Welcome to August! I’m heading off for Arctic field work today, but will try to post updates and I will try to keep Expiscor posts coming, despite the remoteness of where I will be…. I’ll see how I manage…

Here are some discoveries from the past week, for your reading pleasure!

• A truly stunning photo essay, feature spiders… The most exquisitely, weird and beautiful that you will ever see….

• Spider fun with laser-pointers (thanks Bug Girl)

• Flying spiders: spiders are excellent aeronauts, thanks to ballooning. However, I didn’t realize that large spiders balloon, too [PDF] (thanks Spider Joe!)

• High speed imaging of a jumping spider… catching a fly. Awesome. (via Sean McCann)

• A web of spiders - a nice post by Dragonfly Woman

• A spidery mystery - Adrian Thysse posted this on Facebook - what is attached or stuck to the spider’s legs?

• Spiders have personalities. Yup. And you can colour-code them, too. Great feature in Wired!

• Speaking of Wired, did you hear the BIG NEWS! Bug Girl will be posting over at Wired Science! BIG congrats from Expiscor.

• Open call for Entomological Art - YAY!

• Take photographs, folks - you just never know what might come of it. (and here’s the link to the paper about how photosharing websites may improve Hemiptera biodiversity knowledge and conservation.

• Where are all the monarchs? Here’s a story from the Globe & Mail.

• Scorpionflies - too cool for words - good thing we have amazing photographers out there!

• I like bees. My colleague and friend Elena Bennett likes bees, and she has some hives - here’s a photo to show just HOW MUCH she loves bees!

• 33 new ant species described from Central America. SO MUCH BIODIVERSITY TO DISCOVER!

• Heck, we are still discovering new species of birds!

• Shhhh - be very, very quiet. That’s what veeries do when owls are about.

• Birds poop, too. And you can get a bird poop facial. Seriously.

• Fossil frogs! Fascinating paper out in PLOS (thanks Protohedgehog for tweeting that)

• Congrats to Carly Ziter on her new (awesome) paper: Functional diversity management mediate aboveground carbon stocks in small forest fragment

• Tweet of the week goes to…. Insect News. Love it!

• New to teaching? A workshop is probably a great idea - here’s a paper in Bioscience Education that explores that idea (thanks Graham Scott for tweeting that!)

• Here’s a great post titled “Self-promotion: shamelessly selfish or shamefully misunderstood?“

• YES, Boggle is better than Scrabble. That is all.

• Winners of the National Geography Traveler Photo Contest. Amazing work.

• Oh, and for the geek in me - Trek in the Park. Make it so. Engage.

• And to finish, how about a Devonian reef platter! (see here for more amazing stuff from JPOP studios)