All the bugs

I'm in the tropics. Quite literally in the middle of a rainforest. You probably already knew this, if you're reading this. The thing about rainforests is that there are a lot of bugs around. Also a lot of everything that are not bugs. I use the word bug, because I want to refer to not only insects but also spiders and millipedes and all the other things that aren't insects but are included in the super-vague term bug. The fact that there are a lot is not surprising, because that's just what you'd expect from a rainforest. But yeah, this is not a place to be, if you're afraid of anything that could be classified as a bug.
I mean, look at these things:

It's about as long as my middle finger. It's enormous. Well, was. And then it flew away. And again, I don't even know what it is.

Ok. Let's first talk about the mosquitoes. Because mosquitoes are pretty much the first type of bug you think about when you think of the tropics (except for maybe the spiders, but I'll get to those in a sec), because they carry like all the diseases. (You'd think. When I was in Australia five years ago I actually didn't realise there would be mosquitoes, because mosquitoes are a nordic thing, right? I did realise it pretty fast, though, once my shins started to itch from all the bites.)
By now I've pretty much learned to ignore the mosquitoes, but in the beginning, they were the most annoying thing. I thought, multiple times, about how yeah, it's cold in Finland, but at least we only have mosquitoes for four months a year. Unfortunately I didn't (for some reason I can't explain) take a picture of my legs a few weeks ago, when I had been bitten all over and then scratched so that the legs (below the knee) looked absolutely terrible. And by terrible I mean exactly like you'd expect if you have fifty bites and then scratch them for a few weeks. By now I've gotten rid of all but the worst ones that I keep ripping bloody every couple of days so they never heal, and my immune system has learned not to freak out so much about the first ones. I assume. The other option is that I'm just not getting bit as much as in the beginning, but I don't know why that would be, so...
What was I talking about?
Right, mosquitoes. So in Finland we basically have two kinds of mosquitoes, the small ones that bite you and make a sound that drives you crazy when you're trying to sleep, and the ones with the ridiculously long legs. I'm pretty sure there are more than one species of both, but I can't tell the difference between the different species, so what ever. Here I haven't seen any of the long-legged ones at all, but I have noticed that the mosquitoes I think of as normal-sized are not all the same. As in the differences between the mosquito species are big enough, that I can tell some of them are different from others. Not that I can tell all the different species or have any idea what those species are, but yeah, there are mosquitoes here that look completely different from each other. There are also some tiny mosquitoes here, and some that don't make any noise at all, like all the ones in Finland. Silent mosquitoes are weird.

Ok, moving on. I didn't expect to write so much about the mosquitoes. Though I guess you can't really talk about insects here without talking about mosquitoes.

The other bugs I think people think about when thinking about the tropics are the spiders. And yeah, they are everywhere. Literally. From the yard to the kitchen to bathroom to bedroom. Most of the ones I've seen (=notice) are daddy longlegs or harvestmen or whatever those are called in English. The spiders that are way more legs than body. I mostly ignore them, because those are harmless. I think. I mean, in Finland they are. But this is a rainforest, which means anything could be dangerous and I'd have no way of telling, because there are so many things here and I know literally nothing about them.
Soooooo that. Yeah. Not something I thought about before, but I am thinking about now. I don't actually know if some of the long-legged spiders are dangerous.
.....
It'll probably be fine.
Anyway.
There are some more normal-type spiders around too, but I haven't seen any of the really big ones. I mean, the spiders I have seen are bigger than most spiders in Finland, but that doesn't take much, since the spiders in Finland are very small, on the scale of all the spiders in the world. Which is nice, because while I'm not too queasy about spiders, if I have a choice between being in the same room with a giant spider and not being in the same room with it, I'm gonna choose not being in the same room with it. Unless it's in a terrarium.

What else do we have here worth mentioning...

The millipedes. So we have these small (~3 cm) brown millipedes that curl into a curl when poked all over the house. I don't actually have anything more to say about them. They're millipedes. I ignore them.

And the butterflies! The butterflies here are huge, compared to the ones we have in Finland. Well, some of them. There are also butterflies that are normal-sized from a Finnish perspective. But then there are the gorgeous palm-sized vibrant blue butterflies I keep wishing I'd get a good picture of, but no such luck. Yet. I still have months left. Maybe I'll get a good picture of a hummingbird and that time too. That's one of my goals here. Get a good picture of a hummingbird. I occasionally catch some feeding in the flowers in a bush outside, but they are so ridiculously fast that by the time you've spotted them you should already have the camera ready and aiming at the bush to be able to have any kind of hope catching one in a picture.

Ok, back to insects. Ants, to be precise. The ants are almost as annoying as the mosquitoes. They don't carry diseases, though. But the fruit bowl is full of ants. The flour is kept in the fridge so the ants don't get to it. The sugar is kept in a tightly closable jar, so the ants don't get to it. The ones we have in the house are tiny, but they're everywhere. If you leave anything with food crumbles out for like ten minutes there will be ants all over it. Or fruitflies, if what ever you left out are sweet enough. If you peel and cut yourself some fruit and then leave for like ten seconds to take the peels away the fruit plate will be filled with fruit flies. In this particular house it's also possible that if you turn your back for a second there will be a cat in your food. So that's fun.
Anyway. The ants are annoying, but also harmless.

And then there's this:

So like I said, I'm not queasy about insects. Mostly. There is an exception, and that is the hymenopteras (which apparently don't have a name in English, they just use the Latin name for the group). For those of you who know even less about insect taxonomy than I do, Hymenoptera is the group of insects that includes ants, wasps (parasitoid and others), bees and sawflies (which you've probably never heard of). Basically all the things that will sting you for defense, or to deposit its eggs in you.
(I admit I don't actually know if there are any that would use humans as a host for the eggs, but that doesn't make their enormous stingers any less terrifying-looking.)
The hymenoptera are a group that I don't like. At all. If I have a choice, I won't go anywhere close to them, ever. Well, except for the ants, which are mostly alright, if annoying. Though there are some pretty scary ant species too, that will bite hard or sting or something. But all of the rest. Ugh.
This picture is from our backyard. Some local hymenoptera, I guess some sort of wasps, decided to build a nest in one of the trees there, literally two meters from where one end of my hammock is tied to. I am not happy about it, because that means no more hammock (because there aren't any really good spots here for a hammock aside from that one). Because there is no way I'm going to spend sometimes hours a day sitting two meters from a wast nest. This picture is from about a week ago, by now the nest is a lot bigger and a lost readier. This one is still open at the bottom. The only way I was able to get a reasonable picture of it at all is because of the excellent zoom I have in my camera.
So yeah. Not cool.
Apparently our backyard is a deathtrap. First a hole appearing out of nowhere literally beneath your (my) feet (foot) and now a wasp nest. I wonder what's next.

And now, so as to not end on a bummer, here's a doublebanana for you:

A very, very, very raw doublebanana, but a doublebanana nevertheless.

I mean look at that, it's so green it's practically glowing. Also true of the live version, not just the one on screen.

I can put another picture of it in next week's post, so you can see how it looks when it's yellow. Assuming it'll get yellow in a week. The bananas we got last week are still not ripe to eat. Then again, that picture is from Saturday evening, so maybe it's ripe by next Tuesday. Also, the bananas here seem to turn yellow days before they're actually ripe enough to be good to eat, so it'll probably be yellow, even if it's not ripe yet.

Ookay. I guess that's all for today.

~matu