On this date 38

Old Well on UNC Chapel Hill Campus in infra-red
You may be seeing a pattern if you’ve bothered to look at the previous On This Date posts and have the faintest interest, which is highly unlikely, but back in 2006 I was doing a lot of experimentation in infra-red photography, and this image is probably my favorite. Or at least, the tweaked version is. Since you asked so eagerly, this is Old Well, a landmark on the campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – you know, the one with all the idiotic students that helped make North Carolina look dumber than a box of corn dog crumbs…

While that point can not possibly be belabored, there’s also not anything to add to it, so I’ll repeat it once just for the sake of it – UNC students are fucking morons – and move on to later dates.

hatching lady beetle nymphs
2012 was by far the most productive year for arthropod photos; to give you an example, this came from Arthropod folder 2, while a year later on the same date (which I’m not featuring today,) I was in Arthropod folder 4. Since I only allow about 4,000 images to accrue before going to a new folder, you can imagine how busy I was shooting bugs. And my subject here was part of the reason, because the lady beetles had taken to the dog fennel plants in the yard and done their full life cycles thereon, including the hatching of new nymphs from eggs, which is what you’re seeing here. Yes, cute little ladybugs start off looking like mini-Godzillas. Very mini, since they’re only a handful of millimeters in length so that’s, what, 1:1,000,000 scale? I’ll let you do the math. UNC students certainly can’t handle it.

head-on shot of male Enoplognatha ovata
Exactly six years ago (that would be 2014 for UNC students,) I was spending way too much time doing detailed shots of a spider known only as Enoplognatha ovata – specifically, its pedipalps, because hey, when a species has worked this hard to make something this impressive, it deserves the attention. I wrote it up in painful detail here, so check out that post if you dare.

And really, that’s about it – lots more insect photos, but nothing particularly fascinating or creepier than this, and 2014 was the latest that I shot anything on this date. Except for today of course.

[I type this, as usual, a day in advance, so that’s my goad towards making sure I shoot something today. Whether it will work or not remains to be seen – I can be pretty rebellious against myself.]

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