Cold-blooded links

Lizards. We rarely see them in the wild up here in Canada, and I miss them. I remember them in Mexico, outlined like carvings on every sunny wall until we came too close, then convulsing once and disappearing into the bougainvillea. In Oklahoma for a year, we kept an old aquarium full of anole lizards; in the evenings we caught moths that came to the lights and slipped them, live and fluttering, under the screen top. The lizards would take only live prey. I loved to watch them snatch the moths out of the air with their tongues.

Here in BC, I once found a Western Skink in the Southern Interior. Once only. They are resident only in a small area, and blue-listed, partly due to the impact of invasive plant species.

Other than that, Canada hosts only 4 other species, according to Wikipedia.

So I was happy to find two blog posts this week on lizards. Tame, certainly, but still ... "Mike O'Risal" celebrates his bearded dragon's 11th birthday on Hyphoid Logic. And I learned something; I never thought of them as relating in any way to their humans. So much we don't know!

The next lizard story has kept me chuckling all week. From A Blog Around the Clock, why we should have paid attention in biology class.

Spiders: Mo starts off by saying, "Spiders make my skin crawl..." His loss, but he posts a fascinating look at their silk and other spidery matters, in Spider Silk & Spider Senses. Kevin says, "Spiders are just plain cool." And follows up with a report on two papers in Spider Double Whammy!

Bugs in general: Or, more explicitly, Insect Porn. A Flickr pool.

And off the topic, a very funny YouTube video. With an edge. Via PZ.