Mystery intruder identified

Mystery solved courtesy of Chick of Mick,Chick and the Maggies: it is a Death's Head Hawkmoth caterpillar.









This is the link Chick sent me to resolve the matter

and this is the Wikipedia entry for the moth.


Chick solving the bug mystery (and in 30 seconds apparently) and being able to enlighten us all really got me praising the internet all over again. I believe that the internet has been a significant advance for mankind (well those connected anyway) in terms of making knowledge available to a wider audience than ever before in human history. I have believed this since its very inception.

Until yesterday, however it hadn't struck me that outside of the knowledge that is published (statically) on the internet there is another knowledge resource that the internet gives us access to and that is the knowledge of other connected people. Our friends and our networked acquaintances. I suspected that the information that I needed was out there on the web somewhere and both G and I had had a good scout round looking for it but in this case Chick acted as our librarian (and I mean that in the most professional way possible) - she knew the information AND where to look online for it.

The appeal that I put out through the blog was in fact a request for assistance in classification and we were lucky to find someone in our web of internet bodies who responded. Imagine though, if nobody in our web had known where to look. They might have been sufficiently intrigued, or sufficiently helpful, to email a friend of theirs who had speciality knowledge in the field (entomology in this case). Suddenly you can apply extra leverage to problems - other peoples' brains and knowledge. This is awesome if you have the right friends who have the right friends. This is like Archimedes' fulcrum.

We consider ourselves very lucky in our network of connected friends. Thank you all.

As an aside, Duranfan mentioned Silence of the Lambs in her response and that gave me an hour's fun looking up trivia on the film. Did you know that Jeremy Irons turned down the Hannibal Lecter part? I think he would have made a superlative Lecter. Mind you, I thought Brian Cox (a vastly under-rated actor) was better than Anthony Hopkins (check out Manhunt if you get a chance).