I have a handful of pics from a recent outing to post, and while this one came from the same outing, it is notably different from the others and kinda “out of theme,” but I liked it too much to let it go. This is a red-bellied water snake (Nerodia erythrogaster,) a good-sized specimen, basking in the morning sunlight at Mason Farm Biological Reserve. Now that
Tag: molting
Too cool, part 28: Wholly molty!
Seriously, I really need to stop doing titles like that…
This is going to be the longest post on the blog. Not in terms of words, but in terms of images, since I am going to show a long sequence from the other evening, and they’re nearly all vertical format, so the linear dimensions of the post are going to be exceptional. This may result in some gaps between text blocks, so please excuse
Let’s check back with the mantids
Gosh, it’s been, what, six whole hours since I’ve posted anything about the resident mantids? I cannot apologize enough – I know how you must feel.
Okay, it’s been a bit longer than that, and in fact, this first image was taken nine days ago and not posted then. [See what I did there? I prefaced with hyperbole and followed with a contrasting statement, and now another
Coughing up a lung
Once again courtesy of Not Exactly Rocket Science comes an article about a rather bizarre (to us at least) factor in the process of arthropod molting: apparently, they also shed the lining of their lungs while they’re at it.
Now, this is a little bit different from what we might imagine (yeah, like discarding your entire skin at once to emerge bigger is nothing odd.) Insects – and arachnids,
So, spiders
And so, we rejoin our hero in his further adventures of spider encounters and arachnophobia…
When I did the detailed portraits of a largish wolf spider (family Lycosidae) a few days back, I released it under the porch steps and vowed to keep an eye open. Accommodatingly, the spider assisted
I’m gonna git you, sucker
A couple of years ago, I captured a particular sequence of images that didn’t quite cut it, as far as I was concerned, and I’ve been trying to get a better set ever since. This evening, I was successful.
What you see to the left is a mosquito in larval stage. Mosquitoes lay their eggs in the water, usually a still pool for a particular reason we will eventually get to. They hatch out
Aha, hmmmm
I decided to try and answer a couple of questions raised in the post about the newborn mantids, so I went out and collected the debris that was still hanging from the egg sac, that the newborns had been suspended from immediately after emergence. The first thing to become apparent was that it hung from a webbing
Spring and equinox and all that jazz
Shocked as I am to report it, the calendar event of the vernal equinox and the weather coincided quite well – the skies cleared and the temperature got into the twenties (or the seventies, if you prefer,) so I did indeed get out to chase a few spring subjects. It was exceedingly few – it’s still a little early for spring in North Carolina, and more so with the temperature fluctuations
The Great Unused of 2013
I have to admit, I’m really not one for rating things, especially comparatively – top ten lists and all that are not for me. I did it last year, mostly because a prominent blogger would feature any such posts on his own blog as a bit of promotion, so it was blatant opportunism. If you’re here because you found my blog from that link and are still following it, cool, it worked!
A year goes by fast
Last year about this time, I published a post about my little friends the fishing spiders, whom I call ‘friends’ not because we hang out and hammer down Pepsi together, but because my first photo sale featured one as a subject. Lately, a few have been making themselves obvious, clearly begging to
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