Title: Horsehair Worms As mentioned, here is the text: Snoutster: Hey! Snoutster: Do you know about horsehair worms..? When some bugs eat plants, they might ingest a horsehair larva. Snoutster: The larva can make the bug want to seek out water… Snoutster: Causing the bug to drown itself, and the adult emerges from the body! Snoutster: Pretty cool, right? Plumelle: … Snoutster: Aw come on, we’re insects! A lot of us are parasites! This barely even happens now… Now on to the usual description stuff! Ok so this one I started a couple months ago, and for some reason I didn’t manage to finish it until now. I was later planning to finish on Snoutster’s birthday (August 9th), but I didn’t even manage to get that deadline! Idk why it took so long, I am sorry that there have been barely any comics done so far this year! ;-; Also hopefully this one isn’t too disturbing for Scratch… it’s educational… TvT This one shows’s Snoutster’s personality well (finally), as he is a big fan of biology and will go on and on about it, kinda like how Darcy did in a previous comic. Some of his favorites to talk about are dinosaurs (paleontology I guess, but overlaps with biology), parasites, and snails. If you remember him wanting to become a “doctor”, originally he was planning on being a doctor, but I changed it so he wants to be a biologist now because it fits him better. Let’s just pretend it’s weirdly phrased and that he means the title “doctor” and not the job… Here he is talking about horsehair worms to Plumelle. They are real worms and they do what Snoutster mentioned them doing, but I had to simplify it a lot in order to fit it inside the speech bubbles. Basically they mainly affect grasshoppers or crickets that eat a plant with a horsehair larva on it. Some larvae may also first be consumed by small aquatic insects, which are later hunted by mantids and then the larvae grow inside there instead. The horsehair larvae will grow inside of their host, and when they become an adult, they emerge from their host and the adult will live freely in water, and later mate and make new larvae! Something weird though is that a few species can affect their host’s brain, causing the host to want to seek out water, resulting in the host drowning itself. If the host doesn’t drown, the larva will still emerge and kill the host that way. Pretty weird, but pretty cool! (Sorry if the explanation is bad) Horsehair worms wouldn’t normally affect moths, if at all, so Plumelle shouldn’t be concerned. Also, it’s not like she’s eating random plants often. That’s why Snoutster said “this barely happens now”, because nowadays most of the bugs just get their food from the store where they would have already treated plants for horsehair worms or other parasites. Some will still eat random plants anyways, but since it doesn’t happen as frequently, horsehair worm populations are declining and they are encountered less often as well. This is why I showed a non-anthropomorphic grasshopper, because it would be more likely to eat a random plant. I also made the panels with the grasshopper in a pseudo-watercolor style to show that it’s being imagined.
All by me Like always
