So it would appear that, fourteen years ago in 2006, I was visiting my family up in central New York, since this is mist rising off of Skaneateles Lake, one of the Finger Lakes in the center of the state – if you want to know how to pronounce that, saying, “skinny-AT-less” won’t earn you too many funny looks from the locals. It looks like a typical NY winter in this pic, and might well have been chilly, but it wasn’t that cold. I know I was driving around with my dad and trying to find a way to make a scene out of the twisting vapor on the water before it disappeared, and settled on this. I like the foreground elements, anyway…
We now jump ahead seven years.
This one is a little out-of-sync, or something, because it was 2012 when I really kicked in the arthropod photography and cataloged about every life stage of lady beetles (Coccinellidae,) but this was taken in 2013 instead. Nonetheless, the head detail is appreciable, if I do say so myself, and I like how it makes it obvious that the white bit is not the head, but the ‘shoulders’ of sorts, a shield over the thorax called the pronotum. The coloration is aposematic, bright and contrasty ‘keepaway’ hues that are memorable to predators, because lady beetles have a method of discouraging predation: they can produce hemolymph, their blood, from their joints and it’s apparently pretty distasteful – I’d managed to obtain some images of it back then and thought that I’d posted some, but can’t find them. I’ll follow up shortly – I can’t do it here because they weren’t taken on this date.
Five years ago in 2015, I was at a nearby pond (no, not that one, but another, further off but not far,) chasing what the pickerelweed (Pontederia) had to offer, and this image first appeared back then. The little jumping spider was also taken on that date, but some of the others in that post were taken on previous days – I’m almost positive none were taken on any subsequent days. My memory is just that good.