Who done it?

Images of undisturbed subjects in their natural environment. All subject types.

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tpe
Posts: 478
Joined: Sun Aug 26, 2007 4:07 am
Location: Copenhagen Denmark

Who done it?

Post by tpe »

This looks like a horse fly, perhaps Tabanus eggeri? Very big for a horse fly, probably about 20mm long. The pictures arn't great, unfortunatly there were a lot of very curious cows trying to help me by licking the sweat of my brow as i tried to get into a suitable position to take the picture, they also brought a lot of their own biting flies with them. But what gets me is how did it end up in this position, such a big insect so very neatly impailed through its eye on a spike of barbed wire, is there a Vlad the impailer in amongst the Lyoniese robber flies? There was a small hole in the thorax, and it was obviously dry and hollow but otherwise it was more or less undamaged. I would have thought if a bird had done it it would have eaten the fly afterwards, and anything small enough to be parasitize it wouldnt have been able to impail it. If was a human executioner then very daintily done but why? Could it actually have been an accident? these things are supposed to have exceptional eye sight and be very good fliers? Has any one any insight into how it lost the inside of its eye?

Image


Image

Thanks for looking guys :)

tim

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Tim,

This topic is just full of odd effects!

I don't have a clue about how the fly got impaled. All your reasoning sounds fine to me.

But the odd thing I notice is that when I look at your topic using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1, the images don't display. In IE 7.0 they're fine. When asked about properties of the broken images, Firefox reports correct URLs ending in .jpg, but with type "text/html". If I open just the image in its own tab in Firefox, it comes in fine.

I've never seen this before.

Perhaps there's something unusual in the configuration of scientificillustration.net? Are you by any chance trying to block hotlinks except for some specific exceptions, and somehow accesses via Firefox don't qualify?

--Rik

augusthouse
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Joined: Sat Sep 16, 2006 1:39 am
Location: New South Wales Australia

Post by augusthouse »

There is a spider behind all this I suspect (catch and drag). Clever spider.

Regarding the images - I had to right-click the image and 'show picture' in IE7 as initially all I was seeing were the little boxes with the red X.

Craig
To use a classic quote from 'Antz' - "I almost know exactly what I'm doing!"

rovebeetle
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Location: Vienna, Austria
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Post by rovebeetle »

augusthouse wrote:There is a spider behind all this I suspect (catch and drag). Clever spider.
Yes, but who put the horse fly on the spike? I still think that could have been a shrike originally.

Cheers
Harry

lauriek
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Post by lauriek »

I'm seeing the same thing as Rik from here, at home I think I'm still running FF3.0 and I did not notice this issue when I glanced at this thread last night...

On the subject of how the fly got there, I notice some bits of web, I reckon a spider caught the fly, which was then dead in the web, and I reckon the wind has driven it onto the barbed wire spike... Just a guess! I don't think the fly could have done that itself!

Planapo
Posts: 1581
Joined: Tue Nov 07, 2006 2:33 am
Location: Germany, in the United States of Europe

Post by Planapo »

I get the pictures displayed without problems using Firefox 2.0.0.16 .
Who done it?
I´m with Harry!

"A biiiiiiird!"

Here, a scene of the great BBC documentary series on the natural history of typical specimens of Homo sapiens inhabiting Great Britain comes to mind.
The title of the series is "Little Britain". :mrgreen:
And I am talking of the scene where an individual called "Andy" explains to his friend "Lou" what has just ruined the freshly poured and smoothed out concrete of a sun deck while "Lou" was not paying attention for a mo. "Andy" pointing upwards into an empty sky and still with a wet, concrete-grey back explains to "Lou" who had done all the hard work: "A biiiiiird"!

--Betty O:)

(I love British comedy and hope that some of you who remember this scene are smiling with me!)

tpe
Posts: 478
Joined: Sun Aug 26, 2007 4:07 am
Location: Copenhagen Denmark

Post by tpe »

First off, i must say thanks for all the explanations about what is or isnt happening with the pictures. I have contacted my host before because this has been happening for over a year now. That time they said that there were problmes with some IPs in the european union (myself included). But Ric you are in Washington, and Craig australia, Lauri the UK and Betty round the corner in Germany, so that seems to have covered at least three contents, so now they are going to get some stick as they really arnt a cheap hoast, grr, and it was impossible for me to say that it was'nt just my IP :).

I am still not convinced that a spider did this, it would have to be a really really strong spider, as the fly is pretty big on its own, but having checked out the wikipedia on shrike it sounds like they do it a lot :).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrike

tim

Gordon C. Snelling
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Joined: Sun Aug 13, 2006 3:13 pm
Location: California

Post by Gordon C. Snelling »

I agree, Shrike.

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