Celebration! It took me 5 years to collect 100 stories about and around 100 different animals. Each story started with an encounter in the wild, and a photo.
It usually took me a good while to find a story, and to do my research on it. Surprisingly often I learned historical facts about the life of famous zoologist from the past. Vendettas, fatal journeys, poor handwriting, pen pals. Many original descriptions of species are a hundred or more years old, and luckily many are available online. It’s fun to read!
I found a lot of uncertainty when it comes to the classification of animals, and plenty of common name confusion. There are still so many new species to discover, or to reclassify.
And since I like numbers, here’s a ranking of the classes of animals I wrote about.
Out of 100 species, insects form the largest group of picmybug animals.
35 insects and 35 stories, thereof 8 butterflies and moths, which are seriously not even under my favorite animals. 7 Beetles and 4 bees follow. So far I only wrote about 3 true bugs on picmyinsect, I mean picmybug.
The second largest group of animals I wrote about is the class of arachnids, I wrote about 27 species, for example two species of tarantulas I found in their habitat. I wish there will be many more in the future.
3rd place goes to the 16 species of fishes, with 5 shark species included. Since I’m diving a lot, there will be many more to come. For sure Tiger sharks, Whale sharks and Mantas were amongst the most impressive animals I’ve ever seen.
Same as on picmybug, in real life insects form with estimated 1 million species the largest class of animals. Arachnids with 100.000 species are number 2, followed by molluscs (85.000 species).
My stories became much longer with the time. The first five stories (a snake, a crab, a bug, a spider, and a lizard) were in average 270 words long, while the last five (three fishes, a turtle, and a beetle) contain on average 727 words.
I usually don’t have favorites, so there’s not the one favorite story I wrote. But I do remember some facts. For example it was quite funny to find the jumping spider that was part of a deadly spider hoax many years ago. Researching what happened to the largest aquarium fish in the world was a challenge. Mautam and Thingtam are still unbelievable events. Kangfuxin, ladybugs in wine, wolbachia, and just recently letters to the pope(s) about turtles.
Picmybug in numbers:
35 insects (8 butterflies, 7 beetles, 4 bees), 27 arachnids (1 scorpion, 2 tarantulas), 16 fishes (5 sharks, 3 rays), 8 reptiles (3 snakes), 7 molluscs, 2 birds, 3 mammals.
There’s much more to come, for example a tasteful bug, a woman in disguise, a painkiller, and something I was looking for many years…
BTW the image is made with meta Ai. Since Ai is pretty useless for my research, I decided to use it for Instagram to promote this blog… @picmybug
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