Source: 500px.com
Sleeping
1. “Mammatus clouds over northeast South Dakota, . US. Mammatus, also known as mammatocumulus (meaning mammary cloud or breast cloud), is a meteorological term applied to a cellular pattern of pouches hanging underneath the base of a cloud. They can produce some dramatic and unusual patterns on the sky and are also associated with severe storms.”
2. “Noctilucent clouds are crystals of ice hanging around 80 kilometres high in the atmosphere that catch the light of the sun long after it has set on the horizon. Natural nacreous clouds occur at altitudes of 20-25 kilometres. The cloud in this image was formed from the exhaust of a missile launched from a distant firing range.”
3. “Flying saucer or Lenticular cloud”
4. “Von Karman cloud vortices above Alexander Selkirk Island, Chile. These clouds look like they have had a hole punched through them. In fact they are naturally occurring vortices crafted by wind patterns on the clouds. In this image these cloud vortices (swirls down left) have been caused by the peak of Alexander Selkirk Island (bottom left) disrupting wind-blown clouds.”
(via whaoanon-old)
Source: telegraph.co.uk
Carnivorous caterpillar of the moth Eupithecia orichloris (only common name I can find is “Measuring Worm”) native to Kauai, Oahu, Maui, Lanai and the big island of Hawaii.
They hunt for prey by disguising themselves as twigs and waiting for insects to trigger sensitive hairs on their backs which prompts them to swing around and grab their prey.
Forget spiders, millipedes, ticks. These guys win the ‘most terrifying bugger on Earth’ award.
Something about it just looks wrong.
(still a pretty awesome monster though, damn)
(via nirdian)
Source: khoaphan
A new behaviour has been discovered in the fascinating life of ants: when faced with a food item that is too large for it to handle alone, the stinging ant Pachycondyla chinensis quite literally grabs a friend to help out. After assessing that an object such as a cockroach is too big to carry, the ant goes back to the nest and simply picks up another worker in its jaws - who will passively oblige, as seen in this image. The ant then returns to place it in front of the food, and with a bit of teamwork, the food can be shifted to the nest.
Ref: Ant workers carry friends over to help forage for food. BBC News [link]
(via nirdian)
Source: BBC
