Monday, March 06, 2006

You know you're an entomologist-in-the-making when...

You start thinking caterpillars are cute! Like this little bugger I caught just the other day!





I caught it happily crawling around outside my uni's lab a couple of weeks ago and since I had some vials that are used solely for the purpose of keeping little bugs, I caught it and kept in a vial for a while. I had this nice idea of keeping it until it turned into a butterfly then releasing it. i even named it Bugs (after Bugs Bunny, coz' the of the two antenna thingies that look like bunny ears. Plus, it's a bug, so....) !Unfortunately, once I transfered Bugs to a bigger container to make sure it had enough space to emerge, it died after a few days. I suspect it was because God-knows-what-chemicals or other stuff were kept in that container before and the poor caterpillar got poisoned. Poor thing. Couldn't even give it a decent burial coz' I tossed onto the soil outside my lab and like ten seconds later, it was swarmed by ants. A couple of hours later, and Bugs remains were no longer remaining. So sad! Oh well, I still think it was a better death than the one my fellow research assistant was planning - a super fast spin in a centrifuge that probably would've resulted in instant caterpillar mush. Did I mentions he hates caterpillars?

Around the same time I caught Bugs, I also caught a spider, a smaller spider which my fellow research assistant put in the same vial together with the bigger spider and resulted in the bigger spider making a meal out of the smaller spider, another smaller green and pink caterpillar that jumped about when touched but died after a day, and a little grasshopper. I had the wise idea of trying to feed an ant to the big spider a few days after its big meal, but they ended up killing each other (and I even missed the action coz' I was watching tv after I put them together. :P). So right now, the only live bugger I have is the grasshopper, which seems to be doing quite well in its vial (I feed it, of course). I've had it for quite a few days and it's even moulted! So I'm waiting to see just how big it can get. It's still too small to take a good picture of it, though. Not quite sure if I should name it too, lest it dies on me again. Don't wanna get all sentimental with my bugs. Right now, I just call it Mr. Caterpillar and hope it's a male.

Oh yeah, I just started full-time work as a lab demonstrator and a tutor this week, so I might actually start getting too busy and stop harassing every cute little insect I see.

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