Here she is on the bed I made for her:

In this one you can see her bum foot, sans two toes;

She rolls and rubs in the bed every day. I never expected her to like it this much but she spends every evening lounging in it.

Yesterday I left the house to go for a walk but didn’t get far when I spotted this caterpillar on the sidewalk:

It’s the larval form of a luna moth, Actias luna.

I have no idea what this black spot might be, but I posted the same photo on www.bugguide.net asking for an answer.

There’s a good chance that the mark could be of parasitic origin. Caterpillars are unfortunate hosts to a myriad of wasp parasites that lay eggs inside them. The eggs hatch and the developing larvae live inside the caterpillar and eat all but its vital innards to keep it alive as long as possbile. The wasps emerge from the caterpillar, leaving a gutted husk.

If you’re the kind of person that thinks about these kinds of things, you might be wondering how the wasp eggs and larvae go undetected by the caterpillar’s immune defenses. I wondered the same thing until I found a paper in which researchers discovered that certain species of wasps use viral particles to commandeer the caterpillar’s physiology and avoid detection of the invading eggs and young.

Tomato hornworms are parasitized by Braconid wasps. The wasp pierces the caterpillar’s body and injects its eggs along with viral particles that are manufactured in the female wasp’s ovaries. Scientists analyzed the genetic information in these viral particles and found that the genes from these viral particles match the wasp’s own genome. How can they match? One is a virus, the other is an insect. In other words, the particles are indeed viral in nature, but their components lie within the wasp’s own genome. The wasps make the virus!  More that twenty different genes coding for characteristic components of nudiviruses – insect viruses often used in biological pest control – are expressed in the wasps’ ovaries (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090216100425.htm). This most likely happened millions of years ago when the wasp integrated the genome of a nudivirus into its own and used it as a vector to transfer their own genes.

Here’s a photo of a tomato hornworm covered with 154 braconid wasp cocoons.  As if it’s not bad enough that the larvae develop inside the hornworm, they then force it to carry them around until they emerge. Hornworms are pests of tomato plants so, as a a person obsessed with tomatoes, I can’t say that I feel too much pain for this worm.

There are over 100,000 species of wasps known to science with many more yet to be discovered. Most of them are parasitic, so there are untold numbers of examples of insane and scarcely believable host/parasite interactions going on.

Again, I say you can’t make this stuff up. If you think that the scene from Alien where that youngster creature explodes from that guy’s chest was unique and scary, think again. Far worse things happen in nature. Far worse. Like this (please watch this video, it’s unbelievable):

The Barnes Foundation houses one of the finest collections of nineteenth and twentieth-century French painting in the world. An extraordinary number of masterpieces by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse provide a depth of work by these artists unavailable elsewhere.

The Barnes Foundation houses one of the finest collections of French Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early Modern paintings in the world, including an extraordinary number of masterpieces by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (181), Paul Cézanne (69), and Henri Matisse (59). The collection also includes important works by Pablo Picasso (46), Chaim Soutine (21), Henri Rousseau (18), Amedeo Modigliani (16), Edgar Degas (11), Vincent van Gogh (7), Georges Seurat (6), Edouard Manet (4), and Claude Monet (4).

“Extraordinary” is no exaggeration. We went today and both Gene and I were flabbergasted. Here’s the website. If you live in PA, Delware or NJ, you owe it to yourself to visit. It’s really nice to have something like this so accessible.  Don’t just show up though – apparently they can’t have too many people traipsing through the museum at once so advance reservations are required.

I was at the Humane League yesterday. This is Senorita, a beautiful American bulldog who needs a home with a strong and active human:

She’s a very nice dog, but strong as an ox and in need of lots of exercise. I always liked American bulldogs and haven’t met a nasty one yet. They were originally bred to hunt boar in the south USA.

Chancey is about as cute as they come and won’t last long at the shelter.

Skip, a kind and friendly male beagle, was adopted a month ago and returned. I can’t imagine why because he’s a great dog. It’s hard to get a photo of a beagle without their nose to the ground, so here’s a shot of his undercarriage:

This is Grandpa, a shepherd mix, found as a stray. He’s active for an older dog and should be lounging on someone’s porch instead of at the shelter. Who the hell allows their senior pet to end up homeless?!

We just booked a trip to Amsterdam for November and I am almost nuts with excitement. We’re going to take the train to Brussels for a day and possibly Düsseldorf if we have time. The weather isn’t exactly balmy that time of year, but tourism drops sharply and most of our activities will be indoor since we plan on visiting art museums and eating/drinking.

Little Buddy continues to putt along. His abdomen waxes and wanes with fluid retention but not enough to keep him from walking or enjoying the couch. Violet is doing well but I can’t get a picture of her no matter what I do. Treats have no appeal and nothing will convince her to mug for the camera.

I stayed at The MAve hotel which was in the Flatiron district on Madison Avenue, just a mile from Penn Station and a block from Madison Square Park. I have always loved New York and post 9/11 it’s better than ever – clean, renovated and proud to claim that it has the lowest crime rate of any major American city.  I arrived at 8:30 am Friday morning which gave me enough time to pop into Paron Fabrics and dash to Kalustyan’s to pick up a variety of spices I wasn’t able to find anywhere else. If you like to cook and don’t know about it, you need to check it out, preferably in person but their website carries everything they have in the store. They have almost every spice known to the human race and I could have spent hours there. I bought several Middle Eastern spice mixes, aleppo pepper, Spanish paprika and the second best dates I have ever eaten, still on the stalk and straight from Jordan (the first best dates I’ve ever eaten were those that I found lying on the ground underneath a date palm in Alice Springs, Australia). Fresh dates and a glass of milk – heavenly!

Sunday was probably the most fun. We spent a few hours in the park photographing canine models under the instruction of Jamie and Nichole. A few times I looked around and realized we were surrounded by a small crowd of people wondering what was going on. Given the shocking and interesting things ones sees on a daily basis in NYC, it came as a surprise that we were the center of so much attention, but I guess that’s the power of dog-love at work. We even had more models than needed since so many bystanders offered their pets as photo subjects. Here are a few things from the shoot: