Weird, cool stuff you found in the woods.

Some kind of weird flower shaped fungus growing on a tree in my front yard

 

Thanks! And I'm not gonna find out what it tastes like.

 

An abandoned mine tram near Silverton, CO

 

Steam donkey! The ones I’ve found “in the woods” never look this nice.

 

Not the woods, the side of my house.
This wasp like insect (if you know please clarify) was carrying a spider, maybe twice or even thrice its body weight, backwards up a vertical brick wall. I was simply stunned at the physical feat of what this insect was able to accomplish and it looked effortless too, I watched as it carried the spider backwards, and vertically, for 10 maybe 12 feet up the side of my house. Imagine if this guy was the size of a cat, what would it be capable of, how terrifying would it be to live in that reality?
And how the hell do they attach themselves to vertically based objects with such apparent ease, especially carrying this kind of weight. I get that there are probably hundreds/thousands of imperceptible type threads, fibers, whatever they’re called, anchor like attachment points, but even still, it’s difficult to fathom.

 

My man

 

Something like this…

 

And the spider is probably alive, and going to have a single egg laid on it once inside the burrow.

This from wiki... As the larva feeds on its host, it saves the vital organs, such as the heart and central nervous system, for last. By waiting until the final larval instar, it ensures the spider will not decompose before the larva has fully developed.

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

 

Something right out of Ridley Scott’s Alien

 

There is a bug that lays an egg inside another insect. The larva works its way into the end of the long antenna and turns the insect into a zombie. The pretty colors in the antenna attract birds, and the larva moves the insect to an exposed leaf so that a bird eats it. Stage 2 of the larva life is in the gut of the bird until it hitches a ride on the fecal stream and enters the outside world.

Red in tooth and claw, indeed.

 

There’s a few variants of them locally or at least different colors. Some are all black and others have reddish and yellowish sections of exo. All do the same thing and build dirt/mud nests and then pack it full of paralyzed spiders for their babies to eat. When it’s not 100*+ they’ll be plentiful and will build dirt nests in every crevice they can. If you have a project car you’re working on every exposed vac hose can potentially have a nest in the end of it. I actually left a hat in my garage for a few weeks and they started building in it. Noticed one crawling through the little round hole on top of the hat, flipped it over and had 5 little mud spider coffins stuck to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_dauber

 

I don't know if this counts but saw while camping on the Black River in AZ