Another from 2014, I always liked this direct portrait of a minuscule crab spider (genus Mecaphesa) – I went back to the original post to find that she measured 6mm across the legs in this position, which doesn’t make her a whole lot bigger than a tick.
Then I looked at the date, which was familiar, and thought, Is this the last arthropod photo that I took at the old place? Because we moved to the new house the day following, or over the next few days anyway. So I went back and checked through my stock; the answer is no, but close. The last was this (previously unpublished):
This batch of Chinese mantids (Tenodera sinensis) had hatched from an ootheca right on this very azalea bush and I had been following their life cycle, so I was determined to collect a few and bring them along with us to the new place and continue monitoring them. Except that the very next image in the Arthropods 4 folder was this one:
This was taken on the Japanese maple tree alongside the front door at the new place, about the same size as the previous mantis shown, so there had been a hatching there too, and I figured I’d leave the others at the old place and just work with these. Moreover, it’s the same Japanese maple that has appeared in dozens (if not hundreds) of images here over the past 9 years.
I mentioned the Arthropods 4 folder; I limit them to about 4,000 images to make them easier to skim through, and I’m up to 7 now. The Arthropods 3 folder, however, contains images solely from October 2012 to August 2013 – easily my most prolific bug period. Someday schoolkids will be required to know that…