"You know you're meant to be working in the zoo if you come across a beetle the size of a hamster and immediately start searching for a mate, rather than a hammer"
Actual story here. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr...
June 4, 2008
Slightly-disconcerting headline of the day
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3 comments:
I actually found one of these (dead) in '87, while living in Monteverde, Costa Rica. The friend whose house I was staying in had some largish rubber spiders, etc., along the couch, and I put it among them. Yep -- got 'er... :-) (Though such beetles are really as innocuous as june bugs).
I had no name for it before, didn't realize they were rare or endangered, though I never saw another one.
About 3" by 2", actually... not quite hamster-sized, though fully as massive as a large tarantula.
Daver
Well if they eat fruit, they're probably not terribly dangerous. They'll just scare the hell out of you if you're not prepared. (I know, I know.... just how the hell do you prepare for something like that?)
These little 'buggers' may feel creepy (like a June bug) crawling around on you, but they don't kill over a million people worldwide like malaria carrying mosquitos. These beetles are rare, so the 'strangeness' aspect is more scary than the actual 'danger' (or lack thereof). It's kind of like automobile crashs -- there's around 40,000 people killed in the US yearly from them so we barely pay them any mind. Check your Monday paper and in a state of 5 or 6 million you'll probably see anywhere from 3-10 fatalities in your state over the weekend, and it'll be carryed on page 15 of the E section because most people aren't too interested -- it's too 'common'/ usual/ordinary. But let somebody die of some weird, 1-in-a-billion disease like the flesh-eating-virus, for instance, and the MSM will be all over it for several months with lurid details and dire predictions based on straight-line extrapolations. The old 'man-bites-dog' gets coverage, but the 'dog-bites-man' often doesn't warrant a back page entry.
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