It’s strange how I’m trying to pick a major that interests me and will be useful in the future, but when I say I don’t know what I want to major in people just ask “well what kind of job do you want?” and my answer is always something along the line of having my own small farm where I grow the majority of what I eat (obviously what can be grown), where I have some goats and chickens and bees and sheep (ngl I know the sheep and goats are high reaching goals), where I don’t have a 9-5 company job where I want to tear my hair out.
I want the freedom to organize and mobilize and just the freedom to do what I need to do. I want to sit around at night knitting and spend the days tending to gardens and animals. I don’t want to sit at a desk for 8 hours and have a little part of me die everyday.
And the person’s reaction is normally a nervous chuckle and they kind of just close up. No more helping, which I don’t blame. I don’t know what I’m doing, how would they know? Anyways this is a rousing story of me trying to pick classes and a major
image that you’re puttering around in the undergrowth of a temperate forest looking for mushrooms when you see a brightly-colored beetle out of the corner of your eye. it’s not a mushroom, but you reach out curiously anyway.
MISTAKE.
a “pop” like someone stabbing a can of beer with a letter opener rings through the forest, and suddenly your hand is covered with boiling corrosive liquid! roll 2d6 for burn damage and start over.
congrats, you’ve just made the blistering acquaintance of a brutally belligerent beast- it’s the
and this episode of Weird Biology was brought to you by the letter “B”.
Bombardier Beetles are a type of ground beetle with an 8th-grade spelling bee of a name. they come in a striking array of brown and amber shades, but what’s REALLY striking about them is their signature defense move.
you’ve probably heard of the Bombardier Beetle before, and with good reason! these singular insects have one of the most effective, awesome, and outrageously violent defenses on the planet! and it’s centered around exploding butts. I swear I am not making this up.
if animals had ratings, these guys would be “R” for Excessive Butt Violence
now when I say “exploding butts”, what I actually mean is “they shoot a spray of boiling noxious liquid in a wide arc, injuring or outright killing an attacker. from their butts.” there’s a bit of nuance, there. and while there might not be an actual explosion involved, you have to agree that that’s weird as shit.
but how does a mere insect manage to pull off what’s basically a real-life Pokemon move? well, to explain that, we need to get a little more scientific. brace yourselves, it’s time to learn everything your high school teachers never wanted you to learn about butt chemistry!
high school never taught us the important things we really needed in life, especially if it involved butts.
to start with, Bombardier Beetles are structural marvels with guts set up like an organic version of a rocket engine. no, seriously. they have two chambers deep inside their bodies with a valve connecting them both to a special reaction chamber in their teeny beetle butts. (teeny beetle butts would be a pretty good name for a prog rock group.)
one of these chambers contains hydroquinone, a noxious disgusting compound that many other beetle species use to make themselves taste gross and inedible. (like carrying around a “do not eat me!” sign all day.) but Bombardier Beetles use this chemical for a more creative purpose, because their other chamber contains hydrogen peroxide. which does NOT get along with hydroquinone, and demonstrates this fact with ULTIMATE VIOLENCE.
EXTREMELY DO NOT EAT ME.
when these two chemicals are combined, it results in a violent chemical reaction that creates a) a metric fuckton of heat very quickly, and b) a mildly toxic liquid called benzoquinone. and when something impolite gets all up in the Bombardier Beetle’s face, they open the internal valve to combine the chamber contents and now it’s go time motherfucker.
this reaction creates so much heat that it instantly boils the resulting compound. this boiling liquid builds up pressure like the inside of an Instapot, at which point the Bombardier Beetle opens its butt valve and sends a pressurized jet of boiling toxic liquid directly into an attacker’s face with a POP like someone opening the world’s most painful can of soda. and it all happens in just a few milliseconds.
a few milliseconds is a very short time in which to lose your eyebrows.
unsurprisingly, this move is super-effective on every single enemy Mother Nature can field against the Bombardier Beetle. this superhot jet can kill smaller predators on contact and blind or inconvenience larger ones badly enough to scare them off. (this category includes you, by the way. DO NOT TOUCH.)
this elaborate defense is so incredibly unstoppable that the Bombardier Beetle is damn near ubiquitous. there are over 500 different species of them, found on every continent except Antarctica. you may have even seen one today and not realized it!
there are 40 species in the US alone! WATCH OUT.
for all their incredible butt-rocket fury, Bombardier Beetles look… pretty unremarkable. none of them reach even an inch in length, and they tend to inhabit forested and scrubby areas. if you didn’t know exactly what you were looking at, you’d think it was just another itty bitty forest beetle scuttling its unobtrusive way through life. but that just goes to show that Unyielding Butt Destruction can come in very small packages.
but because they are so eeny teeny weeny, Bombardier Beetles really don’t pose much of a threat to humans unless you’re actively harassing one. in which case, cut that out! don’t be an asshole, c’mon. watch where you step though, because the only predator Bombardier Beetles can’t win against is a thick-soled boot.
just don’t hold one directly up to your face.
but being inconspicuous can be a very good thing! because humans rarely interact with Bombardier Beetles, their populations seem to be pretty stable. they’ve lost some habitat, but they’re adaptable enough to make up for it.
Bombardier Beetles will live anywhere that’s damp enough for their eggs to stay moist and babyful, and they have no problems decimating populations of smaller snack-sized insects while warding off any creatures foolish enough to try to munch on THEM. and it’s all thanks to a butt-blasting deathsplosion unequaled in nature. let’s hope these eeny weeny meanies stick around for a long, long time.
Bombardier Beetle, you’re cool enough that I don’t mind typing your terrible name one last time!
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IMAGE SOURCES
img1- UPI.com img2- arabiaweather.com img3- Wikipedia img4- Fun Animals Wiki img5- NewsWeek img6- OneKindPlanet img7- rt-bi.nl img8- Discover Magazine
Bombardier Beetles aka Those things I used to harass my cousin with. Poor Timmy.
Just because nintendo SAYS the Koopalings aren’t Bowser’s kids, doesn’t mean they aren’t his kids. You can’t have a bunch of kid underlings and NOT just instantly be their father. Even if it’s not biological…. BESIDES, it’s canon that all babies come from storks in that world, let the man just have a horde of babies because the stork won’t STOP SENDING THEM.
Maybe each koopaling wasn’t technically Bowser’s kid but little bastards that none of the Storks wanted to deal with so they dumped them at Bowser’s every time because they kinda look like him and so they can be his problem and Bowser just rolled with it.
… I mean why else would they have their own rooms in some versions of Bowser’s castle, their own airships and castles with their names on it if they ain’t special to Bowser in some way? Petey Piranha doesn’t get that kinda treatment.
You get it. You’re a keeper.
And, being Bowser, he probably doesn’t even question any of it, questions are for nerds. Except possibly how did “Roy come pre-packaged with sunglasses?” because let’s face it, he probably did arrive like that.
being Bowser he probably did a little doubletake and then muttered “That’s a cool baby…” in a sort of alarmed tone
peter parker, expressing his affection as any teen would: thor i would die for you 🙂
thor, gripping his shoulders with the intensity of ten thousand burning suns: i would never let that happen
peter parker, later that week: i would die for you loki
loki, looking him dead in the eye: you will.
drax: [really bad joke]
peter parker: mr. drax? I would die for you
drax, with a pause spent determining that peter is probably joking and then a hearty guffaw: but my muscles and fighting power is several times your own! your death would be meaningless!
peter parker, in the middle of battle with no regard for his own safety: i would die for you
t’challa, who has lived with shuri long enough to know exactly what answer peter is looking for: then perish
Peter parker, jumping in front of steve: i would die for you mr. rodgers
Steven Grant Rodgers, a known idiot, somersaulting over peter: not if i die for you first
Peter Parker, one night over dinner: I would die for you aunt may
Aunt May, a worried mess and 100% done with this shit: not if you’re grounded for life you won’t
Peter Parker, out of the blue: I would die for you
its really weird to see all these articles about how people who have ADHD have sleeping problems but the issue I have is that if you look at it as a matter of your circadian rythym being out of sync? of COURSE you’re not going to be able to sleep. we don’t say people who can’t fall asleep at 4 pm and sleep 8 hours have insomnia, because that’s not a normally agreed upon time to sleep and its not your bodies time to sleep. if you tell someone to go to bed at 10 and they can’t sleep till 3 am sometimes in just not insomnia. people with ADHD are often wired to sleep from 4 am to 12 pm ish because of the delayed onset of melatonin but if you let us go to bed at the time we need? most of us actually sleep pretty well and consistently.
wAIT THIS IS AN ACTUAL THING THAT EXISTS
“For most adults the onset of melatonin is around 9.30 pm; in ADHD children compared to controls this occurs at least 45 minutes later, and in adults with ADHD even 90 minutes (van der Heijden ea, 2005; van Veen ea 2010). After melatonin onset, it normally takes 2 hours to fall asleep, but in adults with ADHD it takes at least 3 hours (Bijlenga et al, 2013).”
Look at me awake at 1:47 am and reblogging this post.
So I’m actually trained in therapy for addressing insomnia and one of the things we learned is that a good chunk of sleep problems are societal disorders – as in they WOULDN’T EXIST as problems if society didn’t assume everyone was on the same circadian rhythm and that being up and working 9-5 was mandatory/normal. Blew my mind and made so much sense. You are not the problem, society is literally the problem.
vanhalenofficial 