Friends of the Polk County Parks Foundation, Inc.

06/03/2026

Small cities have the most to lose.

06/02/2026

Here’s a guide to identifying Florida’s six native, venomous snakes and some non-venomous snakes they resemble.

06/01/2026

The legislature keeps ignoring the Public desire for Florida forever Funding.

The Florida Legislature signed off on a $114.5 billion budget Friday afternoon, even as some legislators worried it falls short of doing enough for schools, healthcare, and the environment. A handful of Democrats also sharply criticized a nearly $300 million tax cut package that they said does more....

06/01/2026

Data centers seem to be popping up everywhere in Polk County and the local responses have varied.Fort Meade officials agreed to take the money and run and let the details work themselves out late

05/16/2026

05/03/2026

Five snakes most homeowners remove on sight. Each one was eating the thing they actually wanted gone.

Of the 50+ snake species in most U.S. states, fewer than six are venomous — and most of them avoid human activity.

Garter snake — the striped one in a garden bed. Eats slugs, grasshoppers, and small rodents. Harmless. Will bite if grabbed, and even then it feels like a pinprick

Eastern rat snake — the long black one climbing a barn wall. Eats rats, mice, and squirrels. Doing the job most people would pay an exterminator for

King snake — the banded one people mistake for a coral snake. Eats other snakes — including venomous ones — and has natural immunity to their venom

Gopher snake — flattens its head and rattles its tail against dry leaves when startled. Gets mistaken for a rattlesnake often. Eats gophers, voles, and mice. Six feet of free rodent control

Milk snake — the red-banded one found near barns. Named from the myth that it milks cows. It was there for the mice. Non-venomous

The yard without snakes still has rats. It just lost the one thing keeping them in check.

05/02/2026

A dozen flat brown bodies scatter when a flowerpot lifts. Pincers raised like tiny scorpion tails. Everything about the name tells you what you need to know. Earwig. A creature that crawls into ears and lays eggs in brains.

The name comes from an Old English word for the shape of the wing, not from anything the animal has done to anyone's skull.

I'm a European earwig. I'm not venomous. I don't carry disease. I have not once crawled toward a human ear on purpose.

The pincers are called cerci. Males have curved ones, females have straight ones. They're used for folding my wings — which are pleated into an origami pattern so complex that engineers have studied it — for courtship displays, and occasionally for grabbing small prey. If you pressed me between your fingers, I might pinch. It would feel like a fingernail poke. It would not break skin. No venom, no stinger, no toxin. The most weaponized-looking part of my body is cosmetic.

Here is the part that changes everything.

I am one of the few insects on this continent that takes care of her young. After mating in autumn, I dig an underground chamber and lay thirty to sixty eggs in a tight cluster. Then I stay. I stand over them for two months through winter, turning each egg individually, licking the surface to apply an antifungal compound my body produces. If a predator enters the chamber, I face it with my cerci raised. If something scatters my eggs, I gather them back into formation. I do not eat during this period. I do not leave.

When the nymphs hatch — translucent, tiny, already shaped like me — they stay underneath my body. I regurgitate food for them. I defend them through their first and second molts. Only then do they leave the chamber to forage on their own. Few insect species show this level of maternal care. I am among them.

I spend my nights eating aphids. I eat mites, moth eggs, and slug eggs. The same gardeners who remove me often wonder why their aphid problems keep getting worse.

- Leave me in the garden — I'm a net benefit to plants at normal population levels
- Don't spray mulch beds with broad-spectrum pesticide — it removes me along with the pests I was eating
- The pincers are a bluff. The name is a myth

I've been in the mulch for years eating the aphids that would have damaged the roses. Nobody noticed.

That's because I'm good at my job.