100 Days of Making Comics Day 46

1/24/2021- Day 46: Spent 46min [Yep, an intentional time/day match right there, haha.] Today, I added more to the Endstar Arrival script and used the thumbnail images that I sketched earlier as a guide while laying out some very rough storyboards.

Progress Screenshots: [A few of these are new rough sketches from today, but most of it is a conglomeration of older thumbnail sketches for Endstar Arrival that haven't been officially used yet in the story.]

Other Notes:

Man, today was one of those house cleaning days. It's not even spring yet, but after all that work, this might just be the cleanest the house has been all year. Oh wait, what's that, 2021 just started. heh

Today was also a good day for a nap. Not too often do I get the time for a nap.

Today's random interesting animal(s):

African mound-building termites, which belong to the genus Macrotermes. If you’ve ever wonder what the longest living insect in the world is, I did a little research and found that according to the internet, and scientists, apparently, African mound-building termite queens [Species such as Macrotermes bellicosus] can have a lifespan of 50 years or possibly much longer. They don’t all live that long of course, more typically reaching 15 or 20 years, which is still very long for an insect.

Interestingly, of the more than 2000 species of termite around the world, Macrotermes bellicosus queens are also the largest termite queens known, and can lay more than 20,000 eggs a day. Which adds up to millions of eggs over their lifespan. The colony has a King, Queen, and caste system with different roles for the workers too [which tend to live only a few months] and the nest that’s built underground beneath the elaborately air conditioned mound [also called termitaria] is kept at a constant temperature within one degree of 31 Centigrade, [that’s 87.8 Fahrenheit] all day and night.

Most of the famous large termite mounds in tropical Africa are built by Macrotermes bellicosus. The mound’s diameter can sometimes reach 30 meters, so these little bugs with big construction projects really are the top engineers of the known natural world. But wait till scientists discover castles on the seafloor made by squid. just kidding...haha but am I?
These industrious invertebrates not only construct tough and towering mounds for themselves, they also farm fungus belonging to the genus Termitomyces [and all members of this genus rely symbiotically on the termites for survival] which also happens to include the largest species of edible fungus in the world, Termitomyces titanicus.
Informally, there are 4 main categories of termite; Subterranean, Drywood, Dampwood, and Mound-building. [Which were discussed today.] In the U.S. there aren't any Mound-building termites, just the first three categories mentioned.