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Giant Water Bugs!!!! :D
11 years ago
It’s giant water bug season apparently! The fiance and I found several in one place but they were mostly smooshed. I only found one small one. THEN... we tried this new place that I’d never looked before around midnight tonight. They were bigger than any I’ve ever found before and there were SO MANY, I didn’t even have enough containers for them all… which isn’t a problem I run into often! I’ve exhausted myself from excessive amounts of joy.
I kept 3 giant water bugs for years in a tank and fed them feeder goldfish you can buy at the pet store for .16 cents each. They are low-maintenance pets, but can be dangerous to keep, so if you catch some, be extremely careful and make sure they have no way to escape their enclosure!
Video of all 5 newly-acquired water bugs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNiDwgCYw8w
Video of the puny first one we found feeding on a fish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU9sQhDI-I8
Video of my old water bugs from 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO_moySOv4A *WARNING* do not watch these last two if you don’t want to see a fish being eaten by a bug.
I can’t tell you the times people have given me shit for feeding a “helpless little fish” to my waterbugs, btw. It’s amazing how people can put more value over a “cuter” animal’s life than one they find “disgusting”. There is no other way for these creatures to eat, and they deserve to live just as much as any other animal, predator or not.
and the parking lot is just off a swampy greenbelt, where brown widows, banded water snakes and cuban treefrogs abound, even saw a very lost crayfish one humid night
but there're few possibilities of something with a thumping wing beat whizzing past your head at midnight and you can only hope it was one of the resident giant katydids or sphinx moths and not a toe-biter
if you're lucky you'll be able to track it until it lands gracefully on the wall near a light source and be reassured it was one of the former,
conversely, if it goes crashing headlong and skidding across the asphalt you can't help but feel you've dodged a bullet!