This is not a randomly generated name.
The Cottony Cushion Scale Insect is true blue Australian and was accidentally loosed on Californian Citrus trees DESTROYING THEIR ORANGE ECONOMY.
To mop up the plague they imported its arch nemesis...... the ladybug,
oh, and the Assassin Beetle. hah. Seriously.
It spends its life being helpless, sucking on leaves and getting coated in wax.
Also it secretes Honeydew, and I really thought that shit was made up.
Honeydew is a sugar-rich sticky liquid, secreted by aphids and some scale insects as they feed on plant sap. When their mouthpart penetrates the phloem, the sugary, high-pressure liquid is forced out of the gut's terminal opening. Honeydew is particularly common as a secretion in the Hemipteran insects and is often the basis fortrophobiosis.[1] Some caterpillars of lycaenidae butterflies and some moths also produce honeydew.[2] Honeydew can cause sooty mold—a bane of gardeners—on many ornamental plants.
Ok, so after this it gets fucked up.
Delicious
First of all i remember as a kid being encouraged to EAT these eggsacs coated in honeydew and sooty mould because they tasted sweet, and didnt actually look like horrible insects. Really, i used to hunt this stuff down on leaves during lunchbreak :c
I'm pretty sure gut's terminal opening in english is BUGS ASSHOLE
NOW FOR THE SERIOUS HORROR
Dad leaves parasitic body parts in his own daughter, which produce sperm that fertilise her eggs. He is both father and grandfather to his own grandchildren.
On top of that, these insects are mostly hermaphrodites. With the exception of the odd pure male, almost every individual is both male and female. They reproduce by having sex with themselves, fertilising their own eggs with their own sperm. And this means that scale insects can be father, mother, grandfather and grandmother to all of their grandchildren.
In most hermaphroditic animals, an individual grows up and develops the organs that make both sperm and eggs. But that’s not the case for the cottony cushion scale. When it mates with itself, it fertilises its own egg with its own sperm. Then, after the point of conception, yet more sperm invades the embryo. This “infectious tissue” creates sperm-producing organs inside the daughter* and the resulting sperm eventually fertilises the daughter’s eggs.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/07/15/hermaphrodite-insects-fertilise-daughters-with-parasitic-sperm/
The male of the species almost exclusively lives on as living sperm inside generation after generation of girl-bug.
The male of the species almost exclusively lives on as living sperm inside generation after generation of girl-bug.
In short their family tree looks like this
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