[Taxacom] Sally Lightfoot crab piss photo

Doug Yanega dyanega at ucr.edu
Sun Mar 31 19:44:04 CDT 2013


On 3/31/13 5:21 PM, Robin Leech wrote:
> Geoff Read,
>
> I do not think that any arthropods have a urinary system that excretes.
>
While I'm usually the first to chime in on technical inaccuracies, I can 
certainly think of many insects that squirt liquid from their anus, and 
it isn't very uncommon for this to be referred to as piss, even if it is 
not what *mammals* do when they urinate. It's especially hard not to 
fall into that colloquialism when watching bugs like the glassy-winged 
sharpshooter; it is this behavior, after all, that earned them the 
common name "sharpshooter". ;-)

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82





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