Remember when I said, on last year’s trip to North Topsail, that I hardly did any insect photography at all? Of course you do – forgive me. This trip was about the same; I might have fewer than ten more insect images over what I got last year. This is one of them, taken the grey morning of our last day there after an overnight rain, and I decided it needed a feature of its own since I’m still a bit slow in getting up more posts about the trip. Every example from an image search on BugGuide.net that looked even close to this was the same species, Condylostylus mundus, so that’s what I’m going with and we’ll blame BugGuide for being so misleading if it’s incorrect.
But we haven’t had a color post in a while and I felt this one just might qualify. I hadn’t bothered with the macro rig for this so it’s natural light and freehand – several other frames didn’t pass muster. Yet the larger frame, composed the way I like it, doesn’t yield the detail of the fly itself, so we’ll go with an inset for that.
There, better? This is not quite full resolution, and the fly itself was guesstimated about 5-7mm in length – and yet, hard to miss. Makes me wonder what purpose this coloration serves, since it ain’t camouflage, but by all accounts this is an incredibly fast and reactive species, so the possibility remains that it has no need of avoiding the attention of predators, and developed the colors just to mock them.
We won’t talk about how small that possibility is…