• RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 months ago

    Lady Bugs are pretty easy to buy In large numbers if I remember right, and they fly, and love to hang out in little nooks and crannies.

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CWL25NWJ

    1500 live Ladybugs for about $10.

      • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        2 months ago

        Oooh yes that makes more sense. It's early 😴. I'm just imaging all these turfs trying to get ladybugs out of their hair.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        2 months ago

        The crickets bought for this kind of thing are typically sold for pet food (spiders, snakes and other insect pets eat them). They are always the silent kind because nobody wants noisy crickets as petfood.

    • Awoo [she/her]
      ·
      2 months ago

      You can buy live animals on amazon US?

        • Awoo [she/her]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 months ago

          It's not that the post service will do it that surprises me. It's that amazon does it. There's nothing like this on the UK variant although I know the post service will take live crickets and things.

              • wax_worm_futures [comrade/them]
                ·
                2 months ago

                I worked for an insect farm for over a year. It was run by unremarkable capitalists of mediocre intelligence who wouldn't accept any assertion that there was room for improvement.

                Because they failed so hard at growing a certain species of grub, we had to truck in our stock of that species from another company so we could resell it. They must have had pretty bad containment procedures because crickets got in with the grubs. But the crickets were fine in transit.

      • Owl [he/him]
        ·
        2 months ago

        You can buy a lot of insects that people use for pest control (ladybugs, mantis egg cases) or animal food (crickets, various larva), or pets (ants, centipedes).

        And apparently also hermit crabs, which seems extra cruel

  • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
    ·
    2 months ago

    Were I to deploy a swarm of insects as a protest, I'd probably go for locusts since they're a pretty common feeder insect

    • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
      ·
      2 months ago

      They're actually the same animal as crickets! Sorta! It's really strange but when I a big group crickets will become locusts after a generation or so and in smaller groups vice versa.

      • wax_worm_futures [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 months ago

        Crickets are different from grasshoppers, they're in the same order but different families. Grasshoppers are the ones that turn into locusts.

        Typically you can buy crickets from the Acheta or Gryllodes genus pretty easily, the ones for this prank probably cost around $70-100.

        • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 months ago

          In Finnish, the word "sirkka" is applied to a variety of insects in the order Orthoptera (crickets, grasshoppers, locusts and katydids)

          "Sirkka" on its own means cricket

          "Heinäsirkka," (lit. hay/grass cricket) = grasshopper

          "Kulkusirkka," (lit. wandering cricket) = locust

          On the other hand, we call katydids horse cats

    • SadArtemis [she/her]
      ·
      2 months ago

      Agreed. It might be selective empathy, but I feel bad for the crickets, though I suppose considering they were probably bought as feed they might not have had much of a future anyways. The TERFS deserved something like roaches or (if they could be released without affecting the activists) fleas, lice, ticks, etc. anyways.

      Hope some comrade crickets made it out alive rat-salute-2

  • phorq@lemmy.ml
    ·
    2 months ago

    Damn, a plague of insects. Gettin' biblical, I like it!... Just please no floods right now 🙏