Week Thirteen: Paederus Beetle

Common Name: Paederus Beetle, Nairobi Fly
Scientific Name: referring to all of genus Paederus

Domain: Eukaryota

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Arthropoda

Class: Insecta

Order:  Coleoptera

Family: Staphylinidae   

Genus: Paederus

Not-So-Fun Fact: The Paederus beetle is highly attracted to light, which leads it into homes and other buildings. When these lights turn off, the beetle often drops onto the inhabitants of the buildings, causing them to crush the insect’s body in their haste to rid themselves of the pest. When crushed, however, it releases a potentially rash-causing and even blinding toxin called pederin.

Description: This insect warns potential predators about its toxicity by its bright coloring. Its body segments feature alternating colors of black and red or black and orange. Though it is a beetle, it has very short wings and only some species of the genus are capable of flight. The body of a Paederus beetle is long, narrow, and quite small.

Environment: The Paederus beetle inhabits very hot and damp climates across the globe, enjoying swampy woodland areas. Particular regions impacted by this pest include Nairobi and the Iraqi desert.

Reproduction & Development: Paederus beetle larvae are staphyliniform in shape and hatch from small white eggs. Over the course of a few days to a few weeks, they hatch, grow, and pupate into fully grown adults, which live for a relatively long time for a species of beetle. These beetles reproduce sexually.

Nutrition: Paederus beetles eat rotting vegetables, worms, decaying meat, and smaller insects. Their diet classifies them as omnivores. Other than their poisonous excretions when crushed, they are generally harmless in their feeding habits to larger organism, though they may sometimes damage food supplies by their feeding on vegetables and meat stored for consumption by humans.

 

 

Week Twelve: Corpse Flower

Common Name: Corpse Flower, Titan Arum

Scientific Name: Amorphophallus titanium

Note: Many species of the Rafflesia genus are also referred to as “corpse flower”. Here I am researching the titan arum, a specific species of the Amorphophallus genus.

Domain: Eukaryota

Kingdom: Plantae

Phylum: Magnoliophyta

Class: Monocotyledons

Order: Alismatales

Family: Araceae

Genus: Amorphophallus

Species: A. titanium

Fun(?) Fact: The corpse flower is so vividly named because of its terrible stench, which reminded its taxonomists of rotting flesh. This stench is used by the flower to attract its favored pollinators, which include carrion- and feces-eating beetles. 

Description: The corpse flower is an extremely large plant for a regular angiosperm. The flower itself may be five to ten feet tall and features a bulbous central structure known as the spathe, which stores the plant’s new seeds. The petals form a dull pinkish-red bell-shape and fan out elegantly around the pale spathe.

Environment: The exotic corpse flower is indigenous to the Indonesian island of Sumatra, where its preferred habitat is rainforest.

Reproduction & Development: The corpse flower is differentiated as well by its unusual growth and sexual development. Anywhere from two years to ten years may elapse between a single plant’s blooms, as it requires specific environmental conditions to perform this activity. Between blooms the plant retreats to its underground body and root system, called the corm.  When blooming, its stench attracts its beetle pollinators, which become trapped inside the spathe and then are released coated with corpse-flower pollen, which will hopefully be carried inside another blooming plant that has managed to hoodwink the unfortunate beetles.

Nutrition: The corpse flower is a vascular plant, which means it pumps nutrients and water from the soil. Like most other plants, it also produces energy using photosynthesis. Unlike many of my other posts here, it is not deadly at all, merely unpleasantly scented.

Week Eleven: Hagfish

Common Name: Hagfish, Myxini

Scientific Name: Family Myxinidae

Domain: Eukaryota

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Class: Myxini

Order: Myxiniformes

Family: Myxinidae (this post covers all species; a primary genus of this family is genus Myxine.)

Description: I chose to put hagfish on this blog not because they are especially dangerous but because they are some of the most horrendous-looking creatures on this planet. Their bodies are long, fleshy, and whip-like, colored a dark pinkish-brown. Their mouths are jawless leeching suckers ringed by rasps that are similar but differ from teeth. This orifice is ringed by a set of sensory tentacles

Environment: Hagfish live on the seabed and in the twilit depths of the ocean. Here they encounter their already-decomposing food. The habitats they prefer are occur in very cold water, and are usually very dark, though still with some rays of sunlight. Hagfish crowd these environments, as they have a very high population. It is postulated that this is due to a low mortality rate as opposed to a high birth rate, because hagfish do not lay many eggs at a time.

Reproduction & Development: Hagfish hatch from one-inch-long eggs that occur in small numbers. At birth, they are hermaphroditic and for the most part miniature adults. As they develop they will only grow and form a definite sex, which may change over different breeding seasons. This process of foregoing a larval or nymph stage is known as “direct development”.

Nutrition: The main food source of the hagfish is polychaete worms and undersea carrion, especially the corpses of large marine animals which fall from higher levels of the ocean. Swarms of the creatures will latch onto gargantuan cadavers and rend strips of flesh using their tooth-like rasping suckers. Smaller swarms or singular hagfish eat decaying fish in the same way, and the animal is also known to capture and devour small marine invertebrates.

Week Ten: Platypus

Common Name: Duck-billed Platypus

Scientific Name: Ornithorhynchus anatinus
 
Fun Fact: The platypus is typically considered an adorable, if absurdly constructed, animal. However, the male of the species conceals a set of venomous spurs in his heels.

 

Domain: Eukaryota

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Class: Mammalia

Order: Monotremata

Family: Ornithorhynchidae

Genus: Ornithorhynchus

Species: O. anatinus

Description: When scientists were first presented with a platypus corpse, they thought that they had been given a taxidermist’s joke: a mammal’s body sewn to a duck’s bill. However, the platypus’s absurd anatomy evolved just like any other animal’s body: through natural selection. Its “duck’s bill” is extremely sensitive to aquatic vibrations and is used to detect underwater prey, and its short, waddling, webbed feet are used for swimming. The platypus is covered in thick, glossy brown fur.

Environment: The platypus is indigenous to Australia, and inhabits environments that include bodies of freshwater including rivers and lakes. The typical home of a platypus is a small burrow in the earth, often located in the banks of the lake or river which it frequents.

Reproduction & Development: The platypus belongs to a unique group of mammals know as monotremes, which lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young. They are still considered mammals, however, because they produce milk and are covered in fur. The young platypus is raised by its mother in her burrow after hatching from its egg, which usually spends ten days outside of the mother’s body before hatching. The young nurses for on average seven months after birth, and will become sexually mature in their second year of life.

Nutrition: The platypus mostly relies on freshwater invertebrates and fish for its food supply. It hunts by swimming underwater with eyes closed, relying only on the nerve endings in its bill for sensory perception of its prey.

 

Week Nine: The Black Plague

Common Name: Black Plague, Bubonic Plague

Scientific Name: Yersinia pestis

Not-So-Fun Fact: Yersinia pestis is the bacterium which causes bubonic plague, and was briefly discussed in association with the Oriental Rat Flea. This bacterium builds up in the gut of the flea and causes it to regurgitate the colony into the bloodstream of its victim, spreading the disease. Bubonic plague can cause swollen lymph nodes, necrosis of the flesh, weakness, chills, and death.

Black Plague

Yersinia pestis

Domain: Bacteria

Kingdom: Prokaryotae

Phylum: Proteobacteria

Class: Gammaproteobacteria

Order: Enterobacteriales

Family: Enterobacteriaceae

Genus: Yersinia

Species: Y. pestis

Description: The bacterium itself is a rod-shaped organism that lives in the gut of a flea. For the description of the flea, see Week Five: Oriental Rat Flea.

Environment: The area of the United States inhabited by the hosts of this bacterium is primarily rural areas west of the Rockies. The bacteria usually circulate in an enzootic system among rat and flea populations, spreading to other species only occasionally. Humans usually contract the disease from flea bites contaminated by the pathogen. Once present in the human body, the bacterium moves from the bloodstream to the lymphatic system, where it causes the formation of buboes.

Reproduction & Development: This bacterium undergoes asexual reproduction through the process of binary fission. This quick, simple method of reproduction allows the infamous technique of “blocking” the gut of a flea with the bacterial colony, which forces the partial regurgitation of the colony into the bloodstream of the flea’s victim. During the bacterium’s development it may be passed between fleas and their mammalian hosts many times.

Nutrition: The Black Plague bacterium is a parasite that feeds primarily on fleas and their host rodents, using fleas—usually the Oriental Rat Flea—as a carrier. Rats are the main hosts, but many other species may fall victim to the organism, including squirrels, mice, and chipmunks. Humans are not the preferred host, and especially not for the fleas, but when sudden die-offs of rats occur, the fleas have no choice but to feed off of humans, thus spreading the bacterium to humans. Yersinia pestis is known as a chemoheterotroph, which refers to its reliance on foreign organic molecules for nutrition.

 

Week Eight: Nile Crocodile

Common Name: Nile Crocodile

Scientific Name: Crocodylus niloticus

Fun Fact: From birth, Nile crocodiles are voracious carnivores who will kill and devour any living prey in their vicinity by biting and/or drowning the unfortunate creature.

Domain: Eukaryota

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Class: Reptilia

Order: Crocodylia

Family: Crocodylidae

Genus: Crocodylus

Species: C. niloticus

Description: The Nile crocodile is the largest reptile in Africa, at twenty feet in length and weighing more than 1,980 pounds. Its head tapers to a triangular snout, and its scales are for the most part olive green, with a yellowish underbelly and mouth.

Environment: This species of crocodile can be found in almost any amicable habitat in Africa, from the Nile River to Madagascar. It requires a ready body of freshwater and is therefore vulnerable to drought. It may briefly survive in saltwater estuaries, such as the Nile delta, but prefers rivers, lakes, waterholes, and reservoirs.

Reproduction & Development: During the dry season, Nile crocodiles breed and the females lay anywhere from 25 to 100 eggs. The female guards and cares for these eggs until they hatch, at which point she will assist in their escape from their eggs and lead them to the water. The female crocodile is a caring mother, who guards her offspring carefully from predators of all species, including her own. These offspring will become sexually mature at 7 to 15 years of age and live for up to 100 years.

Nutrition: Nile crocodiles are carnivores and eat nearly any animal prey available, including large game and juveniles of its own species.

Week Seven: Mala Mujer

Common Name: Mala Mujer

Scientific Name: Cnidoscolus angustidens

Not-So-Fun Fact: Mala mujer translates from the Spanish into "bad woman" and refers to the nettle-like stinging hairs combined with toxic sap that cause a painful, inflamed rash on the skin of anyone who comes into contact with the plant.


Domain: Eukaryota

Kingdom: Plantae

Phylum: Magnoliophyta

Class: Magnoliopsida

Order: Euphorbiales

Family: Euphorbiaceae

Genus: Cnidoscolus

Species: C. angustidens

Description: Mala mujer is a two-foot-tall perennial shrub that sports diminutive white flowers. Its white-spotted leaves are covered in fine nettle-like hairs that inject themselves into the skin. Despite these needle-like hairs, mala mujer is classified not as a nettle of the Urticaceae family but a toxic-sap-spurting spurge of the Euphorbiaceae family.

Environment: Mala mujer is generally found in the Sonoran desert of the southern United States and northern Mexico. It prefers hot and very dry climates.

Reproduction & Development: Mala mujer is a flowering angiosperm, which means it reproduces using flowers that must be pollinated and must turn into fruits. This form of reproduction is sexual.

Nutrition: Mala mujer requires very little water or nutrients but much sunlight, as it is a desert plant. Its roots are succulent, which means that they retain much water for the plant underground.