[ExI] blue bug

[spike at rainier66.com]

Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
Subject: Re: [ExI] blue bug

 

Yes, cool!  But please get your technical terms correct:

 

This is a rolly-polly and nothing else.

 

bill w

 

 

BillW, being from the south, I know exactly what you mean, but I feared our colleagues here would not.  Your suggestion successfully avoids the term “bug” which I would prefer to reserve for insects.  The whole incident has me thinking now about all the bugs which are neither insects nor arachnids.  A rolly polly is a crustaceans and still an arthropod, but not your classic “bug” which is way cool in itself.  They even look ancient, ja?

 

The seven pairs of legs, how weird is that?  Seven pairs?

 

We know there are others: centipedes and such as that.

 

And this: everywhere I have ever been has them, which is why we have so many different names: pill bugs, armadillos, potato bugs, sow bugs, rolly polly, woodlice and so on. 

 

A blue rolly polly is one which has caught a iridovirus: 

 

http://www.porcellio.scaber.org/woodlice/wliceod.htm

 

Infected woodlice should be called web link bugs, because the color of my web links on email are pretty close to what that sick bastard looked like.

 

Blue Woodlice
An iridovirus can infect woodlice and at advanced stages of infection virus accumulates in such large numbers that it forms crystalline structures in the diseased tissues. These crystalline structures give an intense blue or purple color to the woodlice…

 

I didn’t realize my patient was terminal:

…Individuals infected to this extent will usually die within a short time…

Oww, damn.  RIP, weird blue pill bug.  You taught me much.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 12:06 AM, <spike at rainier66.com <mailto:spike at rainier66.com> > wrote:

 

Cool!  I was out walking this afternoon and saw what looked like an armadillo bug, but it was blue.  I have seen millions of those things, but I have never seen a blue one.  I took him home, looked it up and learned a lotta cool stuff.

 

I already knew armadillo bugs (some call them pill bugs or woodlice) aren’t insects or arachnids, but I learned that they are crustaceans, the most common of the few crustaceans that are terrestrial.  

 

Then the next cool thing: blue woodlice are ones that have a virus!  No kidding:

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20180504/22af72d1/attachment.html>