Lord Howe Island stick insect

I talked to a friend tonight at goth night about using bones for odd purposes. He was telling me about a corset he had made with a trim made out of little bones. He said he had to eat a lot of chickens to get them all. I've had pretty good luck with owl pellets myself for sculpture stuff.

Art

Goal for the week 16.5 hrs

Today

 work on the sphinx

Animal

Photo by Peter Halasz

The Lord Howe Island stick insect (Dryococelus australis) is probably the world's most endangered insect. They had once been abundant on Lord Howe island near Australia but were thought to have been completely wiped out by black rats in the 1930's. In 2001 about 30 of them were discovered on a tiny isolated treeless sea stack called Ball's Pyramid living under a Melaleuca shrub. Four of them were removed two were taken to the Melbourne zoo and two given to a private breeder in Sydney. There are now about 15 times the wild population living in captivity and there are plans to reintroduce them to Lord Howe island after the rats have been removed.  Current predictions are that this will happen around 2011. 

A picture of one that is less dead

White-margin stargazer

Sorry today the post seems to have shown up on the blog long before I finished it. I'm not sure how that happened. I blame a cat.

Art

Goal for the week 17hrs

today

work on the sphinx

Animal

Photo by WLA

The white-margin stargazer (Uranoscopus sulphureus) is found in southern Asia and northern Australia. They spend most of their time buried under the sand with only their eyes and mouth exposed. They have cirri along the edge of their mouth to help keep it clear of sand. On their tongue they have a worm-like structure that they use to lure in fish (that is not what the brown thing is in this picture I think that is just a piece of seaweed). They have two spines above their pectoral fins with which they can administer venom.

Video of one burying itself in the sand

Amazonian snail-eater

The cockroach living room disappeared. 

Art

Goal for the week 18hrs

Today work on the sphinx

Animal

Photo by James I Watling

The Amazonian snail-eater (Dipsas indica) is a small snake from tropical South America. They have unusual eating habits in that they specialize in slugs and snails. To find their mollusk they generally find a slime trail via chemoreception and follow it. The teeth on their lower jaw are long and well adapted to help them deal with viscous prey. For snails they will constrict the snail and then use their lower jaws to work snails out of their shells. They also have a serous gland in their lower jaw which may secrete a substance that helps them in removing snails from their shells. It is also thought that with their unusual jaw structure that they can triangulate their head to resemble a more dangerous snake like the pitviper Bothrops jararaca.

Red-tailed tropic bird

Today we went to see "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" as part of the EbertFest thing going on downtown. This particular movie was put on by the Champaign Mental Health board and somewhat loosely tied to the rest of EbertFest.  It was also the first movie I've ever been where it was announced they had counselors ready if you needed to talk to someone about the movie.

Art

work on the sphinx

Animal

The red-tailed tropic bird (Phaeton rubricauda) is an open ocean sea bird found in the Pacific Ocean. They are not terribly related to any of the other living birds though they look to me like penguins with all of the necessary changes needed to make them fly. The red-tailed tropic bird is the largest and rarest of the tropic birds. They generally only exhibit one red streamer feather at a time except during the breeding season when both are displayed. During their mating display they also appear to fly backwards. Their long red feathers were prized by the Maori and occasionally used as trade goods. In Hawaiian mythology the red-tailed tropic bird was the offspring of the gray migrating tern.

Photo of a very cute red-tailed tropic bird chick

Video about red-tailed tropic birds with an older chick

Saiga

Art

Goal  for the week 11.5hrs

Work on Sphinx

Animal

In the 1990's the Saiga (Siaga tatarica) was an abundant and funny looking animal in Russia. As part of a conservation plan to save Rhinos the WWF promoted the use of saiga horns instead of Rhino horns in traditional medicine, after all the saiga was abundant and bred quickly. The saiga also historically rebounded back from population crashes quickly. This plan back fired as male saiga were almost completely wiped out. The population dropped from well over a million to under 30,000. The ratio of males to females became ridiculous in many cases 700 to 1. The WWF stopped that reasonably quickly, and I'm guessing felt dumb.

Giant Sea Scorpion

I'm nearly done cataloging all of the channels the company I work for offers at all of the sites with video. They basically had me confirm the station of every channel at about 50 or 60 sites from a slingbox. It was odd that they are having me do this as I have not really watched television consistently for about 8 or 9 years so I'm not really familiar with the shows and I'm really bad with celebrities for movie identification. I was kind of horrified to find that there is an entire reality show based station, perhaps more then one. Also something weird happened to the Learning Channel, they don't seem to do documentaries anymore.

Art

Goal for the week 13hrs

Today work on the dragon  

Animal

Stuart had somehow not heard about the giant 8ft prehistoric sea scorpions (Jaekelopterus rhenaniae) they found somewhat recently. So, I thought that I would do those today, then I discovered there were no usable pictures. Finally I got frustrated and decided it would be faster to draw one only to find that there is considerable disagreement as far as how many legs and body segments reconstructions of sea scorpions seem to have. I gave up and drew something that I thought looked kind of like that sea scorpion. The giant sea scorpion was found in Germany and seems to be mostly known from a claw fossil. The rock around the claw suggests that it lived in brackish areas. They may well be the largest invertebrates or at least one of them. It is thought that they would not have been able to support it's weight on land and so would not have been able to leave the water.

Striped Pyjama squid

Bill is trying to get Stuart to learn programming. 

Art

Goal for the week 15.5hrs

Today

Work on the sphinx

Animal

Photo by Richard Ling

The Striped Pyjama squid (Sepioloidea linolata) is a golfball sized cuttlefish from southern Asia and northern Australia. It is one of only two known poisonous cuttlefish. They have little finger-like projections around their eyes to help keep sand out of them.

A better picture of one

Tripod fish

Art

goal for the week 16.75hrs

Animal 

The tripod fish (Bathypterois grallator) is a very strange fish with three long extentsions off it's pelvic fins and tail that allow it to stand on the ocean floor for extended periods of time. It also has extended pectoral fins that it holds out and waits for small crustaceans to bump into them, then uses to direct the small crustaceans into it's mouth. The fish itself is reasonably small under 14 inches long, but it's fins can span up to 3ft long. All tripod fish are hermaphrodites thus when two tripod fish meet both can spawn, also in extreme cases they can reproduce by themselves. They tend to be found 800-4000 meters on continental ridges.

picture of the real fish

Ajolote Lizard

 Art

Goal for the week 18hrs

Today

Work on the sphinx

Animal

The Ajolote Lizard (Bipes biporus) is a two legged Amphisbaenian (worm lizards sort of the odd group out in the snakes and lizards of Squamata). They are found in California and Mexico. This reptile spends most of it's time burrowing, often near mesquite shrubs using it's legs to do most of the digging. They will occasionally leave there burrows at night to hunt surface dwelling insects, but they tend to be awkward on the surface. They eat mostly ground dwelling invertebrates and they have fairly large teeth (Here is a skull). Their ears are unusual for Amphisbaenians in that they have extra folds of skin and fibrous tissue that may be related to what developed into the epihyal bone found in the ears of mammals according to Ernest Wever and Carl Gans. It seems that this ear set up also gives them better hearing then other Amphisbaenians.

Video of one moving around

Cardinal

I have progress shot of the sphinx so far it is now ready for detailing.

Art

Goal for the week 20hrs

Today

 work on the sphinx

look up and order materials for stop motion puppets.

Animal

photo by Mulletar

In Natchez mythology the cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) brought fire to humanity. There are several legends as to how the cardinal got it red color. In an Iroquoi story vulture gave cardinal his feathers when vulture decided that he did not look good in red while trying on the feathers of every bird. The cardinal got his red feathers from wolf in a Cherokee story in which  raccoon seals wolf's eyes shut with excrement while wolf is sleeping. Cardinal helps wolf get get the excrement off his eyes and as a reward wolf gives cardinal some red paint. The Algonquin have a story for how cardinal ended up a bird at all. In the story cardinal and blackbird were men that lived near a lake one day they went out of their normal territory to gather wild rice. The people in that territory asked them what they were doing and they explained that they were gathering wild rice because they were tired of wild potatoes. The people that lived in the area with the wild rice decided to kill cardinal and blackbird and steal their potatoes. Cardinal and blackbird got wind of this and fled the people in the form of birds. They never returned to human form for fear that the people would kill them. 

Vampire Finch

Wasn't up for doing the mythology article today I will do one tomorrow. 

Art

Goal for the week 4.5 hours

Today 

work on the sphinx

Animal

Photo by KathB

Re-run from livejournal 

On the Galapagos island, Wolf island, there is a small black and brown bird that feeds on the blood of sea birds, mostly boobies. The vampire finch (Geospiza difficilis septentrionalis) is highly endangered bird that is sexually dimorphic the males being mostly black and the females being brown with stripes like most other female finches. It has been theorized that they had originally been removing parasites from the sea birds and gradually came to drink their blood instead. The sea birds seem unfazed by this and mostly sit still for the finches. They also will eat the eggs of the sea birds, seeds, and the nectar of Galapagos prickly pear. 

Channel Island Fox

Today we went out to the Boneyard Arts Festival in Urbana and ran into Andrew at some sort of weird (fake?) punk fashion show. He went to the other galleries with us. We also ran into one of my co-worker's mother who does wildlife photography. 

Art

Goal for the week 7.5 hrs

Today

I had not added an internal armature to the sphinx and I noticed its front legs were sinking in on themselves so I added one today.

work on sphinx

Animal 

Photo by the U.S National Park Service

The Channel Island fox (Urocyon littoralis) is dwarf fox related to gray foxes that lives only on the Channel Islands of California. They are the smallest foxes in North America at only around 4 lbs and standing 6 inches at the shoulder. They split off gray foxes after becoming isolated on the islands about 18000 years ago and have since become a separate species. Aside from their small size they are also different from gray foxes in that they have lost two vertebra. They are critically endangered for a variety of reasons. To begin several invasive species were introduced to the islands such as bison, cats, goats, and feral pigs. The bald eagles that had been on the island (and had not been preying on the foxes) died off due to problems with DDT and the golden eagle which had priorly not really inhabited the island was drawn in by the feral pigs and took the bald eagle's place. The golden eagle as a secondary prey item started preying on the foxes which were not well adjusted to having a regular predator around. Then the declining foxes which had been on an island mostly free of canine diseases picked up distemper from domestic dogs which wiped out quite a lot of them. Then in an effort to protect the endangered Loggerhead Shrike the US Navy was culling the foxes to keep them from preying on the birds, they stopped in 2000 as the foxes had become critically endangered as well. 

Pituriapis doylei

Art

Goal for the week 12hrs

Today

Sphinx

Animal 

Drawing by Stanton F. Fink

Pituriapis doylei is a jawless fish that lived in Devonian estuaries in what is now Australia.   Very little is known about it's body aside from the fact that it had pectoral fins as it is known most from the head shield that gives it's kind of sawfish-like shape. Given it's shape with that long rostral process that might have had some sort of sensory function and it and the position of it's mouth on the bottom I'm going to take a wild guess that it ate bottom dwelling invertebrates. I've not really found anything speculating on it's behavior. The genus was named Pituri an Australian Aboriginal nicotine-based drug that can put one into a hypnotic state. 

Giant tailless whip scorpion

Could not find any baling wire in the house yesterday so that kind of stopped the work on Serenity last night. 

Art

Goal for the week 14.5 hrs

Today

attach the arms to Serenity

finish painting Serenity's hands to match the rest of the body

Other touch ups

work on sphinx

Animal

Photo by Acrocynus

The giant tailless whip scorpion (Damon diadema) is a very unusual arachnid from Africa. They are not true scorpions but are in a distinct arachnid order. Their first set of legs have become modified sensory organs that function like antenna. They do not have venom glands but they do have pair of pedipalps with pincers that they use to break up their prey. As a defensive behavior they can break off bits of their legs when grasped, they later regenerate the legs. While there is not a lot of good data about their lifespan they have been observed to live at least ten years in captivity and mature adults continue growing throughout their lives reaching lengths of up to 8 inches. Very unusual for arachnids they show kin recognition in behavioral studies. Young will remain close to their mothers and interact with them. Related young will also stay together in a group in unfamiliar surroundings.

A video of one moving around

Highfin snake eel

We have a new person at work on my shift I showed him the Elder sign video and he was amused and got the joke, so that bodes well.

Art

goal for the week 15.75

Today

assemble and attach arms for Serenity

paint the new hands to match the rest of the sculpture

perform minor repairs to the rest of the sculpture as needed

If I finish paint boxes

Animal

Photo by Doug.Deep

 The highfin snake eel (Ophichthus altipennis) is a poorly studied burrowing eel that ranges from southern Asia to Northern Australia. There are also reported sightings in Madagascar. They tend to lie in wait almost fully submerged in the sand near reefs. They eat small fish and crustaceans and can grow over 2 feet in length. From the picture I gather they sometimes have a symbiotic relationship with cleaner shrimp. The genus Ophichthus are related to morays but tend to be less aggressive and have a more pointed tail which they use to burrow.

Tentacled Snake

Stuart is participating in creating some sort of mass rpg-blogger campaign setting.  He has a few fun civilizations planned. 

Art

Goal for the week 18hrs

Today

Lop off Serenity's arms

Wrap Serenity in bubble wrap

Drill into the base and add the weights

Plug up the drilled holes with apoxy

work on the sphinx

Animal

photo by djwudi

The tentacled snake (Erepeton tentaculatum)from Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam has several unusual features. It is the only reptile that has two heavily muscled moveable tentacles on the front of it head. There tentacles are theorized to be sensory organs not unlike the barbs one would find on a carp. They are venomous, but have short rear fangs and venom that does not have a long lasting effect on humans. They are fully aquatic and have developed an odd J shaped strike pose that gives them maximum power underwater. As an adaptation to underwater life they also are ovoviviparous, meaning that their eggs develop fully internally but their young are fed with a yolk rather then from the mother's body. Their eyes are also very dorsally located for a snake.

A video tentacled snake going into the J shaped strike pose and eating a large goldfish

Black-crested coquette

I got very strange looks at our local hobby store today when getting puppet supplies. 

Art

Goal for the week 19hrs

Today

assemble first bits of armature for the fingers of the first stop motion puppet

drill into Serenity's base add weights and re-seal.

Animal

Photo by Jerryoldenettel

The black-crested coquette (Lophornis helenae) is a crested hummingbird from forested areas of Central America and Hawaii. It is being considered for the red list as there is speculation that there may be less then 10,000 of them left. Oddly its markings look a great deal like a 2 inch nectar eating sphinx moth Aellopos titan even down to having an antenna like crest. I was not able to find any reason for the mimicry, such as the moth being toxic, so I guess that is a mystery. Here a link to a picture of the moth.

Plains zebra

I did taxes yesterday having a business really makes taxes unpleasant there were a lot of forms to fill out. I also got a drill press which should make the stop motion puppet project possible.

Art

Goal for the week 6 hrs

Today 

carve the new hands for Serenity

Drill large holes into the base of Serenity for adding weights.

Animal

Photo by Picture taker 2

Mythology

There are several origin myths as to how the plains zebra (Equus Quagga) got its stripes. In one version the zebra was depicted as gluttonous and would not stop eating to go and pick up it's distinguishing characteristics from an unspecified creator. The zebra was left with only a striped coat that none of the other animals had wanted. In another story from Botswana zebra and baboon had gotten into a fight as baboon was keeping him from a water hole. Baboon was guarding the water hole as his and had built a fire near it so that he did not even have to leave it at night. During the fight zebra kicked the baboon so hard that when the baboon hit the rocks it scraped all of the fur off of his butt, it also knocked the zebra off balance into the fire which stained his white coat with black stripes. In a Khoi story the zebra has no horns because they were stolen by gemsbok while zebra was sleeping. Gemsbok stole them after zebra had refused to give gemsbok one of his horns. The are also several taboos regarding the eating of zebra meat. For some of the Tonga spotted or striped animals such as zebras must not be eaten by pregnant women or the child might end up marked. The Dubes do not eat the meat of zebras because the zebra is their totem. 

Elginia mirabilis

The cockroach living room is still outside my place of work though I notice people have been changing the position of the furniture. 

Art

goal for the week 14 hours

Today

work on the dragon

Animal 

drawing by Arthur Weasley photo by .:sandman

Elginia mirabilis was a small pareiasaur (about 2ft long) from Scotland during the Permian. Pareiasaurs are anapsid reptiles that may well be related to the things that became turtles. Turtles and anapsid reptiles have similar skull types and there is a debate as to whether turtles originated from this very early group or converged to having similar skull type. They have yet to find a lot of transitional turtle fossils aside from the 220 million year old Odontochelys. Elginia mirabilis was though to have been an herbivore and its impressive horns and bony plates were thought to be mostly for display. At the time Scotland likely would have been a desert so it might have been well adapted for dry conditions. It probably was not blue but how would you know.

Baler volute

Art

Goal for the week 15hrs

today 

sphinx

Animal

photo by Wild Singapore

The baler volute (melo melo) is a very large snail found in Indonesia. They are specialized predators of other predatory gastropods. Odd for a snail they can produce pearls when bits of sand get stuck in their shells. The pearls are large, but lack nacre and their color tends to fade over time. The baler volute is also getting to be quite threatened particularly in Singapore among other places so hopefully the pearls will not catch on.  They are also eaten as a delicacy. They are called baler volutes because their shells were traditionally used to bail water out of boats. 

Man o' war fish

Last night the head fell off  the sphinx and got was fairly smashed so I spent most of last night doing reconstructive surgery.  

Art

Goal for the week 17.25 hours

today

do the initial sculpt on a new pair of hands for serenity

paint boxes

Animal

The man-o-war fish (Nomeus gronovii) is a small (8 inch) drift fish that forms a symbiotic relationship with siphonophores like the Portuguese man o' war. It is theorized that it is immune to the Physalia's stinging cells. The fish gains protection from predators by living among the deadly tentacles and it in turn lures other fish into the man o' war. They may also remove debris from the tentacles of the siphonophores and occasionally eat the tentacles. They may leave the man o' war when they leave the juvenile stage. It is the only member of it's genus Nomeus.

photo of the real fish

Crested Anole

Someone knocked over and broke one of the pieces I had at Cinema Gallery so I need to see what needs to be done to repair that. If I have to replace the hands on this one again it will be kind of funny and the fourth time counting on this piece. The first time I made the hands for the piece and they were probably the best hands I'd ever made I got the veins of the back just right and then I dropped them as I was loading them in the kiln and was just sick. I tried to fix them but putting greenware porcelain back together is kind of iffy and in this case it ended up a lost cause. The next set not nearly as good I dropped on the way out of the kiln. The third set broke as I was attaching the piece to the base and dropped the whole piece. This last set I had made a little bigger and fired a lot higher and they had been good for months then someone knocked it over at the Gallery. I'll try them in ceramic one more time but it happens again I'm going to cast the friggin things in metal.

Art

Goal for the week 19.25 hrs

Today

make clay

look at Serenity and access damage

work on sphinx

Animal

photo by alumroot

When Stuart and I went to New Orleans I kept seeing a type of anole I was not familiar with, along with all the green and brown anoles and blue tailed skinks. It was brown and had a large back crest, and I was really curious as to what this thing was, you'd think I'd have seen it in a petstore somewhere with as many as there were. I speculated on what this odd anole with a crest's name might be, perhaps it had been named after the researcher that discovered it, or any number of other things. I hopefully did not annoy Stuart to much fixating on a strange lizard. We finally found a few in a tank at the aquarium and they were in fact the crested anole, so much for creative names. The crested anole (Anolis cristatellus) is not native to the U.S., actually being native to Puerto Rico, but have been fairly successful in establishing themselves. The males have crests bright orange dewlaps but the females do not.

Barnacle Goose

I went and saw the funker vogt show tonight. I've noticed goth and rivethead dancers tend to be strangely considerate of glasses during concerts. Tonight one of people from out of town had his glasses fly off and the whole section of the dance floor stopped and helped him locate them before resuming. I saw something similar happen at a Sisters of Mercy concert where Andrew Eldritch's sunglasses fell off into the crowd during the performance and the crowd politely handed them back rather then tearing them to pieces as one might expect from a concert crowd. Not to say that the crowd tonight was completely considerate there was also this guy that kept trying to crowd surf was got dropped head first at least twice.

Art

Goal for the week 20hrs

Animal

photo by omarrun

The barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis) is a striking black and white goose from Europe. It was once believed that they sprung from gooseneck barnicles (suborder Lepadomorpha) as the barnacles looked a bit like the geese and were believed to grow being found generally on drift wood. The barnacles were seen only in the summer while the geese were seen only in the winter and at that time it was unknown that birds migrate. The monk Giraldus Cambrensis claimed to witness geese springing from the barnacles. The pope also declared them fish because they sprang from barnacles, so they could be eaten on fish days. Actually, in the summer barnicle geese nest on cliffs in the artic. As the babies are not yet able to fly but must feed them selves, the first action a baby barnacle goose must take in life is to leap off a cliff and hope the fluff slows it's fall, quite a lot of them don't die.

Black and Rufous Elephant Shrew

The party was a little quieter then I was expecting I hope people had a little bit of fun. Tomorrow we have a Funker vogt show in town. I'd kind of heard about it but I had assumed it would be in Chicago, hopefully there will be tickets at the door.

Art

sphinx

Animal

Photo by morganglines

The black and rufous elephant shrew (Rhynchocyon petersi) is a relatively large sengi from Kenya and Tanzania. They are an odd group of mammals, elephant shrews are actually not related to shrews and are actually part of an ancient and once very diverse group of mammals that includes elephants, sea cows, aardvarks, hyraxes, golden moles, and tenrecs. They have a scent gland on their chest called a sternal gland that they use to scent mark their territory, sometimes as often as 5 times a minute. The males and females have a detectably different scents. They are monogamous and both the males and females will defend a territory but the pairs do not spend a lot of time together. Oh and they have a long flexible nose.

North American Teratorn

There are a lot of things going on this weeks so it has been a really bad art week.

Art

stuff

Animal

photo of a California Condor (which should have a very similar build) by bsterling that was then heavily modified.

The North American Teratorn (Teratornis merriami) was the largest flying bird man ever saw they went extinct around the end of the last ice age. While with it's 12ft wingspan it was not the largest flying bird that ever was it was still fairly impressive and it was thought that after went extinct stories about it endured as a supernatural creature. There are theories that it was the origin of the thunderbirds. Thunderbirds are large intelligent bird shaped spirits that can control storms and thunder you find in a lot of forms of them in the mythology of a number of Native American tribes. In Wisconsin there is a lake called Devil's lake (Tawacunchukdah) that I'm very fond of that gets tied into the thunderbirds (Wakunja) mythology of the Winnebago. It was supposed to have been a site where the underwater pumas and the thunderbirds had a fight and threw a lot of large rocks and lighting at each other. I got to spend quite a bit of time a kid crawling around on the spent weapons of old gods there. The Cowichan also had a thunderbird (Tzinquaw) that had a fight with a water spirit this one in the form of an Orca. The Sioux had thunderbird had wiped out the Unktehila a dangerous reptilian water monster,  so there seems to be a bit of theme thunderbirds and water spirits not getting along. Not that there were not other giant birds in mythology that were not thunderbirds but may have been influenced by Teratornis. The Miwok had a giant man-eating bird named Yellokin that was eventually killed by eagle and turned into trees by coyote. The Passamaquoddy had a giant bird Wuchowsen that created wind with it's wings.  Cryptozoologists also love these guys, there are occasionally stories about modern giant bird sightings, though many ornithologists point out if there were physical living Teratorns running around the small army (84 million according to a survey in 2000) of American bird watchers probably would have noticed.

Sorry, I did not get a chance to do the animal write up today. 

Outside my place of work in the stairwell there has been a Jimmy Johns menu and a dead American cockroach for about 2 months. It has kind of become a landmark for me, each day I'm greeted by this dead cockroach. So on April 1st I quickly made a couple of little armchairs and and table and set up like a little living room for the cockroach. So far my co-workers don't really seem to have noticed.

Human

 

Art

Goal for the week- some time

Animal

The human (Homo sapiens) is a large bipedal primate from east Africa, though humans have become invasive on all of the other continents. As an invasive species humans tend to out compete local predators and wreak havoc on the megafauna.  Like some corvids humans have the ability to alter tools to the purposes they are using them for. Due to a special setup of the larynx and hyoid bone humans have a large vocal range and can make a wide variety of noises. Humans tend to have elaborate social groups sometimes living in colonies of well over a million. Odd among mammals though not unlike sandhill cranes both male and female humans get involved in mating displays. Many other species also interact with humans in symbiotic ways such as the African wild cat and the jungle fowl. Humans oddly enough have the most reduced canines among primates, but tend to be quite omnivorous and often prey on large animals. In mythology humans are strangely prominent they are featured in the mythologies of most if not all cultures.

Video of a male human engaged in some sort of mating display