Tales of an entomologist. About adventures and travel

Community and Forum → Other questions. Insects topics → Tales of an entomologist. About adventures and travel

Likes: 5

Likes: 1

Likes: 6

Likes: 1

24.06.2015 17:09, Penzyak

George, what's that noise outside the window?
"A coprophile parade, sir.
" And what do they want?
"They're just defending their rights to equality, sir.
" Is someone stopping them from eating shit at home?
"No, sir. They don't want to eat it only at home. They advocate that shit is sold in all public catering establishments, so that at intersections you can easily buy shit on a stick, and in a restaurant you can easily order shit on a shovel.
"But this is sickening and completely unnatural, George.
"Why not, sir?" This is innate, they were born this way and can't do anything about it. In addition, nature is full of examples of coprofilism. Rabbits, hares, guinea pigs, and a whole bunch of animals take it quite normally. Therefore, it is not surprising that this also applies to humans as part of the animal world.
"George, am I right in thinking that if they get their way, my favorite corner cafe is going to serve shit in cups along with strawberry souffle???"
- That's right, sir. Coprophiles are absolutely normal people and have the right to eat their favorite dish during lunch, without hiding their preferences.
"God, I'm going to throw up on the spot!"
"Sir, how can you??? This is completely intolerant.

And by the way, sir, one famous psychiatrist once said something along the lines of: "if you don't like coprophiles, then it is very likely that you are actually also a coprophile, just hidden." I can't guarantee the authenticity of the phrase, but still listen to yourself, maybe you are waiting for fresh taste sensations!?

Likes: 3

06.11.2015 22:46, Kharkovbut

I don't know where to put it... let it be here...

I read the memoirs of the famous Soviet-Russian mathematician A. A. Bolibrukh, now deceased... It turned out that as a child (apparently in the 1960s), he was fond of collecting butterflies. He included several paragraphs about this in his memoirs... Here is one of them:

"But perhaps my best collection of butterflies was a collection consisting of several specimens of a little-known moth of the same species with the long name Anglewing Es white. This butterfly got its name for the shape of its wings and for the small letter "C", as if painted with oil paint on its abdomen. The fact is that this butterfly has a remarkable property of a chameleon: the color of its abdomen changes depending on what it is sitting on. On a tree, this color is brownish, on the wall of a wooden house it gets a light color. I was especially proud of the specimen caught on a piece of brick: a light burgundy shade I had never seen before among the angleflies."

As they say, for the sake of a red word, you will not regret Polygonia c-album...

Likes: 4

22.12.2015 22:31, Maksim M.

This season,in the month of August, I went to Dosang.I also bought 5 kg of liver at home-liver and lung of cows.I decided to try it out as a rotten bait for beetles in those places.But as you move in that direction, this substrate was in the car interior.Despite all the insulation measures, the smell still gradually seeped into the cabin.When spending the night, I put a basin with packages on the roof of the car.And now about 4 days have passed and tomorrow my son and I are on the dunes and hills of Dosang.The last day and night in the Volga floodplain, district of the city.Kharabali.We go to bed and I accidentally left the basin on the ground, near the wheel, on the roof did not put.In the morning, we get up,start packing-the basin is on the ground, on its side, and there are no packages of rotten meat!!!!The thieves didn't leave any traces.Moreover, the bags were blue and with ties, under the garbage, and should be visible from afar.I went through all the surrounding places-no leftover packages!!I never had to test the effectiveness of this bait in the semi-desert.By the way, it was in the floodplain of the Volga, on rotten fish-chicken-vegetables that were regularly found along the coast, near tours. I didn't find any camps or any special variety of insects, it was probably just that there were a lot of these smelly objects,and almost nothing came from afar to detect new smells.But in the next trips I will definitely bring the same bait and check in the semi-desert.......

Likes: 4

Likes: 2

22.01.2016 14:26, Wild Yuri

This season,in the month of August, I went to Dosang.I also bought 5 kg of liver at home-liver and lung of cows.I decided to try it out as a rotten bait for beetles in those places.But as you move in that direction, this substrate was in the car interior.Despite all the insulation measures, the smell still gradually seeped into the cabin.When spending the night, I put a basin with packages on the roof of the car.And now about 4 days have passed and tomorrow my son and I are on the dunes and hills of Dosang.The last day and night in the Volga floodplain, district of the city.Kharabali.We go to bed and I accidentally left the basin on the ground, near the wheel, on the roof did not put.In the morning, we get up,start packing-the basin is on the ground, on its side, and there are no packages of rotten meat!!!!The thieves didn't leave any traces.Moreover, the bags were blue and with ties, under the garbage, and should be visible from afar.I went through all the surrounding places-no leftover packages!!I never had to test the effectiveness of this bait in the semi-desert.By the way, it was in the floodplain of the Volga, on rotten fish-chicken-vegetables that were regularly found along the coast, near tours. I didn't find any camps or any special variety of insects, it was probably just that there were a lot of these smelly objects,and almost nothing came from afar to detect new smells.But on my next trips, I will definitely bring the same bait and check it out in the semi-desert.......

I don't recommend doing this in Yakutia. The bear is coming!

Likes: 1

Likes: 2

Likes: 1

11.02.2016 1:14, Maksim M.

Well, just yesterday...I sit in the evening straightening soaked bumblebees.Anyone who has encountered it knows that it is necessary to scratch the fur on the abdomen, pronotum and paws as it dries,otherwise it will stick together and be sloppy and bad.There is a device for this,but it is necessary to do everything very delicately, not to be distracted for a long time.Call,this is a friend, something you need to see - then report-then-call back again and in short stop doing bumblebees.I tried to explain why I wouldn't be able to do something else soon..My first words were these-I can't get distracted-I comb my bumblebees..... and it started-what bumblebees?!!!,- February!!!"why do you have to comb your hair?"!!!Nah-what were you smoking?!!!I answer-bumblebees are simple, February is dry, I comb my hair-they are wet,I can't give up-I need to scratch and comb my hair.

Likes: 8

Likes: 1

Likes: 13

26.05.2016 12:20, Penzyak

Friends, colleagues and like-minded people, thank you all very much for the flattering reviews for my many years of work. I write a number of other narratives (damn it, I shouldn't have called them narratives - otherwise I'll write until retirement...) about the nature of the Penza Region and expeditions... Not all of them are about nature, there is a plot like x / f. "Three + two" but much more fun and modern (it happens in the summer on Khopra near Zubrilovo-Penzaki who know immediately express a lot of emotions they say it's time to make a movie based on this almost ready-made scenario...). Well, come on, we'll wait and see how it goes it'll do.

This post was edited by Penzyak - 26.05.2016 12: 21

Pictures:
picture: IMG_7478.jpg

IMG_7478.jpg — (148.57к)

picture: IMG_7486.jpg

IMG_7486.jpg — (155.21к)

picture: IMG_7489.jpg

IMG_7489.jpg — (127.18к)

IMG_7544.jpg — (244.35к)

picture: IMG_7563_2.jpg

IMG_7563_2.jpg — (174.58к)

picture: IMG_7576_2.jpg

IMG_7576_2.jpg — (100.39к)

Likes: 1

Likes: 2

Likes: 1

02.06.2016 13:13, vep

Back in ' 91, I worked at a biostation in Chashnikovo right next to my house in the Moscow region. I started studying long-legged mosquitoes and really wanted to deal with the females and larvae of the vast subgenus Pterelachisus. Not all females are well diagnosed. To do this, I caught different males and females of the subgenus. Females that could not be identified were put in cages, put males to them and tried to see who would mate with whom. This is the criterion for the species belonging of females. Well, then get eggs, larvae of the first and other increases. I had a lot of time and desire then. Once I caught one male (a little starved with ether), I look at it under binoculars, rummage through the determinant. He comes to life and flies away through the open window. But I managed to see it somehow. I find that it is most similar to Tipula (Pt) cinereocincta, I read in the Fauna of the USSR that it is a subarctic species, in the collection of ZINA only 1 specimen from the Polar Urals! There is also a Far Eastern subspecies. And so he flew away... I almost cried! All my searches for this species did not lead to anything, I did not include this species in the list for the center of the European part, because I was still not sure of the correctness of my definition and due to the lack of material. You never know what it seemed.
A couple of weeks ago, I went for a walk in the evening in the nearest park near the house (without a net, of course, so go for a walk to breathe). I don't particularly want to catch tipulids - nothing new can get caught in the Moscow region, and it's awkward to swing a net among people. What to catch - everything is overfished. Except for the mysterious male that flew away from me. I remembered this incident and felt sad again. Then I look – some kind of tipulida under my feet on the path. He must have fallen into a spider's web and flown out of it, but he got tangled in the remains and fell on the path. I picked it up and cleared it of cobwebs. It doesn't sound like a banal image, but I can't see very well without my glasses. I made a triangle out of a hundred-ruble note, put a mosquito in it, then put it in my wallet, and of course I forgot about it. A week later, at work, I accidentally remembered. It's a good thing that this hundred-ruble note wasn't needed, and I didn't shake out the mosquito. It really turned out to be T (Pt) cinereocincta! After 25 years, he came back to me! It seems that the Far Eastern subspecies should also be reduced to synonyms…

This post was edited by vep-02.06.2016 13: 48

Likes: 14

13.06.2016 16:21, AGG

The work week was coming to an end, and I trudged home tired.
"Tyn-tyn!" echoed in my brain. I turn my gaze to the lower-left corner of my glasses (this is how I set up "incoming messages")
- "Shall we go?"
Two eyes click in the template "YES!"
We meet, load up, and go exchanging crop images with interesting views. Friends say that there is a place where "the drone did not fly". Yes, poh where, if only away from the hustle and bustle of the city.
We arrived, looked around, liked the place, decided to stay here. We unpacked the car: we pulled out a couple of foams, booze and drones. The firmware on them is certainly "not ice", so they drag all sorts of guano. You have to focus 7G glasses to somehow see the mRNA of the desired species.
Beer flows where it should, drones vacuum the slopes of the beam. And like a thunderbolt out of the blue - " I'm going to bury the glasses!". Well, how to live with this Old Believer?! Just an aspen stake in the wheels of progress.
I'm tired, and the drone batteries are almost dead. It's time for bed. Tomorrow we still need to update from the genbank.

Likes: 3

20.10.2016 11:37, Penzyak

In kindergarten, the girl read a verse at the matinee that her grandfather taught her. The audience fell into a stupor!

In the middle group of kindergarten, my grandfather prepared me for the September matinee. The theme of the festival was animals and birds: how they meet autumn and prepare for winter. Poems, as far as I remember, were not distributed to us, and if they were, grandfather rejected the teachers ' suggestions and said that we would read our own.
With this, he chose the outstanding, without fools, work of Nikolai Oleynikov "Cockroach".
It's hard for me to say what guided him. Grandpa himself never went to kindergarten, so there was nothing to take revenge on him for. My teachers were wonderful, kind women. I don't know. Perhaps he wanted to add a note of high tragedy to the mundane flutter of squirrels and starlings.
So, on a fine autumn morning, I went to the center of the room, straightened my dress embroidered with velvet paper leaves, looked around the audience, and began earnestly:
- A cockroach is sitting in a glass,
sucking a red leg.
I got him. He's trapped.
And now he's waiting to be executed.
At Maugham's Theatre, Julia's first acting lessons were taught by her aunt. I had a grandfather instead of an aunt. We worked out everything: pauses, gestures, proper breathing.
"The cockroach
is pressed up against the window, barely breathing.
He wouldn't be afraid of death
if he knew there was a soul.

Gradually my voice grew stronger and stronger. I was approaching the most dangerous moment:
With sad eyes, he
glances at the sofa,
Where
the Vivisectors are sitting with knives and axes.

My grandfather didn't see me, but he would have been proud of me. I recited with deep feeling. And the fact that the faces of teachers and mothers began to change on vivisectors was explained by the influence of poetry and her talent.
"Here's the hangman coming to him," I said fervently. "
And when he feels his chest,
he finds something under the ribs
that should be pierced!"

The hero is mercilessly killed. One hundred and four instruments are tearing the patient apart! (here my voice broke.) A cockroach dies from injuries and wounds.
At this point, the intensity of the drama reached its peak. When I later read Lermontov's "On the Death of a Poet" at school, it turned out that the entire spectrum of emotions, from anger to grief, was experienced by me at the age of five.
"It's all in the past," I sighed resignedly
. There's nothing else.
And subsurface water flows out of it.

I paused for a long moment. The adults ' faces lit up with hope: they probably thought I was done. Ha! And the tragedy of an orphaned child?
- There,in the crack of the big closet,
the Son,abandoned by Everyone, alone,
babbles: "Dad, Dad!"
Poor son!

Shout out the last words. Look up. Pause, catch your breath.
The audience was stunned into silence along with me.
But that wasn't the end of it.
— And there's a shaggy vivisector standing over him, "
I said with grim hatred
," ugly, hairy, with a pair of tongs and a saw."

One of the weak-minded children began to cry.
"You pants-wearing scoundrel!
I shouted in someone's dad's face. -
Know that a dead cockroach
is a martyr to science! Not just a cockroach.

Dad made a strange sound in his throat that I couldn't interpret. But it was also unimportant. Stormy waves of poetry carried me to the final.
"The watchman
will throw him out of the window with a rough hand.
And
our darling will fall headfirst into the yard.

Pause. Pause. Pause. There was still a yellow chestnut tree outside the window, and a bird was running around on the roof of the veranda, but it was all over.
"On the trampled path," I said mournfully,
" near the porch itself, he will wait with his legs
up for the sad end.

Powerless to drop your hands. Slouch. Look like a person who has lost the meaning of life. And clearly, holding back sobs, pronounce the last four lines:
- His bones will be dry
And the rain will water them,
And His eyes will be blue
And the hen will peck at them.

Silence. Someone sobbed — probably me. A velvet leaf fell from my lap, swirling to the floor, breaking the oppressive silence with a rustle, and then, finally, somewhere deep in the basement, the cockroaches began to applaud violently, desperately, in full growth.
In fact, of course not. And we didn't have any cockroaches, and the leaf didn't fall off me. They patted me very carefully, probably for fear of causing an encore outbreak, took the crying children away, patted the unconscious ones on the cheeks, gave water to the limp teacher of the junior group, and handed me some ridiculously childish book like Bianchi stories.
- why? My grandmother asked my grandfather angrily in the evening. The anger was caused, among other things, by the fact that she was alone in her indignation. I didn't have to wait for my parents to understand: my father laughed, and my mother said that she hated matinees and I could even read Mein Kampf there, it wouldn't get any worse. — Why did you learn this particular poem with your child?
"Because it's inconvenient to recite the Anti-Semitic Beetle in one person," Grandpa said with genuine regret.

Likes: 16

Likes: 2

25.10.2016 16:16, А.Й.Элез

How was it possible to destroy something that was already completely built up?

This is inaccurate information. There were buildings, but not the built-up outskirts of the lowlands served as a shelter for birds, including temporary and irreplaceable for migrating ones; first of all, this was discussed in the articles of environmentalists at the discussion stage (however, as usual, if there was already a ready-made solution), and at that stage it was necessary to reassure them that that everything is already "fully built up", but they don't know. I won't bring up periodicals now, but to be honest, I didn't expect that someone's publications at that time could have been completely ignored and that the Internet is so inaccessible today. The lowlands came to the Olympic construction sites with the presence of still considerable areas of wet meadows with shrubs, ditches and lakes, where you had to get through the building on its "backs" (even if from the sea). I've been there myself many times in those days (alas, I've already been there twice since: crumbs, no more than half a square kilometer to the west of the main complex). Yes, and on the Google images, nature there by inertia still remained for some time, when everything was really already broken up.

It doesn't matter. The main thing is to write, and let the Russians understand.

The Russians figured it out a long time ago. And for those who really need to write, I would like to send them at least to the page of the Sochi branch of the Russian Geographical Society.:
http://geo.opensochi.org/node/147
By the way, not only Russians and not only in the Russian Geographical Society have figured it out:
http://sochiweb.ru/archives/61.html
http://www.wwf.ru/data/pub/oopt/imeretinskaynizmennost.pdf
http://gazaryan-suren.livejournal.com/123765.html

This post was edited by A. J. Elez - 10/25/2016 18: 12

Likes: 1

29.11.2016 11:40, Penzyak

Draft list of species, subspecies, and populations of the next edition of the Red Book of the Russian Federation (Animals)
Order Coleoptera-Coleoptera

15. Burrowing sphodrus-Sphodrus leucophthalmus. Survival threat status in Russia according to IUCN criteria EN B1ab (i,ii)c (i, ii, iii), E. CC RF: was not included. An inhabitant of burrows, often a synanthrope, where it lives in basements, in particular in old wine cellars. A rare species with a steadily declining population. There is a progressive decline in the habitat and total population of the species; it has disappeared in part of its range.

.. Yes, life is hard in old wine cellars and cellars... especially if there's still wine in there. I wonder who it is and where it was observed... (the last phrase also pleased)...

This post was edited by Penzyak - 29.11.2016 11:51 am

Pictures:
picture: ________________.jpg