Sadly, I’ve lost all the information about this photograph, including who took it and who sent it. A reverse image search has drawn a blank. Perhaps the reader who brought the picture below to my attention will fill in the blanks. At any rate, this is a moth—and I don’t even know the species—that is said to resemble a dead cricket infected with fungus. Presumably bird predators will shy away from a dead, infected prey.
Crickets are indeed affected by fungus, and do look a bit like the moth. Here’s one from Ohio Birds and Biodiversity
Another fungus-exploded cricket, from a tweet and photo by Phil Torres, who calls this “The most impressive, insect-exploding fungus I’ve come across. Poor cricket.”
And I thought tomato hornworms parasitized by Braconid wasps were creepy…
Yikes. Fungus is creepy stuff.
It was me. I saw it on Twitter. Again.
I’ve had fish get fungus & it’s the stuff of sci fi horror! Forget Day of the Triffids, there needs to be Day of the Mycosis.
It’s in the family Sesiidae – possibly in the genus Melittia. Many species have ‘hairy’ back legs. Hope this helps.
Wow! Never saw anything like that.
Those are interesting antennae for a moth. I wonder if it is really a skipper (Hesperidae) or Castniid? The wings are soooo tiny. How does that thing fly?
Seemy comment above and search for “Melittia” in Google Images!
Yes, I see that some of those antennae are swollen at the tips like hesperids…I didn’t see your earlier comment due to a browser glitch that just pulled up older cached versions of this page. Thanks for the info!
I thought is was a colorized Rorschach test and I don’t know *what* I think I saw!
That’s terrifying.
It’s ‘the last of us’
Another astonishing piece of mimicry I saw recently (sadly only on television) was a species of moth or butterfly whose caterpillars formed up into a line and collectively had an uncanny resemblance t a small snake. It was in a rainforest somewhere in Papua New Guinea, I believe, and was discovered during an expedition filmed by the BBC.
I’d be interested to know of other examples where the mimicry depends on several individuals combining in this way.
Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.
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