In the French food store: 5 porcupines, 15 gazelles, 20 bats, and lots of caterpillars.

The police raided the place and — as the UK Telegraph puts it — "carted off 200 lbs of bush meat belonging to the unfortunate animals stored in three freezers in the unnamed shop situated in a run-down part of Paris’ 18th arrondissement."

Unfortunate animals? This was meat, frozen meat. The animals were dead, as dead as the animals that yield all the meat that is sold in stores that are not raided by the police. The only unfortunate animals in this scenario are the human beings who might get sick if this meat is tainted in some way. It's silly — perhaps intentionally so — to refer to a caterpillar as "unfortunate."

And what's the big deal — if you're going to eat animal — with eating odd things like porcupines? It's actually quite the thing in France:

Exotic animals have been legally making their way onto French plates of late in upscale restaurants. In Montmartre — just down the road from the shop police raided - Le Festin Nu (The Naked Lunch) bistro gives customers the chance to select from a variety of insects. Specials include palm weevils with beetroot and oil of truffle; water scorpion with preserved peppers and black garlic; or grasshopper with quail’s eggs. In Nice, Michelin-starred chef David Faure offers an “Alternative Food” menu at his Aphrodite restaurant. Mealworm and crickets share the billing with pate de foie gras.

"Grasshoppers boiled in every direction, ricocheting off my face and chest."

"Some latched on to my bare arms and a few tangled their spiny legs into my hair. Others began to crawl into my clothing — beneath my shorts, under my collar. They worked their way into the gaps between shirt buttons, pricking my chest, sliding down my sweaty torso. For the first time in my life as an entomologist, I panicked."

Jeffrey Lockwood, in "The Infested Mind," quoted at The Dish.

Too bad that book's not out on Kindle. I ended up buying "Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon's Army & Other Diabolical Insects," which is.

ADDED: "Wicked Bugs" also uses the verb "to boil" to describe grasshoppers:

A plague of locusts swept across the American West in the summer of 1875.... When the larvae hatched in the spring, it looked like the ground was boiling with them....

A locust... is little more than a grasshopper under pressure.... Grasshoppers usually forage alone, spreading out across large areas when food is plentiful. But during a drought, the creatures might be crowded together, and that proximity brings on chemical changes that cause the females to lay very different eggs. The nymphs that hatch from those eggs grow longer wings, have a propensity to live more closely together and travel in dense packs, and are themselves capable of laying eggs that can survive longer periods of dormancy. They even change color. In essence, a fairly benign, stable grasshopper population transforms itself into something entirely different— a migratory plague of locusts capable of swarming and devouring everything in its path.

This explains why the settlers claimed to have never seen these particular locusts before the ominous swarms arrived, and why plagues of locusts have always been seen as having some divine origin. They are entirely unfamiliar creatures, having transformed themselves from ordinary grasshoppers to larger, darker, never-before-seen invaders.

Here's a nice illustration, from the Kansas Historical Society website:

"This is unbelievable, but the fruit fly G tridens has somehow evolved to have what looks like pictures of ants on its wings."

"Seriously, its transparent wings have an ant design on them complete with 'six legs, two antennae, a head, thorax and tapered abdomen.' It's nature's evolutionary art painted on a fly's wings."



Wow! Awesome! It was even in the New York Times! Evolution, baby! What can't it do?!

Well, it didn't do that, but it did produce a human mind capable of settling down after viewing something awesome and figuring out what we're really looking at:

Returning to the viral ant-winged photo, it would appear that the fly is supinating its wings (twisting the wing 90° and pressing forwards to display patterns), which can occur both when a species is pretending they’re a threatening spider as well as in species with courtship wing displays, which doesn’t help us decide what’s going on — is there a female just off camera that’s being courted, or is the fly threatened by the giant camera lens in its face? However, if you look closely at the photo you can see that the middle and hind legs are actually curled up under the body and the fore legs are not resting in a natural position at all — they look more like a ballerina en pointe, with the last leg segments curled and with the tops of the “feet” (the tarsomeres) resting on the surface of the substrate — which leads me to believe the fly in the photo may be dead, or at least heavily compromised, and not actively displaying its wings at all!

Putting everything together, it leads me to believe we may be choosing to see ants where they don’t actually exist.

So what's really awesome is the entomology grad student Morgan D. Jackson and not the fruit fly... or The New York Times.

Or would you have been happier if the story of a fruit fly with ant wings had really been true?

Teaching kids to be neuroscientists... or psychokillers... you decide.

At Metafilter:

After a TED Talk demonstration and a successful Kickstarter, Backyard Brains plans to release a kit instructing kids to strap a miniature backpack to cockroaches and insert electrodes into its brain, allowing the cockroach to be controlled by a smartphone app. Some scientists are less than pleased with the ethics of the project.

At the "less than pleased" link, BBC quotes a Backyard Brains spokeswoman, who says they're trying to get kids interested in the "woefully under-taught" subject of neuroscience, which is "crucially important... especially... when diseases of the brain such as Alzheimer's take a heavier toll within society."

That "heavier toll" presumably refers to the aging Baby Boomers, who are going to be hard to handle as our brains fail, and wouldn't it be nice if insect-trained youngsters one day implant devices into our brain that can be used to keep us moving about — going to the bathroom, bathing, dressing, getting in and out of chairs and beds — on the force of whatever is left of our own atrophying muscles instead of needing to do the physical work themselves?

Everyone will be a winner, as we feel independent despite senility, and the younger folks can avoid having to touch us and listen to our nonsense. They can be in another room, feeling like they're playing a video game. And so what if they prank us? We'll imagine that we are sprightly, enlivened by impish silliness. Oh, I don't know what just got into me!

And of course, there's the old philosophical problem: How do you know that isn't already what life is, with some devil moving you this way and that, putting ideas into your head?

Investigating "everyday sadists."

"In the study’s first experiment..."

Students who chose to be bug-killers were presented with three cups, each holding a live pill bug. To anthropomorphize the bugs, each was given a name: Muffin, Ike, or Tootsie. Bug-killers had to drop a bug into a modified coffee grinder, force the top down, and grind the bug up....

(... Though the machines emitted crunching sounds, the researchers said, “no bugs were harmed in the experiment.”)

During the execution of the assignment, some bug-killers quit after one or two. But some asked for more bugs....

"She has a bong in the shape of a penis."

"It was a birthday present, and is one of a few clues to her interior decor; the others being that she keeps fish and cockroaches ("Why u do not [sic] have any pet at home?")...."

#4 on a list of 10 things learned about Madonna via her "Ask Me Anything" stint on Reddit.

"The Dung Beetle Is a Climate Change Hero."

Hail, dung beetle.

"'Crazy ants' invade Southern states, altering ecosystem."

"Also known to scientists as Nylanderia fulva, they're called crazy because of their unpredictable movements and swarming populations."

The bug is reddish-brown, about an eighth of an inch long and has a hankering for honey dew — with a side of electronics. The insects nest anywhere and are easily transported, but so far have mostly infested Texas and several Southern states after being inadvertently transported from South America by humans....

They cause about $146.5 million in electrical damage a year because millions of ants are electrocuted in small circuits or wires, where they seek warmth....

5 headlines from The Daily News.

1. "Couple having sex against window fall to their deaths."

2. "Woman, 70, with severe wound kept alive by hundreds of maggots after daughter leaves her to rot."

3. "Woman in the Netherlands had five to six 'foot orgasms' a day."

4. "California woman sentenced to life in prison for chopping off ex-husband's penis, then grinding it in garbage disposal."

5. "Son plants bomb in mom’s suitcase, killing her and 43 others during flight." (This happened in 1955.)

"What’s interesting is that just because a food is delicious doesn’t necessarily make it popular."

"You enjoy it because, well, people around you seem to enjoy it. This means that items can also change contexts. This is what happened to Pabst Blue Ribbon, which went from a working-class Midwestern beer to Brooklyn’s preferred Hipster beverage. It’s also what happened to Marlboro, a poorly selling women’s cigarette ('Mild as May') before being rebranded to appeal to men. In both cases, nothing about the product itself changed. But if the peer behavior around the product changes, so too does our appreciation of it."

From an essay called "How Lobster Got Fancy/The surprising history—from food for the poor, servants, and prisoners to a soldier’s staple to everybody’s idea of a delicacy—of 'the cockroach of the ocean'" — via Metafilter — which first made me think why would anyone write an essay about lobster after there's already a greatest-essay-ever-written-level essay about lobster, which, by the way, the first-linked essay quotes — how could it not? — but doesn't link. But there's some good info and analysis about the culture of food:

During the Great Depression, impoverished families in Maine would sneak down to the ocean in the dark to empty and reset their lobster traps and take home the day’s haul to feed their families. It was still seen, at least in Maine, as a food for the poor. It was considered embarrassing for children to have to go to school with sandwiches made of lobster meat.

During World War II, however, lobster wasn’t rationed like other foods, and so people of all classes began to eat it enthusiastically, and discover its deliciousness.

Things that are delicious that you're nevertheless disgusted by. Is it because you're disgusted by other people? If you know that's your reason, do you overcome your disgust? If you do, is that because you're ashamed of yourself for looking down on other people or because you think that the food of the common people is usually pretty good and actually just what you're looking for?

But you still won't eat the cicadas, will you?

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From the May 15, 2013 Amazon Associates Report:
Safer Brand 5118 Insect Killing Soap, Concentrate

Let them eat insects.

"The report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that eating insects could help boost nutrition and reduce pollution."

It notes than over 2 billion people worldwide already supplement their diet with insects.

However it admits that "consumer disgust" remains a large barrier in many Western countries.

Wasps, beetles and other insects are currently "underutilised" as food for people and livestock, the report says. Insect farming is "one of the many ways to address food and feed security".

"Insects are everywhere and they reproduce quickly, and they have high growth and feed conversion rates and a low environmental footprint," according to the report.

Mimolette cheese can't possibly meet the FDA's target of no more than 6 cheese mites per inch.

"Cheese mites are microscopic little bugs that live on the surfaces of aged cheeses, munching the microscopic molds that grow there. For many aged cheeses, they're something of an industry nuisance, gently brushed off the cheeses. But for Mimolette, a bright orange French cheese, they're actually encouraged."

French cheeses sing out in protest against U.S. government regulation:



ADDED: Is there some reason why we should be more upset about microscopic insects than we are with microscopic bacteria? From Bill Bryson's (delightful!) book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life":

Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye but unquestionably there. It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung—or frass, as it is known to entomologists....

If you had the right equipment and a peculiar measure of motivation, you could find numberless millions of dinky creatures living with you—vast tribes of isopods, pleopods, endopodites, myriapods, chilopods, pauropods, and other all-but-invisible specks. Some of these little creatures are practically ineradicable. An insect named Niptus hololeucus has been found living in cayenne pepper and in the cork stoppers of cyanide bottles. Some, like flour mites and cheese mites, dine with you pretty regularly.

Move down to the next level of living things, to the world of microbes, and the numbers swell beyond counting. Your skin alone is home to about a trillion bacteria. Inside you are many thousands of trillions more, many of them engaged in necessary and helpful tasks like breaking down food in the gut. Altogether you hold about a hundred quadrillion bacterial cells in your body. If you took them out and put them in a pile, they would weigh about four pounds....

"I typed up a cicada story... not every piece needs to be about the meaning of the universe..."

"... but it did make a good point about cicada behavior: They don’t really interact with us the way other insects do...."

They’re in their own universe. They do not care about us. They don’t care about the war in Iraq, the prisoner abuse scandal, the presidential race, the federal deficit or the rising price of gas...

Try to interact with a cicada. It shows no fear. Indeed, it doesn’t seem to see you at all. It has beady red eyes but might as well be blind. If you pick one up it will wriggle its legs and maybe flit its wings, but with no genuine buggy emotion. They don’t know the basic animal trick of fleeing....

There is a temptation to scorn cicadas, what with their narrow, molt-mate-and-die agenda, the one-note song of the males that sounds like someone has left the pod-bay door ajar, and their general adaptive tendency to rely entirely on numbers rather than skill or savvy or strength or any other evolutionary adaptation....

That's Joel Achenbach, who hasn't heard of insect politics... because — as you should know by now...

Insects don't have politics.... they're very brutal. No compassion.... no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first insect politician. I'd like to, but.... I'm an insect.... who dreamed he was a man, and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake....

"Are the Periodical Cicadas coming to your town?"

"The next periodical cicada emergence, Brood II, will happen in the Spring of 2013 in CT, MD, NC, NJ, NY, PA and VA...."

Look out for cicada chimneys... also known as turrets. These are structures cicadas build out of soil, positioned above the spot where they will emerge.

Eating locusts in Israel...

... where there's a bad infestation going on.

Locust is the only insect which is considered kosher. Specific extracts in the Torah state that four types of desert locust - the red, the yellow, the spotted grey, and the white - can be eaten....

Locusts that have feasted on sesame plants acquire an oily, shiny tinge, and are said to be particularly delicious.

"A 22-year-old passenger caught carrying 207 pounds of dried caterpillars at London's Gatwick Airport on Saturday..."

"... told customs agents that the insects were meant for personal consumption...."

And: "Caterpillar Stew Found Cooking In Shop In Aubervilliers, France; Police Shut Down Location."

"I don’t endorse the argument of the philosopher John Rawls that no one is entitled to a high income because..."

"... even characteristics that we think internal rather than external to a person, like IQ and leadership skills and athletic skills and energy and good health, are ultimately the product of luck. Therefore, Rawls argued, no one should be allowed to keep more of his earnings than necessary to 'incentivize' him to exert himself in a way that will maximize the social product."

So says Richard Posner. His objection is:

That treats people like the cells of an animal’s body, or the ants in an ant heap. Rather my point is that, to the extent reducing income inequality increases overall social welfare, there is a case for programs, financed by the well to do, that increase overall welfare by more than the cost of the programs. There is no reason to think that the cost would impose a crushing burden on the well to do, a result that would be objectionable quite apart from the costs in diminished incentives, and related costs such as tax avoidance and emigration.

Chew on that. I was distracted by "ant heap." Who says "ant heap" rather than "ant hill"?  I'm more the literary type than the economic. But speaking of departmentalization of each of us having our various skills and predilections, whether inborn or cultivated, my searching for the answer to my heap/hill question brought me quickly to this Robert Frost poem, "Departmental":

An ant on the tablecloth
Ran into a dormant moth
Of many times his size.
He showed not the least surprise.
His business wasn't with such.
He gave it scarcely a touch,
And was off on his duty run.
Yet if he encountered one
Of the hive's enquiry squad
Whose work is to find out God
And the nature of time and space,
He would put him onto the case.
Ants are a curious race;
One crossing with hurried tread
The body of one of their dead
Isn't given a moment's arrest-
Seems not even impressed.
But he no doubt reports to any
With whom he crosses antennae,
And they no doubt report
To the higher-up at court.
Then word goes forth in Formic:
"Death's come to Jerry McCormic,
Our selfless forager Jerry.
Will the special Janizary
Whose office it is to bury
The dead of the commissary
Go bring him home to his people.
Lay him in state on a sepal.
Wrap him for shroud in a petal.
Embalm him with ichor of nettle.
This is the word of your Queen."
And presently on the scene
Appears a solemn mortician;
And taking formal position,
With feelers calmly atwiddle,
Seizes the dead by the middle,
And heaving him high in air,
Carries him out of there.
No one stands round to stare.
It is nobody else's affair
It couldn't be called ungentle
But how thoroughly departmental

Put that in your Rawlsian/Posnerian analysis.

"A woman in a Third Avenue West apartment was reported trying to catch bugs that weren’t there...."

Time to get back to the old Inter Lake police blotter news:

An Appleway Drive boy reported his mother was drunk and trying to kick him out. She told officers she was kicking him out due to his drinking and drug activity....

An officer assisted a man crawling in the middle of East First Street....

The Columbia Falls Police Department received a report from a confused First Avenue West North resident who said a man tried to come into the house and give the resident a $1,000 ticket, but didn’t say what kind. The resident told the man “I’m not interested” and shut the door.

The ultimate reason to switch to ebooks.

Bedbugs!!

That's hot news in the NYT, but of course, insects have been enjoying the nourishment of books for a long long time, and book-readers love to use the metaphor of insects-feeding-on-books for themselves. What do you think a bookworm is?

Bookworm is a popular generalization for any insect which supposedly bores through books. Actual book-borers are uncommon....

A major book-feeding insect is the book or paper louse (aka booklouse or paperlouse).... It is not actually a true louse.

Many other insects, like the silverfish (Lepisma saccharina) or cockroach (various Blattodea), will consume these molds and also degraded paper or the starch-based binding pastes – warmth and moisture or high humidity are prerequisites, so damage is more common in the tropics. Modern glues and paper are less attractive to insects....

Even less attractive: iPad, Nook, and Kindle.