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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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May I ask what's the new hobby you're enjoying?
I've tried so many hobbies the past decade but non of them stick. Everytime, I get obsessed right away, make great progress and learning super fast, invest in more equipments, just to completely lose interest couple months later.
(To name a few: paper crafts, pottery, crossstitch, DIY electronics and gadgets, violin, piano, guitar, ukulele, biking, hiking, VR, even gym and exercises)
And everytime in between I went back to gaming and collecting backlogs in Steam Sale.
Right now, it's raising bugs. And I don't mean the hobbyist way of buying cool bugs from a pet store and raising them in some plastic container. It's the half-assed way of getting grabbing random bugs I see from my yard and raising them in those plastic soup containers and plastic food trays. I've raised mosquitos (I found mosquito eggs one day, dumped the eggs in some empty peanuts container, and watched the magic happen), midge flies, a whole bunch of different moths, some sawfly, and a bunch of hover flies. I found a parasitized caterpillar and watched the wasps emerge from their cocoons (along with a bonus fly that appeared out of nowhere).
It's just fascinating to me as someone with no zoologist background. There's so many time where I go "well, I didn't expect that." Stuff like how some caterpillars are cannibals or how there's apparently a type of maggot that will tunnel into a moth pupa, feast upon the pupa from within, pupate within the now empty moth pupa, and emerge from the two pupas as a generic-looking fly. And it's not like a parasitoid fly since all the parasitoid flies I've searched for online were smaller than the caterpillar when this fly is just a generic fly. I remembered being so confused when the sawfly emerged because sawfly larva look and act like caterpillars. I expected a moth and got some wasplike insect instead.
If you don't want to be weird like me, there's always gardening. You'll encounter the bugs that way as well.
Do you have a vermicomposter yet? They sell fairly cheap ones that go in the kitchen. No smell, breaks down a kilo or so of food waste per week into plant fertiliser, and it's such a neat little ecosystem. I stocked mine with two species of worms and all the pillbugs I could find.
I actually got a vermicomposter set up, but by "vermicomposter" I just mean one of those clean soup containers with worms in them. I mostly feed the worms decomposed leaves/twigs and banana peels. I don't know how to easily harvest their castings outside of putting their food at the bottom of the containers, but to do that, I have to dump everything into a temp soup container, put the food at the bottom and dump the contents from the temp soup container back to the original soup container. I'm thinking about cutting the bottom of two soup containers and assembling them together so I basically have a soup container with two openings, one where I can put their food and one where they deposit their castings.
But yes, it's cool to see him wiggle around and how there's very discrete layers with castings at the top, food in the middle, stuff that they won't eat like grains of sand below that, and water at the very bottom.