Weekly Five, and an update on the green bug

First, the bug.

I planned to send my photos to What's that Bug?, but when I went to the site, I found this announcement:

We're Swamped!!!!!!!

We've Returned
(05/29/2007) We were in Ohio between May 20 and May 29 and we returned to over 700 emails. Sadly, we can only answer a few.

There is such a thing as being too useful, I guess.

I loaded my photos, instead, on Bug Guide. Hopefully, someone will help with their identification. The real difficulty is that some of these creatures go through several different shapes and habits in the course of their life cycle. So that a nymph, which I'm thinking this guy is, may not look anything like his adult form, nor even live in the same environment.

Next: science links, the weekly five.

1. May as well give you Bug Guide's home page. Well worth just wandering around.
2. Astronomy picture of the day. Yesterday's was amazing; I was going to link to that. But today's is wonderful, too. I'm going to go back and browse the archives.
3. Sharks do too get cancer! On Junkfood Science.
4. Arctic ice caps reach tipping points. Scary, but a bit premature.
5. And GrrrlScientist passes on a report on Body Bugs. Denialism blog explains this in a more credible, less credulous fashion, in Folie a news. (Not to say that GrrrlScientist is credulous, but the producers of the report certainly were.)

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to look at those astronomy pics. G'night!

An interesting (and worrisome) spider post

Arctic spiders. I didn't even know there were such things.

On Stolen Moments: A Green Digest, today's post was about these spiders and the changes coming to them with the thawing Arctic.

Source story from Reuters.

"In the winter they hide under the snow where the climate is quite mild,"

The Worldwide Fund for Nature International gives an example; the Glacier Bay wolf spider.

"(the Glacier Bay wolf spider only lives in southeast Alaska, and its habitat is at risk from glacier recession),"

This is in a 1992 Discussion paper. 1992! How slow we are to pay attention!