My Most Popular YouTube Video?

Is this one…

Sisaket Genetic Anomaly >

Yeah, it’s wrong… but it’s had over 220,000 views so far.

Love them Tokay Geckos…

My mom on first coming to Hawaii was amazed at all the geek-os. She calls them geek-os to this day and no amount of correction ever takes hold. It’s hilarious to hear her say it.

We don’t have Tokay geckos in Hawaii, just the small “Gin Joke” type we have in Thailand. I really like these Tokay geckos - they’re all the more fascinating because they are usually hard to find, though they’re squawk is loud enough to be heard 50-100 meters away.

This one resides in the roof of an internet cafe I was going to for a while. It’s a foot long, easily. It’s thick and scary looking. I always need to use flash when I get a photo of them so the colors are influenced by the flash too much. Meaning - they’re skin flouresces - I think that’s how you spell that. And the flash captures that reflection - not the color of their skin in the natural light.

I’ve heard stories that these jump on you. Then I’ve had a 14 year old student tell me she picks the ones in her room up and puts them outside the window. So - what the truth is I don’t know. Anyone seen one jump on someone?

7 Types of Ants in Your Pants in Thailand

I woke up last night again with ants forming a trail across my shoulder to get to some Lay’s potato chip remnants that must have been on my shirt and the bed. Seems whenever I watch a movie in bed and have the mandatory 10 baht bag of Lay’s I wake up with ant bites all over. This has happened four times now and it doesn’t matter how careful I am about eating the chips - the crumbs are still falling somehow.

I am fascinated by the ants. I think it’s because I see humans as the ants of the world. I like watching us to see how we’re dealing with adversity. I watch the ants to see - do they deal with it in the same way or differently? Do they have anything to teach us? So far, the answer is definitely no. But, that doesn’t mean they’re not fascinating to me…

Thais’ ignore the ants. If I wasn’t around my girlfriend wouldn’t even see them. They don’t bother her. I know this because when we first were dating and she stayed in her own room every time I went to her room there would be parades of ants leading to and from whatever food she had left on her plate on the floor. I watched to see - would she flip out over it like me? Nope. Not a concern at all. If ants aren’t biting her - she could care less what they’re doing. They could take over the apartment and she’d walk around them.

This morning as I got bit by an “Annoying Red Biter” - a smaller one, I realized… there are a lot of different types of ants in Thailand. I know about 7 kinds. I’m sure there are more. Here’s a little about each of the seven I’m aware of so you’ll know… some do damage, some not at all. Some are actually smart!

Sugar Ants or Sweet Ants - These I see at restaurants in the northeast a lot. They are almost microscopic they’re so small. They are a light tan color and no bigger than two heads of a pin. Actually smaller. Hmm, they are small like two periods of a sentence written here. They are very slow and maybe don’t appear to be moving at all they’re so slow. Or, they’re camped out grubbing on some sugar, chocolate, or jelly (jam) of some sort. If you start to kill them they do nothing different that what they were doing before. You can wipe out the entire colony in ten minutes as they keep sending ants right into the bloodbath from the home-base. They haven’t learned that dead ants around them might mean they too might meet the same fate. These are really dumb ants. They are virtually harmless - they don’t bite. At least that’s what the restaurant owner at Choke Dees near Tung C. Muang Park in Ubon told me.

Psycho Black Hyper-Speed Ants - These are psychotic little black ants that are maybe twice the size of the sugar ants described above. They are erratic little cusses that seem to be doing nothing in particular. They run about ‘willy-nilly‘ as my mom and grandmother used to say about us kids when we were little. Willy nilly is running around without any kind of purpose in a random fashion that bugs people. These ants are they same. They run around in short bursts of speed in random directions with no apparent goal. The only time they stop for any length of time is when they’ve come upon a fly or cockroach to eat. They then pool together and drag their food across door thresholds, up and down steps, up walls, etc. It’s so weird to see three ants pulling on one roach antennae like kids doing a tug of war contest. It appears that every ant is pulling a different direction. Sometimes the roach spins in circles until they get coordinated.

These appear to be ridiculously dim ants. If you attempt to squash them they turn into turbo psycho black hyper-speed ants and run in the most bizarre random patterns that your mind cannot duplicate. You cannot guess where they are headed next because their evolution has made them smarter than human beings in this limited area. However, it doesn’t take one long to realize that if you fake like you’re gonna squash one he stops for an instant to decide which way to run from your descending finger. At that point you can squash him. If you happen to squash one of them all the sudden six will appear from thin air and they’ll all be running these crazy patterns that mess with your mind and make you anxious and frantic like you need to kill them all immediately. If you do succeed in killing those six, twenty more will come. And so on. These ants also don’t understand the elementary fact that dead ants around them means they might also end up dead. Eventually you’ll kill a hundred or so before ants stop coming to see what’s up.

Geckos love to stand outside the hole in the floor leading to a nest of these dumb ants because they can eat smorgasbord style until they’re full. They just keep coming out and getting eaten, never smartening up.

These ants do not bite but just by virtue of being so fast they can quickly cover your leg and make you nuts because they are running scatterbrained all over you and giving you the creepy crawlies.

Red Devils - This is the ant I find in bed with me in the middle of the night. The only reason I know it’s in bed with me is that it’s biting from the time it feels warm skin beneath it. They bite immediately - like a centipede - for no apparent reason except they think because we’re warm, we are food. These ants are similar to the fire ants of Florida and the rest of the USA - the ones that migrated from South America so many years back. They are reddish brown, thick, and shiny. They have pincers if you look closely at their mouths. They inject a burning poison when they bite that is similar to a centipede’s sting - though on a much smaller scale. These are larger than the Psycho Black Hyper-Speed ants mostly in thickness, but they’re also longer by maybe half a body length.

These ants love food that people like. I think it’s the fat, though they eat just about anything. Chicken, Lay’s chips, banana cupcakes from Tesco… all appear to be favorites. I don’t think they like fruit and veggies. Oh, I’ve seen about a hundred thousand of them cover a nest of chicken eggs - forcing the hen away as they devoured scraps of chicken placenta left from the recent hatchlings. These are the ants that will always be in your garbage if you leave the bag outside for ten minutes.

Their bites hurt initially and then the pain disappears for a few hours. Then, usually at night for some weird reason, the spot they bit will start to itch intensely, driving some people to insanity if they have more than ten bites or so. Usually small red bumps will form. Later, in a day or so the red bumps will get a white dot on the top - this is, I think, your white blood cells that went in to fight the poison. Eventually your body wins and the red bumps go away. Some, like me - scratch them off. I have seen some Thai kids with horrible scars all over their legs where I think these ants got them repeatedly and the kids must be allergic to them or something. You’ve likely seen Thai people with horrible bug bite scars on their legs too if you’ve been here any length of time.

These ants are slow moving and fairly smart. If they see friends dying around them they’ll stop sending in others to be slaughtered.

Large Black Biters - These are like the regular black ants you might see in your country. Large, about twice as big as the Red Devil and not moving erratically. They appear to be on a mission of some sort. They don’t attack people at first opportunity like Red Devils but if you start killing them they’ll latch onto your skin and bite. They don’t hurt as much as the Red Devils, but after ten bites or so you’ll get aggravated and exterminate them all. These are fairly smart ants that run and hide when their friends start dying. I don’t see these ants very often.

Large Red 180’s - I call them 180’s because this is what their ant IQ appears to be. I look at the Red Devils as having a 100 IQ - normal in the ant kingdom. They understand death around them means death to themselves and they scat. The Psycho Black Hyper-Speed ants come in at around 80 IQ. The Sugar Ants don’t have an IQ - they are dumb like mud. The Large Black Biters are at 100 also as they demonstrate some basic intelligence regarding fearing death.

Why are these large red ants called 180’s? To me these are the smartest and coolest ants in Thailand. In fact, these ants rival mice in their intelligence. They can usually be seen outside walking along a fence or tree. They prefer outdoors - as I do. That’s smart to start with. Outdoors is where ants belong - on the ground and climbing trees. I’ve not seen these ants indoors here in Thailand - ever. They understand humans live indoors and don’t want ants living with them. Again, smart.

These ants if you look at them closely have heads and eyes. Yes I know, all ants do. But you can differentiate their heads and eyes. Not only that, but they will LOOK AT YOU and check you out if you get a finger or nose close enough. They’ll stop their marching and look up at you. If they can grab on to your nose they will so don’t get too close. You’ll be able to make eye-contact with these ants, which is a natural sign of intelligence. Isn’t it? I think so. It’s a sign of something. These ants have a personality. At least in my mind they do.

I like to give these ants tests. I do little experiments with them because I want to see what they do when faced with hardship. If they are marching in a procession across a fence in the back I will throw up a barrier to where they need to go and see how long it takes them to come up with another plan. They are fast. They check things out before walking over or through them. They are cautious about walking through tubes and other things laid in their paths. In the end they come up with a variety of ways to get around the barrier. They’ll go over it, around it and through it. They are very smart for the ant kingdom.

If I kill one and watch the rest. They go over to it, verify it’s dead and start telling everyone there was a friend killed over there. The entire march stops and the ants congregate until someone decides the new path to take. They alter the path so nobody else gets whacked. These are SMART ants. They don’t stop unless there is a bloodbath and you kill fifty ants or more. Then they’ll find a new path altogether - far away from the old one.

These ants will bite in self-defense. They are territorial. Meaning… if you play with their nest they will quickly cover your arm with two or three hundred of them and bite you all at once. They don’t hurt much, not even as much as the Annoying Red Biters which are much smaller.

Their nest is the coolest thing about these ants. I have no understanding how they do it as it seems impossible. They like certain leafy trees for their nests. Somehow, and I’ve seen them do it but it still doesn’t make sense, they bend the leaves together into a sort of sphere… but not really round. Let’s say into a pocket sort of. They then seal the ends of the leaves with spit or something that is like glue. When they’re finished there is a pocket of leaves - hollow on the inside. This is where the eggs are stored. The nests are covered on the outside with ants that look at you as you approach. They try to grab onto you so don’t get too close. Inside the nest are developing ant egg larvae. These larvae are edible. In fact, here is a short video of me eating some at a restaurant in Isaan a long time ago. A woman came selling the ant eggs in a bag. I bought 10 baht worth. I mixed them with some soup as I wasn’t sure what I was in for. They weren’t bad. A little acidic flavor is all I can really say about the taste. It wasn’t offensive, but not worth 10 baht a handful either.

Thai people collect the nests of these ants since they can sell the eggs for 10 baht a handful. At least to farangs that don’t have a clue how much to pay for them they can. If you’re wondering how these ants get an IQ rating of 180 if they are dumb enough to let humans harvest their eggs for consumption it’s because the scales are different. An ant IQ of 180 means a human IQ of about 50. See? lol. Anyway - these are the coolest ants and if you get a chance stick your face down within a couple inches and watch them watching you watching them.

Annoying Red Biters - These are red ants that are smaller than the Red Devils and that bite, though they don’t hurt near as much as the Red Devils. It’s amazing that an ant of this size can hurt at all but if you try an experiment where you put one on the back of your hand and watch him bite and try not to kill him as he sinks into your skin you’ll have quite an appreciation for the amount of pain this tiny little thing can cause you. Multiply that by ten or a hundred like when you get them on your towel you’re drying off with after a shower - like I have before and you’ll understand why they’re annoying. Get one or two on your privates - like I have - and again, you’ll have a real appreciation, understanding, and some learning will have taken place. You’ll likely never again pick up a towel after a shower without checking for these pests. Guys, try to explain to your spouse or partner that the swollen red bump on your privates was caused by an ant. No fun.

These ants are dumb but not profoundly dumb. I’m assigning them an IQ of 90. They do alter their course if some are killed. They choose a new course, but it’s so close to the old path that the entire population could almost be wiped out. I say almost because these are slow ants that have secret hiding places for their nest. I’ve never seen where a nest is for these ants. They appear to live everywhere and call nowhere home. You can never get rid of all of these ants as they are on the walls, floor, doors, in the beds, on the tables, in the restroom… they are everywhere. They are prolific and hardy because there appears to be no actual nest that you can wipe out. These are ANNOYING because they are always around.

Small Black Bastards - The small black thick ones that bite are the worst you’ll likely encounter in Thailand as they like to come in the house. These ants hurt more than the Red Devils, hence they are called Black Bastards. These are about the same size as the Red Devils, but maybe a bit smaller even. They are deep black and shiny. They have a large head and pincers to bite with. They move slowly which is good as they usually can’t cover you before you notice being bit. I’ve not had many encounters with these here in Thailand but I do remember being bitten and wondering - was it that ANT that just bit down on me or a crab? It was seriously much more painful than any other ant I’ve ever been bit by. These ants are not to be messed with. Kill them and kill them fast. Kill them completely. Kill them until the last one. Kill them until you are satisfied there are none in your house. Just kill them, whatever you do, kill them.

Big Red Hellfires - These are found in the jungle mostly, I’ve not seen any inside homes. These are massive red biting ants that burn more than the Red Devils and hurt more than the Black Bastards. These are ants from Hell. Thai people call them fire ants. I’ve only seen these a couple times out in the wild, but my Thai friend has been bitten by them. They HURT!

Those are the 7 types of ants I know about here in Thailand. Are there more? Probably hundreds more. Thailand is really a great place if you love wildlife. Stop looking at the nightlife and look at the wildlife!

2 Thai Snake Photos

Laotian Wolf Snake (dead on road)

Orange snake (no idea what kind - must try to find it today online)

Hissing Beetle on the Back Patio (Video)

I love Thailand’s variety of wildlife if you haven’t noticed.

Yesterday I found a golden tree snake going across the street and a really cool caterpillar (pic below).

This morning I found another large beetle on the back patio area and when I tried to roll her over on her stomach again she hissed at me! I told my girlfriend and she said that it’s a sugarcane beetle, a female.

I ran and got the Sony Cybershot camera that wasn’t stolen during the robbery and did a short video-clip. You can hear it hiss. Is that cool or what? I know that not everyone is into this as much as me. But I do see the download numbers and I think it’s mostly 6th grade classes in the midwest that are downloading the wildlife videos.

No matter. At least we’re all on the same wave-length.

This hissing beetle .wmv clip is about 7Mb and should download quickly.

Poisonous Centipedes in Thailand

There are many poisonous things that bite here in Thailand. I was reading an article in the online Pattaya City News about a local Thai man that was bitten by a centipede and he nearly died from it. It sounds bizarre, but, after I ate the fried scorpion that still had some potent venom in it and I went to the hospital with very shallow breathing I understand that it can happen anytime.

I’ve been bitten by a small centipede in Maui, Hawaii once. I had them all over my floor as they lived under the carpet in my bedroom closet. They were a couple inches long and not the monster ones you see here in Thailand. They were really cool colors, like pastels.

Anyway. I was sitting for breakfast with my sandals on in the living room and I felt a burn. Then it was as if my foot was on fire… when I looked I saw a small 3 inch centipede clamping down on the outside of my foot. Apparently I had stepped on him by accident. BUT, don’t think you need to cause them harm first - they bite without reason as soon as they know they’re near skin for some reason. They bite immediately.

I killed it, because I kill anything that bites me.

My foot swelled up a lot, but nothing major. It hurt for a few days. This guy that was bitten in Thailand had an allergic reaction to the poison and his breathing became shallow. I know just what that’s like because I must have been allergic to the scorpion poison. It felt as if I would soon die because there was just not enough breath coming in. Strange feeling. I had it once before as I ate some Aunt Jemimah’s Pancake syrup in Florida- I damn near died on the floor of my apartment from it -but was able to grab a phone and hit 911 in time.

Thing is, and why poisonous things are so dangerous is that you don’t really know you’re allergic to some poison until the thing bites you.

There are some HUGE centipedes here in Thailand, on scale with some of those in Hawaii. I’ve seen a couple in Hawaii that were almost as long as my forearm and as thick as my ring finger.

Recently in Phuket there was a story going around that a MONSTER centipede lived in a palm tree down there and some locals saw it and called the newspaper. I’ll have to find that story. I also remember a Jack London story about a huge centipede falling into a girl’s hair… I’ll find a link to that one too.

Headless centipede video -

Large Centipede with Head cut off > (.wmv)

some kids caught a big one where they were eating at a park cabana and almost cut off it’s head. It lived and walked around before they dismembered the lower part. It still lived and ran around. They laughed like it was a riot. Yes it’s cruel, but I was just videotaping - I had nothing to do with the harming of the centipede - nor do I condone it. This is a different culture though - and Thais do as they wish…

Here is another centipede that I saw at Wat Tum Sua while walking around the foothills near where the monks live in the caves. I petted him because he seemed friendly enough. Not sure if this is a centipede or millipede as he appears to have 2 pair of legs for each segments, but not sure… On YouTube they can’t figure it out either.

Centipede Video from Wat Tum Sua, Krabi, Thailand >

Here’s a giant millipede I caught in Sisaket - definitely a millipede >

Jack London Story mentioning a huge centipede in Hawaii >
(man I like Jack London’s Stories of Hawaii“

Here is the monster centipede story from the Phuket Gazette a while back:

Centipede on steroids

RAWAI: Villagers in Rawai were dumbfounded when a huge centipede, reportedly half a meter in length, was spotted near a public waterhole in Village 2.

At 1 pm on February 6, villagers in the area of Baan Thai Mai (New Thais Village, or “Sea Gypsy” village) on Wiset Rd were seen crowding around a 20-meter-tall sugar palm tree. All were excitedly trying to catch a glimpse of an enormous centipede reportedly hiding out high up in the tree’s canopy.

Some villagers were throwing rocks at the tree, hoping to force the arthropod to come down and make an appearance. Others stood ready with cameras, hoping to capture an image of the creature as a souvenir.

One villager, identified only as Rawee, 45, said he was the first one to spot the centipede the day before.

He and four other friends were bathing in the public waterhole when he saw the enormous centipede crawl down the tree and dip itself in the water before crawling back up to the safety of the tree’s upper reaches.

He described the centipede as reddish-brown in color, about 50 centimeters in length and with a girth similar to that of a human arm.

Rawee and his bathing buddies were astonished by the size of the centipede because they had never seen anything like it, he said.

After the initial shock wore off, he screamed out to other villagers in the area about the centipede. All who saw it agreed that it was, in truth, a very large specimen. Word of the discovery soon became the talk of the tambon, with people from near and far hoping to catch a glimpse of the hundred-legged invertebrate.

The sheer size of the creature, if correctly reported, is significant because the largest known species of centipede, the Amazonian giant centipede, reportedly maxes out at about 30 centimeters in length. The Vietnamese centipede, which matches the color description given by K. Rawee, only reaches about 20 centimeters in length.

At last report, residents of the area were planning a mission to scale the sugar palm in an effort to catch a better view of the centipede – or even capture it and put it on display for all to see.

Surprisingly in a case such as this, there were no reports of people trying to divine winning lottery numbers from aspects of the creatures physiology.

Source: Siang Tai

Centipede biting man article from Pattaya City News:

On Wednesday Night, Rescue Workers received an urgent call to attend to a Thai Man, Khun Mongkong aged 31, who had become seriously ill after sustaining a bite from a large Centipede. The man was walking around the back of his house and was wearing only sandals. It was dark and he suddenly felt a sharp pain on his right ankle and realized he had been bitten. He soon lost consciousness and his breathing became shallow. He was rushed to the Queen Sirigit Hospital and we can report he was given drugs to counteract the affects of the bite and he is now expected to fully recover from the ordeal.

Big Green Caterpillars in Thailand (photos)

Driving the motorbike to the end of the soi I saw 4 of these amazing bright green caterpillars laying on the road near the curb. I didn’t pick them up at first but went to get my camera. By the time I came back 2 of them were run over by a motorbike and I grabbed these two and took them to photograph.

Nice colors. Anyone know what butterfly type this will turn into?

New Thaipulse Thailand Wildlife Videos up at Youtube

I just posted some new Thailand videos at youtube - get ‘em while we can still see youtube.

Scorpion, Pit Viper and Summer Blogging Hiatus

I got some great video footage of a scorpion and some not so great footage of a pit viper that was a bit far away to capture with my lame camera/camcorder but that’ll have to wait.

Vern is on hiatus for a little while… taking care of some books and sitting (meditating) maybe a little too much for his own good.

If anyone is interested in editing “book 1″ about my first 3 years in Thailand please find my email in the right hand side column and send me off a note.

Check back in in a few weeks to a month and I might be back online posting by then…

Thailand Bird trying his Damnedest to Impress me…

Some birds are smart, they realize, since they’re in a cage that they might as well entertain passerby visitors. Especially if you’re a bird in a cage in a zoo that doesn’t get many visitors each day because it’s rainy season and there are maybe 30 people that pay the 10 baht to come in and peer past the fence and cages to see you…

This bird was right on the ball though.

This bird had the coolest sounds come out of him… and not just one chirp… You know, most birds have one chirp and even the most beautiful sounding chirp will get annoying after 75 times or so. This bird KNEW that, and he changed it up to keep me entertained! I wanted to throw him some Thai baht by the time I left!

There he was, trying his heart out - you can SEE IT! He’s using his entire body to perform for me, and it’s not going unappreciated… If I didn’t have the camera in my hand I’d have clapped it was so awesome.

Now, there is an ANNOYING as all hell bird on the right side that doesn’t understand performing… and that bird can go to hell for all I care, but the one on the left I wanted to rip the door off the cage and free his silly ass to let him fly through the sky again far away from his idiot cagemate he was unlucky enough to get stuck with.

Maybe he thought if he performed well enough he’d earn an escape… I’d feel so sorry for him being stuck with idiot bird that I’d free him…

Well, maybe I’ll go back and free him sometime when I get up that way next…

Thailand Bird Impressing the hell outta me video
( 4.6Mb, wmv file)

Here’s another video of a bird that wasn’t so smart… There I was, giving him part of my precious time to talk to him a little bit and he just wasn’t “getting it”… I gave up in frustration on that bird…

Not so smart bird in Thailand video
(3.5Mb wmv, file)

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