“Arachnid explosion

A man suffered serious burns after he blew himself up trying to kill a spider. The 28-year-old had tried to attack the spider with an aerosol can at his home in Clacton in Essex.

He had been called by his wife to deal with a spider she had seen going behind the lavatory on Monday. Unable to reach it, the man decided to kill it by spraying it. However he was unable to see whether it was dead because the bulb had gone. He used a cigarette lighter to illuminate the room, but ignited the gas fumes and caused an explosion.”

A rare spider which was feared extinct in the UK has been caught on camera for the first time after a new colony of the species was found.

The elusive Rosser’s sac spider had not been seen in Britain for 10 years, but a colony has now been discovered at Chippenham Fen in Cambridgeshire.

The spider, Clubiona rosserae, which makes its home in wetland areas, has only ever been found in one other site in Britain, at Lakenheath Fen in Suffolk.

The light brown spider was first discovered in the 1950s, but the draining of the fens and changing farming practices since the Second World War has been putting its preferred habitat under threat, experts said.

*Mistletoe is the fulcrum of an entire ecosystem. A versatile and rapacious plant, it is home to a number of invertebrates which are specially adapted to thrive on and around its surface. As well as the “kiss me slow” weevil and four other beetle species, it is also home to the mistletoe marble moth. This extremely rare insect spawns only on mistletoe plants and is subject to a government conservation plan to increase numbers.

*In England we use mistletoe to decorate our front doors, but in Austria it is used as a cancer medicine. The plant is a rich source of toxic lectin proteins (the substance that killed the Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov in the umbrella killing in 1978) which, when refined, can be injected into a patient with cancer. This solution, it is argued, stimulates the immune system into a renewed attack on the cancer cells. Although commonly used by followers of complementary medicine, its efficacy as a cancer treatment has never been satisfactorily proven.

Swarms probably make use of the available food more efficiently as the leading edge is constantly pushing forwards into new vegetation. It may be fear more than hunger, however, that drives the locusts.

Locusts are highly cannibalistic, says Professor Sword, and any that stay still too long are likely to get nibbled. “Swarms are like lifeboats,” he says, forging a gruesome metaphor. “If you’re the only one in the boat, you could easily starve. But if you’ve got lots of company, you could be the last to survive. We call it travelling with your lunch.”

“The Asian hornet, Vespa velutina, is strongly established in France, where it is thought to have arrived from the Far East in a consignment of Chinese plant pots in late 2004, and beekeepers and entomologists are concerned that it may now spread across the Channel, especially as climate change brings warmer summers.

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Groups from five to 50 Asian hornets hover in front of a beehive, picking off single honeybees, decapitating them and stripping off their wings and legs before making off with the “meat ball” to their nest to feed their young.

As the attacks continue, the honeybee colony stops flying and has to consume its own stores, a development which eventually weakens it to such a point that a hornet invasion force can enter the hive and pillage it completely. Whole hives can be destroyed in this way relatively rapidly.”

Note

I’ve never seen this behavior, but  it seems to be very  terror-inspiring  wasp, but any time I have tried to photograph it, it immediately flies.  I’ve never seen or encountered it in pack, but only as solitary  hunter that scouts  about flowering  plants for small honeybees or attacking emerging dormant  solitary bees, but this behavior might  change as there is population increase.

When I have  attempted to  photograph the wasp after a catch,  it is easily startled and  disappears, often abandoning the catch.

“Through looking at insects,” Jones excitedly announces, “you can study the world – the whole natural environment – far better than you can by looking at humans. In fact, there’s a lovely idea that, if an alien civilisation landed on Earth and had limited time and resources to study life, all it need do is study beetles and dismiss everything else as a sampling error, because you can understand the whole of evolution, ecology, genetics, physiology – the whole way life on earth works – just by studying insects.”

“I just started with the biggest, fattest, smallest, thinnest and longest and worked my way through some of the obvious ones. Those ones were fairly easy but there are not many of those; you get those out of the way quite quickly.

Welcome to the BeetleCam project page. Beetle Cam Mark II will soon be returning to Africa to take more photographs. To receive news about BeetleCam’s future escapades, and to be the first to see the resulting photographs, please subscribe to our free email newsletter (or subscribe to our RSS feed).

the Adventures of Beetle Cam

http://blog.burrard-lucas.com/2010/04/adventures-of-beetlecam/

Burrard-Lucas

The modern world of wildlife photography is saturated with thousands of talented photographers producing a huge number of incredible photographs. As a result it is difficult to produce original shots without really pushing the boundaries and striving for new perspectives. Often, this means putting the camera into places that may at first seem impossible.

With this in mind, we were driven to embark upon an ambitious project to photograph African wildlife from a new perspective, one that would involve getting close to potentially dangerous animals and photographing them with a wide-angle lens. Traditionally, this has been achieved using camera traps – stationary cameras triggered when an animal breaks an invisible infra-red beem. The problem with this method is that it requires a great deal of time, patience and luck. We therefore decided to invent something a little more proactive! And so BeetleCam was conceived; a DSLR camera mounted on top of a four-wheel drive remote control buggy.

The third competition in our 2010 photo contest series is now open for entries. The theme is “Wildlife”. We are looking for images of wild animals that stand out from the crowd… maybe it will be a striking portrait that catches our eye or perhaps the image will reveal an interesting aspect of an animal’s behaviour. Photographs of animals in captivity are eligible for entry but if this is the case, please disclose it in the caption. Please note that photos of domestic animals such as pets and livestock are not eligible. The deadline for this contest is 31st October 2010.

Wildlife Photography Contest

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Posted by Will on August 18, 2010
Canon EOS 7D
Lensbaby Composer
SmugMug

First of all, a big thank you to everyone who entered our Landscape Photography Contest, once again we have been amazed by the quality of the entries received! The winning photographs will be announced by the end of this month.

The third competition in our 2010 photo contest series is now open for entries. The theme is “Wildlife”. We are looking for images of wild animals that stand out from the crowd… maybe it will be a striking portrait that catches our eye or perhaps the image will reveal an interesting aspect of an animal’s behaviour. Photographs of animals in captivity are eligible for entry but if this is the case, please disclose it in the caption. Please note that photos of domestic animals such as pets and livestock are not eligible. The deadline for this contest is 31st October 2010.
Prizes

We have some fantastic prizes on offer including the chance to win a Canon EOS 7D Digital SLR camera (more info).

Lensbaby and Smugmug have generously donated the following additional prizes:

* Winner: Lensbaby Composer and a SmugMug Pro account.
* Runners up x 2: SmugMug standard accounts.

Click here for more information about the 2010 prizes.

To receive notification when the winners are announced, please subscribe to our free newsletter. You can either subscribe by email or by RSS feed.

Rules

* The contest theme is Wildlife.
* Photographs of animals in captivity are eligible for entry but please disclose this in the caption.
* Photographs of domestic animals such as pets and livestock are not eligible.
* This competition is open to participants worldwide, aged 18 or over on the closing date.
* There is no entry fee.
* You must be the photographer and owner of the copyright for any image entered.
* Entrants can submit a maximum of three images to this contest.
* Please keep digital manipulation such as cloning and compositing to a minimum; your photograph should faithfully represent the scene as you saw it.
* Submitted images should be a minimum of 1024 pixels along the long edge.
* Images must not include a watermark or border.
* You will retain copyright of your entries at all times and will always be credited alongside your picture.
* By entering this competition, you grant us a non-exclusive license to display your photograph in connection with this contest. Photographers will always be credited alongside their image.
* Under no-circumstance will we use submitted images for commercial gain unless it has been agreed on a case by case basis with the photographer.
* The deadline for entry is 31st October 2010.

The dainty damselfly, a flying matchstick of bright blue and black, is the latest of a number of new arrivals from Europe which are thought to have been brought to Britain by rising temperatures caused by climate change.

It is actually a returner, rather than a completely new species, as it bred in at least one site in Essex until the population was wiped out in the great floods of the winter of 1953. There was no further sighting for 57 years until four adults were observed and photographed recently in north Kent by two recorders for the British Dragonfly Society, Gill and John Brooks.