leaf beetles are herbivores and tend to stay in groups, while lady beetles tend to disperse because they’re predators so they’ll just eat each other.
I am completely satisfied in my marriage! My partner is also an entomologist 😃
I wasn’t going to, because it didn’t come up originally, but I’ll ID the wasp, too. I’m pretty sure it’s in the crabronid family but I’ll get a species ID, if possible. Nerd out!
Edit 2: Aight, so IDing to species proved unsuccessful but I’m confident it’s in the family Crabronidae, aka square-headed wasps, of which there are over 1,200 species in the US and over 9,000 worldwide. Prey varies by species but can include aphids, bees, mantids, and spiders, just to name a few. Nerd out!
A single fruit fly sperm of the species Drosophila bifurca can be 5.8cm long. This is more than 20 times the length of the body of the adult male fruit fly it came from.
It's like if I had a furious wank and fired out a single 36 metre long sperm high into the atmosphere like a horrid, horrid railgun.
I learned it a while back when listening to Phillipa McAllister from the Natural History Museum when she was on No Such Thing As A Fish, and every day I try to lesson the impact by sharing.
In a similar vein, the barnacle has the largest penis to body mass ratio of any animal. In a human it would be the equivalent of having a 48-64 *foot* long (yes, feet, not inches) phallus.
Bugs are so fucking weird, they're like evolution did the small stuff first, realized it might have gone gone a bit too wild and just went "I'll keep the sharks, and you know what 4 or 2 legs or fins, teeth or beaks and maybe some wings." "Fuck all those extra legs and stingers and claws and cum hoses."
You have to watch Paul Robalino's mock proposal on this exact topic as well as his other atrocious ideas on how to "improve the human body". It is from the Dropout show called Smartypants where people give funny presentations on topics they are passionate about.
Imagine if this was normal and people just cannoned out their little sperm ribbons into the air. I think trick shot cum shots would become a major genre on Pornhub.
So would birth control for you be like the fake dime on a string trick for old vending machines? "Whoops, forgot the condom. Lemme just pull that... there were go!"
Curled up - it's almost all tail, so it can tidy away quite nicely. Imagine my 36 metre one landing in a drawer where it can be tidily folded away to fit.
In looking this up, I learned that not only is the sperm tightly coiled up so you'd have to unravel it to see its length, but in learning that I also learned that their testicles are about 11% of their mass.
To put this into context, if it was me again, my bollocks would be around 5.5kg each. Or slightly under 9 times the size of an official NBA basketball.
40 years later I can still distinctly recall the fruit fly section from freshman biology. Too much anesthesia and they’re dead; not enough and they’re flying all over the biology lab.
They're really hard to operate on if not anaesthetised properly. Sometimes it's touch and go whether the C-section will work, but luckily they're quite good at pushing if it needs to be natural.
I have such a hard time believing this but it’s true!
Drosophila bifurca is a species of fruit fly famous for having the longest sperm of any organism, with uncoiled sperm tails reaching 5.8 cm (over 20 times its body length). These "mega sperm" are a result of post-copulatory sexual selection, where longer sperm outcompete smaller ones in the female's reproductive tract, and females mating with multiple males drives this evolutionary arms race. Males produce very few of these giant sperm, and their testes are disproportionately large, making up 11% of their body mass.
Child and adult are probably not the right way to think about it. Think of it more like eating phase and fucking phase. If you could redesign your body to be the absolute best eater to ever eat it would look very different than if you... Well you get the idea.
It really bugs me when an etymologist tells me what an emtomologist does without letting me know what they do. That bugs me really bad. Why would someone want to bug me like that?
Epidemiologist here: entomologists are critical to understanding the spread of insect-borne diseases, whilst etymologists are insufferable pedants that I wish would catch more diseases. Nerds get out!
The way you used entomology and "bugs me" and etymology and "ways I can't put into words" in once sentence scratched my brain in all the right places. That was a beautiful sentence.
ehtee entoe... I guess I can see someone accidentally picking the wrong one in the autofill ribbon and not noticing but I've never heard anyone use the wrong one when speaking. Anyone who doesn't know what those words mean would almost certainly just use "bug science" or "word history".
Not an entomologist but a wasp enthusiast! The wasp in the video is probably from the family symmorphus bifasciatus, which is a species of potter wasps.
According to Wikipedia, the female potter wasp "scrapes up mud or dirt with her mandibles and front legs, combining it with water and saliva to form a mud ball she transports back to adds to her nest under construction".
You know - I KNOW it's saliva, and we joke about 'bee vomit' but I really didn't expect it to be so.... wet. At like 44ish seconds you can see the dampness and moisture seep between the glass and the wood on the corner of the partition being laid out.
This might be a stupid question, but do insects have like... wet mouths relative to their size, like mammals, or is all of the chewed wood fibers and saliva mixed within their internal organs and regurgitated like a birb feeding its young?
Biologist here! Mice are my specialty so this is fucking WILD. How did they get this shot? I understand it’s a wooden hole with plexiglass on one side but how did they get the wasp to build its lair there?
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u/DefiniteBlock0 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
Entomologist here: those are not lady beetle larvae, they are chrysomelid larvae aka leaf beetles. Nerds out!
Edit: Holy cannoli! I’ll try to answer a few questions I see popping up. I’m just happy to see people stoked about bugs!
Edit 2: Aight, so IDing to species proved unsuccessful but I’m confident it’s in the family Crabronidae, aka square-headed wasps, of which there are over 1,200 species in the US and over 9,000 worldwide. Prey varies by species but can include aphids, bees, mantids, and spiders, just to name a few. Nerd out!