I grew up in another country, and where I came from, small spiders are like toys, where kids get their own spiders and use them in spider competitions. The game is simple, just get a barbecue stick and each player holds one end of the stick. Then a spider is placed on each end. Then we let each spider fight each other and who every falls down the stick first, loses. Another game is with beetles where their hard wing shell is folded up and pinched on one end of a slitted barbecue stick and another on the other end facing each other. They are placed in a lined circle area on the ground, preferably on soil and not concrete and it is like a sumo match. With all these games as kids, we sometimes tend to experiment. And we have done moth larvae versus a spiders where the moth larvae won since it has some stinging hairs. I have also got a moth larva and placed it in a path of red ants just to see who will win this battle and I have seen a moth larva lose to the large volume and group effort of red ants. I remember my wife watching this also as I was curious with the battle that was just happening on the gate of our house. And here is one interesting video, but these are not kids having fun. These are American soldiers spending some time having fun with insects and spiders (a spider is not an insect.) Probably to temporarily take out the loneliness of being away from their family and being sane with the insane war. Below is some specie of spider versus from ants. Although the spider won, these ants are not red ants. They are black ants that are not usually equipped with claws on their mouths. Aside from that, ants have the advantage in numbers and a good communication skills to cal for backup. This is a case of a limited number of ants within a plastic bottle and a very big spider. not really that big, but too big enough for the ants. Well I know this is boring. But it is interesting to me. 🙂

I heard over the radio that this weekend is the Orion meteor shower. These meteor showers happen once a year and usually are named after the constellation where it occurs. These meteor showers don’t really look like it is raining meteors, but you may get to see one or two or more shooting stars in a night. Shooting stars are not really stars but small objects like rocks that when are captured by the earth’s gravity and accelerates, they generate enough heat to melt them up and being small, they don’t have the opportunity to even reach the earth’s land or sea surface.

Meteor showers that make more than one occurrence of these shooting stars more than once in a night are usually the fragments of a comet left behind from the path a comet takes. And since these comets have a fixed path, so do their fragments have a fixed location and when the earth passes by this path, this is when we see the meteor showers.

Problem is I do not know where to look. I used to have a software on my computer that shows all constellations in the night sky, but I uninstalled it. I usually ask Mike Lopez who has a telescope at home and knows his constellations well but he was offline. I tried searching, and Google was just not that updated with the current sites talking about the meteor shower. And maybe it is about time to buy my own telescope too. And this brings me to thought of all these other stuff I want to buy, like a night vision cameras and binocular cameras. But maybe I’ll do these next time when I have a house with a big back yard to set things up and will probably get into astronomical photography. I think that would be cool.