Re:A most bizarre and mysterious cocoon
by pessimizer on Tuesday September 03, 2013 @03:54PM
(#6323335)
I'm not sure if you have much of a chance of finding the answer if you know nothing about the subject - unless someone else already blogged about it somewhere. I'm sure that many of the people that are confused about it in the comments actually do have a background in biology, and they're having a tough time.
There's another possibility. Because of where this was discovered, it's more than possible that it's a new species. There are plenty of undiscovered species in the tropics, especially in the insecta class.
Re:A most bizarre and mysterious cocoon
by pessimizer on Tuesday September 03, 2013 @05:43PM
(#6324026)
Absolutely. It's not a "the first person who can tell me what this is a picture of gets a prize" thing, it's an "I'm a biologist and I'm genuinely confused about what this is, please help" thing.
My approach is to bang in various words and do image searches, forcing some and not others, and then try similar words. [weird cocoon] or [weird egg sac peru] and then sometimes including a subject word. (Entomology).
Then I do a TinEye search, or a GoogleImage search to see if I can find other pages talkng about it.
This feels sub-optimal.
What's a better approach?