Favoritos de aiva

I’m at a bit of a loss on this one. At first thought spider eggs which I thought was confirmed when I found a small spider inside of the mass but then found another small spider of an obviously different species, and when we pulled apart the mass we found the shell of a much larger insect that was not a spider.

Going off of iNat suggestion and visual similarity to eggs but eager to hear suggestions.

@aiva

Cropped iPhone photos, taken from a float plane window. I saw this dandy caribou with a full set of velvet- clad antlers smashing its muzzle and face repeatedly into the ice pack. (Shame the photos couldn't capture the antler detail, grateful that I got any pictures at all.)
I later learned about the archeaological significance of these kinds of sites, coupled with this predicatable behaviour in Caribou and Ovis dallii, in the context of the southern Yukon. Caribou seek out ice packs in the summer months to cool themselves down and escape biting insects.
Read more here: https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6343/

Collected by @shawnb2 and IDd together (mostly him) with the help of Starzomski’s lab. 1.71 mm in length with bumpy dentricles seems to point to genus but size doesn’t match any of the listed for Canada, so possible we made a mistake or new species for Canada. Possible as it seems Vancouver Island was never sampled, and this was found in the same vernal pool as a species of fairy shrimp that was new for Canada.

Specimens deposited at Royal BC Museum