Woodland Park Zoo

[guppiecat]

Shortly after I returned from my Seattle trip and finished uploading my photos, my photo database got corrupted. This set was the one most impacted. I had lost all of my notes and captions, but kept the photos. However, the way that this happened, meant that the photos were basically half-processed. It took a while, but I finally figured out how to continue the processing from F-Spot on into Bibble. The recovered set is here, and contains photos and captions, but the names aren't as precise as I usually prefer, as that was the hardest to recover and I eventually decided not to bother.




Colobus - Life is not all roses and fluffy kittens. Sometimes life is an endangered suicidal monkey.


Toucan - Check out the serrations on the beak.


Ocelot - Having so many spots can be so exhausting.


Ocelot - Oh, and OCELOT TONGUE!


Fly - No, I did not go to the zoo to photograph that fly. I went to photograph the leaf. The fly was a bonus.


Gorilla - Gorillas really benefit from black and white.


Stick Insect - Yes. That's its face.


Beetle - These guys were HUGE.


Roly Poly - Well, I know they're supposed to be called "sowbugs", but I always called them roly polys. I like that name better.

Comments

[beki.livejournal.com]

We always called them roly polys too.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

OCELOT TONGUE!

So which is the front end and which is the hind end of the rolypoly? (This one looks translucent, but the ones in my yard are black.)

[guppiecat]

I believe that the left side is the "head".

I had no idea that they came in black. The ones around here a grey, and I sorta viewed the translucency as what happens to the grey when they're well-lit.

[research time]

Wow, there sure are a lot of types and names for roly polys.

* armadillo bug
* carpenter
* cheeselog
* cheesy bug
* doodlebug
* pill bug
* roly-poly
* potato bug
* sow bug
* roll up bug
* chuggypig
* chucky pig
* slater
* gramersow
* wood bug

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the sticky-outy things on the right are for.

I'd never heard "sow bug" before, but "pill bug" (and rolypoly).

[guppiecat]

I'm pretty sure those are false antennae. A lot of insects have them, as it confuses a (stupid) predator into mis-guessing which direction they'll flee towards. The classic example is the swallowtail butterfly.

I must admit that I have my doubts that a roly poly can move sufficiently quickly for this to be effective... maybe it's residual.

(In the course of writing this, I have thought of another possibility. Maybe the bits where the real antennae join the head are sensitive, and the false ones protect that region when it's in ball form?)

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

I wondering if they are used to hook the ball together when it rolls up.

[hrrunka]

Typically "wood-louse" over here, for no obviously apparent reason...

[mplsfish.livejournal.com]

Some of these names belong to other distinct bugs. For instance a doodle bug has a distinctive nesting habit that involves entertaining children like Mark Twain.
Potato bugs are what ate my potatoes this summer. The have wings and are kind of brown. They can dig really fast.

I have heard them called sow bugs. I don't know if there is a real sow bug.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Here in Southern California, at least two of those are distinctly different species (though both are sometimes called rolypolys) -- pillbugs roll up into an almost-perfectly spherical ball, whereas sowbugs are broader and kinda just fold up in the middle, making a kind of lozenge. I don't remember if there's any difference in taste -- after all, it's been 78 years since I was three years old (which, I think, is the canonical age for eating them).