The World Through Your Eyes

Today I saw a quite big red ant (for around here)…the pic is unfortunately subpar :confused:


Then this crazy beetle I’ve never seen before:

And this fat rose beetle fella had a crashlanding at home and I picked him up and waited for him to recover…shortly before lift off he decided to take a big, yellow piss on my hand :grimacing:

I swear these beetles are so fkn dumb, they ALWAYS crash land (I still adore them lol)

I want one here now lol sounds like a funny feeling

So a pure “guard ant”? How cool is that?? I was wondering where they supposedly had their wings xD
Looking forward to some sexy shots of the queen :smirk::grin:

Am actually very, very sure that we have ants around here wt a (slightly) venomous bite, doesn’t hurt nearly as much as a wasp sting tho. Didn’t know that some actually do have a stinger, gotta watch out for that in the future :sweat_smile:

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The ant looks blackish brown (just asking for clarification of the color as you describe it as reddish), and looks a bit like a carpenter ant (given the size and the dark color), but their is an odd flange on the thorax that makes me uncertain.
The beetle looks like a woodboring beetle, like a longhorned woodborer specifically, they tend to be nocturnal though so odd it shows up now.

May have been reflexing bleeding or defensive vomiting, beetles can do one or the other. They keep foul smelling fluid in their crop to deter predators.

Am fairly certain isn’t an ant then… Ant venom glands are in the abdomen…Also, mouthparts tend to be cutting/crushing not ‘injecting’ stuff.

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Yes, it’s a very dark red, blackish brown if you will. I’ll try to take a better pic if I get to see another one around here.

I wonder what made it show up midday then, it was in a quite calm place, there aren’t rly any obvious reasons like lots of dogs or kids who might disturb the wildlife.

Hm, it didn’t smell bad tho…and I handled it with great care, I don’t think that it felt like it was under attack…but maybe that’s it :confused: I never had that happen before wt them, but I was certainly surprised about how much fluid such a little bug could excrete.

I looked it up, it’s not venom but acid, but yes it’s an ant.

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Sooooooo… the Red wood ant, like all Formicines actually, has the ability to spray formic acid from its abdomen (the thing that makes them amazing is that they can do so at such range).

When an ant bites into an intruder or an enemy they often spray acid into the wound created by the bite. This is typically why people confuse the sting and the bite.
https://cisr.ucr.edu/images/red_imported_fire_ant_01.jpg
This is an example of the pose that ants may often take, although this is the unrelated red fire ant.

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Here’s an old school motorbike if anyone is interested…

This was a V8 driven vehicle, he went 137 miles per hour for a mile in 1907… :exploding_head:

Was at a local museum today, it is the Glen Curtiss museum…

And by the way, how would anyone find this a comfortable ride?

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Thread necromancy is in the air again, folks!

Not a great image, since I am about 15 feet / 5 meters (metres) away with my cell phone, trying to capture it quickly on camera before it flew away…

Bull frogs are out and making lots of funny noises again!

Some irises opened up yesterday and today too!

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Ok, first of all, my phone is a Nokia 3210. Still, I can look for a few pictures I made in some places.

Let me take an imaginary pause before clicking “reply” while I search for a couple to mimic having a conversation in person. […]

I’m back! Ok, so this is gonna start a little bit cheesy but, you asked to see my world and a very important part of it, if not the most important is my partner. This is a photo I made for some little text for the university along the lines of sustainability, nature, progress, you know, hippy stuff. She happens to study in the biomedical field and have diabetes type 1, that photo is in an old abandoned orchard right before a hospital decently equiped for investigation. I didn’t have a lot of time and despise my love for art, I’m not really good creating it, if anything maybe literature would be my not-so-shameless try (in my mother tongue, obviously, in english I can’t even understand Shakespeare properly).

This one is one extremely big organ in a rather big church in a small city at the east of Spain. It’s hard to capture the charm of it, since it really feels the building.

This castle is called “La Alcazaba” and it’s one of many remains of the muslim architecture in Spain, actually placed in Málaga, south of Spain. The part I really like about this side is that no one ever shows it as an example of it (and for a reason) because the front of it it’s really impressive, full of green and beautiful, but the fact this was constructed side by side to a roman theatre wich was used until not so long ago always has been a plus for me. Also, there’s a little cinema near by where they pick quite good and strange films and people playing music so, it makes a quite nice place. I will put a photo of the front part to make you understand. Part of the charm of this photo is nearly impossible to make such an “empty” capture, no matter the hour of the day.

This place, as watery as may look, used to be filled with ton of cats, who sleeped in the rocks like iguanas. Sadly, the mayor decided to start getting rid of them even being a good thing for tourists and never being aggresive. Now there’s more problems with insects and rats in the area (full of restaurants) and the city hall will wonder why. Still, sometimes water in this area turns silver with the reflection of the sun over a huge surface like in the second one, not made by me.

Well, I think that’s enough. Also, I happen to have most of photos in either paper, the other semi-dead computer or lost in time.

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I love old fortifications and castle towns, I have a few in my vicinity as well though not quite as large and obvious as the one you’ve posted here. The place looks amazing but way too warm.

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Oh Fraggles, you’re in fact right. The place is too warm. Just not for me! I’m a sun lover to the end of the days. I can be at 40 degrees and thinking “Hell yeah, this is good weather”. I can’t stand cold though, less than 5 degrees and I start shaking and asking why God has left me.

Probably because I’m an atheist, we will never know

Spain has some very cool castles, no way near as much as the United Kindom but still a good number. One of my favourites is “La Alhambra” in Granada, south as well.

These photos are not mine but I’m sure you will like them.
PD: One cool thing about the Alhambra is there is a castle and then a royal palace, less focused on militar defense. Also there’s a very nice example in Sevilla of a Cathedral wich was built and destroyed several times by catholics and muslims alike, demolishing, building and using parts of it.

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Went out and had an early morning walk about last night, left home at about 3:30. Decided to snap a few photos to see how they’d come out. Turns out my cellphone does not have a great camera.


This is supposed to be about half an hour before sunrise. Of course it’s summer so it never really gets very dark. My phone decided the sky was WAY too bright and blew it out entirely, but it created a rather nice little colourscape that I enjoyed none the less.


At this point I think the sun has technically risen, just hiding behind a low mountain range and a few trees. These scared the shit out of me by sneezing at me while I was trying to take another picture in the opposite direction.


We have a few of these things littered around the place. I bet the farmer is real fond of it, having to leave it where it is right in the middle of his field and having to make it accessible to the public as well.

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I think your phone takes quite nice photos, @Fraggles. The difficulty of a camera phone to capture light aberrations is quite normal, I would say. I kind of like that effect that ended up in that photo.

I guess you didn’t see them ahead of time, huh? Is this not along your usual walking path? I would imagine you would be familiar with the animals that are on your way.

And whatever that pedestal/stone slab is, it’s pretty cool. Are you or anyone else able to read what it says on there?

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No I knew there were horses there, there’s horses everywhere this particular stretch. But a horse suddenly sneezing behind you is a still a bit startling. It’s also not at all as bright as the images suggests so it was a weird sound coming out of a high contrast shadow space.

Yeah the runes are very legible so easily translated. They pretty much just say
“Hi, my name is…” (what?)
“my name is…” (who?)
“written by…” (chika-chik, slim shady)

Well the 3 different names are actually on there but I don’t remember them at this point.

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That’s cool… here we don’t see a whole lot of stuff like that…

I can imagine! :slight_smile:

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Hey people, I forgot I took these photos I intended to post them here and totally forgot :o
these photos are so old that the path has been changed now, as shown in the newer pictures.

And then today I got there before the sunset and took some really nice ones!

You can just about see Blackpool tower in the next shot! I’m too far to get a great shot of it though, it’s nice looking at it from afar, the white destroyed looking part on the left is where the path was destroyed and replaced with that tasty new tarmac :stuck_out_tongue:

And also the cruise liner that occasionally passes by did so :0

Thank you for your time and please enjoy my home town :3

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Thank you for sharing, Kyle!

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I have friends there…MAN!!!:scream:

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wish that was me :sweat:
(ps also has to mention, june is summer, not spring, silly editor) :smile:

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We take our Seasons serious in Canada. We enjoy each and every one of them to their fullest.:yum:

https://www.google.com/search?q=summer%20begins

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don’t where the seasons start change based on where you are on the globe? like that fake country australia pretends their winter is now I thought.

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Correct, the northern and southern hemispheres have opposite seasons.

Also, the dates of seasons vary from place to place. Where I grew up, the seasons were tied to months, so summer is all of June, July, and August, and autumn starts on the first of September.

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