This week I have a mini mystery object for you in the form of this specimen from the Grant Museum of Zoology Micrarium:
Any ideas what this might be?
As usual you can put your thoughts in the comments section below. Comedy responses welcome!
Zygoma
Adventures in natural history collections
Zygoma 
Looks like a lot of liquid to ‘siphon’ or ‘pour’ into that specimen tube, hope that you ‘coped’. Seen something like that before, or at least as alike as a pea in a ‘pod’
I sooo want this to be an assassin bug. It’d be called Irritatingchildus ninjai.
Oh cripes! I just realised what it is: the growing embryo of an Alien. When t has developed a bit more it shoots out of the egg and latches onto your face. We need NASA to develop tech, not just stuff to blast away encroaching asteroids, but formaldehyde sprays – instant death to and preservation of these buggers.
Where did you find my pre-school drawing of my grandma with her beehive hairdo?
I’m torn between obvious copepod or less obvious lice-type bug… sea-bug, land-bug, all the same 😉
Not too sure about this one but it looks like if it has a sanguine temperament…
So how many guesses do we get? And can I say I am firmly against the ‘dealing with a pea covering’ camp. I’ve seen bucket loads of them and nothing with what appear to be oversized antennae in that position. Jones can disagree if he wants….
You know what? That ‘abdomen’ makes me suspect this may be a larval thingy rather than the reproductive stage of this particular arthropod.
We’re all agreed it’s an arthropod right? (Oh the horror and shame if I’m wrong about that!)
Totally changing my tune…’dealing with peas’ it is. What kind? I’m working on it.
Ewwwwwwww. That’s nasty. I’m going to have nightmares about this one.
So, taking everyone else’s hints about this being an oar-foot, may I guess that the genus sounds like one of those Roman emperor chappies? One of the nasty ones…
I think you might be referring to a Synonym of the current Genus… It now starts with an L (like the second part of the common name) and the specific name might well be the same as its host (like the first part of the common name…
Ta.
Although I can’t follow palfreyman and Richard – too cryptic for my feeble brain. I do agree with a genus beginning with L and ending in ‘us’ with a species that sounds like a semiaquatic wippomorph after a good polish. I’d love for this to be my biological genius coming through, but I really can’t take credit…Thank you high res images from this summer’s trip to the Grant Museum!! I want a micrarium too…
palfreyman was referring to “Caligus” (Caligula was the emperor he spoke of) which is a synonym of Lepeophtheirus. I was guessing the species as Salmon Louse (Lepeophtheirus salmonis).
Yep. But we (you) got the genus right, just the wrong species…