Friday, July 2, 2010

Scuttle

It’s not that I am doing nothing; I am doing little worth mentioning, where watching a bug crawl across the tiles becomes something to ponder.
 In this case, a wireworm, the larval stage of a click beetle, and this particular one the largest I have seen, either on my floor or elsewhere.

The question is not why I chose to dip the soon-to-be bug in ink and watch him scamper, but rather, why have I seen four of these things in my studio this week. Small ground beetles, I am quite accustomed to seeing, more often than not as carcasses — no, husks — strewn beneath a spider’s den in one of the back rooms. Flies come and go with similar dispatch, and I suppose spiders handicapped by one-forth meet the same fate (twas not I). However, wireworms are most often associated with dirt and root crops one finds in said soil.

I don’t believe there are any potatoes left in storage, but I am not necessarily motivated to double-check.

Still, enquiring minds and all of that, so I think to image search the wireworm as a matter of convenience for those less inclined to google and discover something I had wondered about for some time. The little white cylindrical segmented worms out in the fields... well, it seems they are wireworms, and while I see where I may have been under the impression that they were not, given the large variety of types, had I looked for the images years ago, I would have an answer to the question I posed to someone supposedly in the know; yet, perhaps my description had been lacking. At any rate, it was obvious I was under the wrong impression in the dungeon.

Well then, if not, then what? 

Not thoroughly analytically addled,  I thought again about my observations on the frequency of some bugs. All too familiar with squirmy rice, I could rule out flies. Spiders have no such stage in development. Yes, google shows me beetle larvae.

Oops. Should make for an interesting title change for the drawing.

On other fronts…oh, never mind. Make sure you read Quincy.

4 comments:

Ten Mile said...

Just checkin' the comments. Dumped a security program.

Yakshi said...

Very interesting idea. I would never have thought about a critter as an art-creation device.

And thanks for the mention.

joxum said...

Looks like some kind of freak creature with stick arms and a big tormented mouth.

/j.

joxum said...

Looks like some kind of freak creature with stick arms and a big tormented mouth.

/j.