SNN (ScrollingNetworkNews) ✿ ✿ Our Mel and Sydney returned to their nesting box with plenty of bonding occurring..but after 2.5 months of Sydney in the box from Dec 2013 to mid Feb 2014, the lack of prey gifts from Mel ( perhaps due to the severe and historic drought underway in California)and they have forgone the nesting process this year as many other raptors ✿ Compared to other owls of similar size, the Barn Owl has a much higher metabolic rate, requiring relatively more food. Pound for pound, Barn Owls consume more rodents – often regarded as pests by humans – than possibly any other creature. ✿ We remind viewers that sometimes owlets may not survive - the parents will dispose of things in "The Owl Way" -viewer discretion is advised, this is nature and the "Owl way". ✿ ~ ✿ “Animals, like us, are living souls. They are not things. They are not objects. Neither are they human. Yet they mourn. They love. They dance. They suffer. They know the peaks and chasms of being.” ― Gary Kowalski, The Souls of Animals ✿ Each species is a masterpiece, a creation assembled with extreme care and genius." ~ E.O. Wilson

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Bug

The giraffe weevil
(Trachelophorus giraffa) is a weevil endemic to Madagascar.
 It derives its name from an extended neck much like that of the common giraffe. Most of the body is black with distinctive red elytra covering the flying wings. The total body length of the males is just under an inch, among the longest for any Attelabid species.
The extended neck is an adaptation that assists in nest building and fighting. When it comes time to breed, the mother-to-be will roll and secure a leaf of the host plant, Dichaetanthera cordifolia and Dichaetanthera arborea (a small tree in the family Melastomataceae), and then lay a single egg within the tube.
She will then snip the roll from the remaining leaf in preparation of the egg hatching.

The New Zealand giraffe beetle, sometimes referred to as Lasiorhyncus barbicornis is a straight-snouted weevil of the family Brentidae, endemic to New Zealand.
Its Māori name, tuwhaipapa, derives from the Māori god of newly made canoes.

The beetles display sexual dimorphism; males having a long protrusion on the head with antennae at the end, while females have a reduced protrusion with antennae about halfway along.