From the world of arachnology, entomology and beyond… Expiscor is here for you! Here are some things I stumbled across this week:
- Find your inner bug dork: The amazing, inspiring Bug Chicks: they are going to take a couch across America, filming and talking about insects. Check out their awesome video here, and you can give them money here. Do it. Just do it.
- Need a jumping spider fix? Here’s an oldie but a goodie – jumpers wearing water droplet hats.
- Top fears of teenagers. #1 – Terrorist attack. #2 – spiders. Unbelievable!
- Mirror mirror on the wall… Nicky Bay with photos of a spider turning its abdomen into a multifaceted mirror.
- Do you like Dock Spiders? Hey, that genus is found in Madagascar, too [PDF]
- Photo time! Another stunning shot from Adrian Thysse – this one of a crab spiders as prey. You can follow his blog here (and thanks to Adrian for allowing me to reproduce the shot, here)
Dipigon sayi with Xysticus prey
- A terrifying ball of flies. What?? Too bad about the title, but the story is awesome.
- Six Second Insects: a great use of the Vine app, from Morgan Jackson.
- In case you missed it, pubic lice suck.
- Macrophotography of ant warfare – io9 features Alex Wild!
- A Catan-style board game with ants. FUN! (thanks Alex Wild)
- and even more from Alex Wild – an ant that is 30 million years too early.
- Here’s a paper based on a reexamination of weevils collected by Thunberg the late 1700s – and a new genus was described. Don’t forget about the value of museums!
- Mosquito season: here’s a must-read article by Cameron Webb – busting myths of mosquito repellents.
- Want to learn more about German cockroaches? Why yes, I would!
- Spider poop. Spider Joe posted an amazing photo of the stuff (see below); the solids are undigested prey material and the liquid is a slurry of guanine crystals. Wow. (um, and as Joe stated on twitter, Oreo cookie, anyone?)
- Bird poop. I had some land on me earlier this week. Apparently that should only happen once every 195 years. (I take that as good luck). Thanks Lab & Field for the link!
- Having trouble figuring out authorship for a paper? Why not determine it by croquet? (thanks Karen James, for that tweet!)
- Dinosaur Train: A review of a kids book in a scientific journal. A fine idea! (and a good review, good work Canadian Field Naturalist)
- Tweet of the week goes to my (young) colleague Dr. Dez:
- Changing families behind the decline of field stations? Terry McGlynn has a good point…
- First Impressions: a great piece of nature writing from Kim Moynahan.
- Editors and authors of this Journal of Animal Ecology paper should be ashamed: “Who wears the pants” in the title of this paper.
- The greening of Canadian Campuses. Hey, my campus is featured!
- For Academics: The awesomest 7-year post-doc.
- Alcohol-free whisky. Seriously, this doesn’t sound like a very good idea.
- And finally, a Happy Birthday (today!) to my big sister. She’s awesome (and she writes books!)
- For nature geeks everywhere… True facts about owls. I love this:
Arthropod Ecology 
Hello,
I started following your blog after finding a little pseudo scorpion going for a stroll across a bedroom floor in our 100 year-old house. I thought then that if there was one, there must be others and today my wife finally collected one. It is probably a Chelifer cancroides. We plan to show it to friends and then release in back into the wild, so to speak.
If you look up Sutherland Saskatoon on Wikipedia you can see a photo of the habitat where we are finding these cool little beasties, aka the Powe residence.
Thanks for all the interesting posts, and keep them coming!