Just had to post this.
I came in this evening from being outside shirtless, horrifying the neighbors, and felt something walking on my chest. Looked down and found a little winged aphid – just the perfect size, to my way of thinking. Grasping it by the wings and scampering outside, I carefully placed it on the azalea bush in front of one of the newborn mantises. This was touchy – they’re
This is probably the best photo I’m ever going to get of this, so I have to share. This is what spider sex looks like.
The female is the larger one, which is very typical of spiders. The little ‘legs’ seen here extending out to the front are pedipalps, and one of the ways you can easily (well, more or less) tell the gender of a spider, because the male’s are
One of those items on my mental list of images to capture is the emergence of newborn mantises from their egg sac. I’ve gotten recently hatched nymphs a couple of times, but none ever emerging.
On spotting an egg sac near the pond in the park close by a few days ago, I found dangling debris, the shredded structure of the sac, that indicates the hatching has already occurred.
Well, it’s my 500th post, provided you ignore some deleted update markers and having to rebuild the blog long ago when the last software failed to perform, and the idea that everything I write goes through a few drafts. But anyway, it’s an important milestone, since it’s halfway to 1,000 posts, which is where I actually get readers, right? Nice
Edit: I’d already used “part eight” on a previous post and missed it, so this has been renamed.
I have a small collection of school presentations that I’ve put together, primarily about arthropods – life cycles, feeding habits, camouflage, and so on. For one of them, I have pretty much everything about lady beetles illustrated, save for just one thing:
The Girlfriend pointed this out to me, since this one had slipped past my radar, but two recent pics illustrated a trait I had mentioned long ago, in the early days of the blog, back when my readers numbered, well, pretty much as they do now (we won’t talk about those numbers.)
“Middle of nowhere.” This is one of those phrases that have gradually gotten more annoying to me over time, and I realize now that it subtly says a lot about our society, and perhaps even influences our reactions.
The middle of nowhere tells us that it’s far from roads, and restaurants, and telephones, and people overall – this is, supposedly, the “nowhere”
If you’re the least bit familiar with frogs and toads, you know that anything but the most cautious approach to any pond where they hang out will send them sailing off the bank into the cover of the water, or vanish beneath the surface if they’re in the water in the first place. This, however, is a set of rules that does not apply to mating season.
On approaching the little drainage pond
Here, we’re still wondering if spring has finally decided to settle in, or if its meds are going to wear off and send it scurrying for safety someplace, wherever spring goes when it’s not around – my guess is a shop that does specialty jams. The past few days have been spent dealing with the peripheral effects of a minor surgery – not mine, but that of The Girlfriend’s
When I was putting together the calendar and trying to include all dates that would be of interest to nature & wildlife photographers, and I had the chance to reflect on the event dates that had been chosen. For instance, National Pollinator Week falls in June. Now, pollinators can
