It is TICK SEASON in Australia, my friends. Keep an eye out, especially if you have pets.

This photo below shows a tick buried in human skin. My human skin. Gross, but bear with me, it’s a death-defying tale of high adventure. (🧵) This was a very difficult photo to take because this tick is SO SMALL that I had to use my biggest, beefiest lens at its full 5x magnification, stack several slices of focus together, and then crop most of the way in just so you could see something other than a tiny black speck.

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.

In this case, the job you have is coasting around on the forest floor at dusk and in darkness, squeezing under rocks and logs in search for a tasty bug body to feast on. The body can be alive or dead. Doesn't matter. /1 The job you want is working as a DJ at an arthropod rave. You look killer in your neon greens and blues. Your songs get the arthropod bods wiggling inside their segmented exoskeletons. You hum to yourself as you strafe through the leaf litter. /2

It's been weeks since she last slept. Her four enlarged eyes stare into the middle distance in every direction. The other four have given up and tumbled into the kind of line her mouth would make if it could make expressions. It can't. She screams without sound. The children never sleep. The children never stop. Eight squirming legs for each child. How many children? She has not counted. A hundred? 800 legs? Each movement of a leg disturbing another in a domino effect, a Mexican spider wave rippling around her abdomen.