I was going to open this by saying, it’s been a while since we’ve had an arthropod, but on checking, it’s only been since the end of last month – it’s just been a while since I’ve done a session revolving around one. Not much of one either, but the subject presented itself.
I’d gone into the bathroom and, as I was washing my hands, something flew/dropped into the sink, and I knew I hadn’t done it. It was quite round and the size of a pinhead, so I bent close and examined it, determining that it was indeed self-propelled, a tiny beetle of some kind. I carefully slipped it into a small container until I could do something more serious, which came about an hour later.
It kind of looks like a ladybug, and it is – a twenty-spotted lady beetle to be precise (Psyllobora vigintimaculata.) Finding it on BugGuide.net was far easier than I imagined, but that’s because they’re fairly common – tiny, but common. I had to get out the reversed 28-105 for this, and I believe these two frames were even taken with an extension tube for greater magnification. My specimen wasn’t doing a hell of a lot, which was okay because achieving focus at this size is tricky enough, more so when the lens is locked at f16 and thus the viewfinder is quite dark. Eventually, the beetle began to wander and I saw the evidence of it about to fly, though my timing was off – the resulting frame is empty, the beetle already having launched into the air; at the range I was working with, a few millimeters of flight and it was out of the frame. I figured that was the end of the session, because there’s virtually no way to track something that small that’s flying, but I discovered that it had only gone to the desk beneath and was still retrievable, so I switched backgrounds.
This time it’s a succulent from the window box, with one of my paper scales in there – yes, this lines denote millimeters. The species averages 1.75 to 3mm in length, so mine seems typical, if a little boring – there are better color variations to be found within the species.
By the way, the tiny size made retrieving it from the desk a small challenge in itself – not happening with my fat fingers for sure, nor with any kind of tweezers. Even sliding a piece of paper alongside and trying to get under it was pushing it aside rather than slipping underneath, but eventually with the aid of a scalpel blade I coaxed it onto the surface of the paper and then over to the plant, where it disappeared between leaves for a bit before coming back out into the open enough for me to slide the paper scale into the frame. It then dropped back down between the fat leaves and appeared to want to stay there, and I returned the plant to the window box with the beetle riding along. They eat fungus, mainly mildew, and it obviously doesn’t take a lot to fill one, so perhaps the beetle was finding food down there.
I admit, this was much earlier than expected to find a macro subject of this nature – more will be along with warmer weather.