The Firefly Forest

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum's website (desertmuseum.org) has been hacked and some of the pages from their "A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert" are intermittently serving up Blogger-powered spam pages. Here is an example of what their Funnel-web Spider page (http://www.desertmuseum.org/books/nhsd_funnelweb_spider.php) now looks like when clicked on from a Google search:

The script that the spam hacker is using takes the keywords from the referring site's search query. I used the following search query in Google to get the above result. Note the odd capitalization I used that is reflected in the post's green title.

http://www.google.com/search?q=ariZona+FuNnel-WEB+spiDers

This website's hacked pages all have the following characteristic text on them (note the misspelling of particularly):

"Particulary I like the first site but other sites are informative as well"

Search Google for this phrase in quotes, and you'll see the thousands of websites that have fallen prey to this hack.

The script that the hacker is using comes from http://58.22.101.120 and the php comes from http://67.18.150.90. The spam page has a meta refresh, so the normal Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum page will load after 300 seconds if you don't click on an ad or the back button. I have repeatedly notified the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum about the serious problem with their website, but they have never bothered to respond and the problem still exists, so I am removing links to their "A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert" site.

Because hacked websites can be used to infect people's computers with malware, I would strongly advise you NOT to visit their website. I use Firefox and a Mac, but this sort of thing still worries me.

Update: This might be due to a hacked .htaccess file on the desertmuseum.org website, which redirects only search engine traffic to the hacked pages. Read about another similarly victimized website here and here.

Here in Arizona, Bloody Net-winged Beetles (Lycus sanguineus) can be observed on short flights or perched in vegetation in riparian areas. In April of 2008, I observed this one in Agua Caliente Canyon in Arizona's Santa Rita Mountains. With the sun glowing through its red elytra, the colorful Bloody Net-winged Beetle flew past me and landed in some dead grass along the recently dried stream.

Bloody Net-winged Beetles are soft-bodied and mostly blood-red in color with black-tipped legs, black antennae, black eyes, and black-tipped elytra (modified forewings that serve as wing covers). Like other Lycids or members of the Net-winged Beetle Family (Lycidae), Bloody Net-winged Beetles have a netlike pattern of raised veins on their leathery elytra, a wide, flattened pronotum (the area behind the eyes), elongated mouthparts, and broad, flattened, often saw-toothed antennae.

Net-winged Beetles typically have aposematic (warning) red, orange, or yellow and black coloration meant to warn potential predators like birds that they are noxious or foul-tasting. Bold patterning with bright colors and black are a widely understood warning sign in the animal kingdom that a creature is either inedible and/or dangerous. This Bloody Net-winged Beetle's red color made it very easy for me to spot, and this conspicuous beetle would be in great danger from hungry, sharp-eyed birds if they didn't understand that its colors were a warning to leave it alone.