I woke up late for church this morning and decided to clean up around the house a bit. I got outside to my patio and noticed that my plant has again been covered in tiny orange balls with legs (??) For the past few weeks I’ve noticed these things attacking my plant. After a few minutes on Google I discovered these things are called Oleander Aphids. For a while I tried burning each one with a stick of incense but found that just hosing them off works fine.

These things are pretty weird. They only appear on one of my generic white flower plants(no idea what it’s called). I also have strange little black aphids on my Ficus but have yet to discover exactly what they are. These little orange guys reproduce really fast. Every few days I hose down a few stems on the plant. Peep this though:

Aphids don’t have sex. In fact, in natural colonies there are no male aphids. The females reproduce by cloning themselves (pathenogenesis). They also give birth to live nymphs, rather than lay eggs. When a colony lands on a host their population explodes. When it gets a little crowded, some of they aphids will develop wings so that they can fly to new host plants. If you have an aphid infestation the best way to get rid of them is soapy water or certain kinds of oils. Generally if you give them a good spray down with the soapy water they won’t be back.

Read more: http://www.ayavaya.com/bug-photos/oleander-aphids

I am apparently up against some shit right out of a sci-fi (or syfy) channel original movie. This is the stuff that keeps me happy we have yet to discover other lifeforms or alternate universes because there has to be one out there somewhere where these things are king. Maybe they even walk upright and resemble us in some weird way. Asexual beings that birth live miniature clones of themselves. Not only that but they also secrete some sort of nasty toxin so other bugs that try and eat them are poisoned and those who don’t die from it are condemned to a life of deformed wings and wonky web spinning (according to link above)

Naturally my thoughts drift and I think back on how earlier this week the Vatican Observatory stated it would indeed consider extraterrestrial alien life part of Gods Plan. “If biology is not unique to the Earth, or life elsewhere differs bio-chemically from our version, or we ever make contact with an intelligent species in the vastness of space, the implications for our self-image will be profound… Just as there is a multitude of creatures on Earth, there could be other beings, even intelligent ones, created by God. This does not contradict our faith, because we cannot put limits on God’s creative freedom.” said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes. This goes to show that humans are kind of greedy in their quest for knowledge, preparing to understand extraterrestrial life forms while our own is in shambles. There’s oodles on this out there, here is a nice starting point: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120291244

Which then makes me wonder, would the average Christian welcome an intelligent life form from another dimension before a person with a different lifestyle or ethnicity from his own universe. How pretty would said alien need to be? If it were more like the Predator would we just attack? Would we befriend the aliens if they were more like the ones form Earth Girls Are Easy?

I mean who knows? I know most folks probably aren’t ready for that sort of thing. I like to think of myself as slightly ahead of the herd and I know I aint ready for aliens. I can barely figure out how to wrangle the remainder of my small family. Just the thought of aphids cloning live nymphs in my side yard is enough to urk me.