lightsinthedistance-modernlife

I've been busy lately, in a good way. My current project is identifying all the species of insects, spiders, millipedes, and other arthropods I've found at the Barbara A. Beiser Field Station (BBFS) over the past few years as an undergraduate at Marietta College. I spent many hours at the field station and thoroughly explored much of it, taking many photos along the way. I have an article about my experiences coming up in the next issue of the Marietta Natural History Society's newsletter, which I'll link to when it comes out. UPDATE! : You can read my article here (PDF warning). It starts on page 4, titled Beiser Browsings . So far I've identified around 200 arthropods from BBFS. The timeline for my sightings and collections goes back to 2010 or so, when I first started going there for things like labs and work days, and the identifications have been a long time in coming. It feels great to have so many identified though, as there hasn't been a taxonomic inven...

While on a night hike looking for fluorescent millipedes and whatever else I could find a few months ago (September 16th), I came across a most interesting arachnid. Now, it's important to note that Arachnids aren't just spiders: Arachnida is a large class that includes other organisms like scorpions, ticks, mites, solifugids, and harvestmen (or daddy longlegs, if you prefer). It's the harvestmen (Order Opiliones) that are most important to this post, and while the popular perception of harvestmen is a small-bodied organism with long, thread-like legs, this is not always the case. There's a surprising amount of diversity in the harvestmen: it includes 6,411 described species (estimates of over 10,000 total species have been put forward!) and 45 families. After spiders and mites, it's the third largest order of Arachnids. Which brings us to the specimen found on that cool September night: Not exactly what you were expecting, eh? This is probably the largest harvestme...