Let’s play catchup


By about this time in the past few years, I would have posted roughly four thousand mantis pictures. I am definitely behind those numbers this year, so let’s see if we can rectify that.

To begin with, I was super-prepared this spring, having ordered a bunch of Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) egg cases – called “oothecas” if you want to get technical or simply confuse read more

It’s not coming together yet

I have finally gotten a veritable buttload of pics to post, but unfortunately, cannot do so just yet. Between work and student schedules, various tasks around the house and in the office, and sinuses that are wreaking havoc, I can’t sit down long enough to do a post justice, much less a couple or three of them.

I know what you’re saying: “Jeez, Al, work from a read more

Podcast: Macro video, part one I suspect

I wanted to do this one entirely as a video, but the video clips that I had to work with ended up being too short (or, I guess you could say, I was once again too long-winded) to match up audio and video. So it’s both, a podcast covering the main details and a video to illustrate what I was talking about. I’ll get better at this soon. Maybe.

So let’s start with the audio.

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Let’s do this by category

As I mentioned, I have more pics to put up and have been juggling time to try and get to them – not at all helped by the number of unforeseen circumstances that spring up on top of the routine things already taking up my time. So right now, I’m splitting up the posts by subject matter of the photos, and today is arthropod day.

My attempts to capture more Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) read more

Of course of course of course of course

Poking around in the yard late last, I was silently lamenting the fact that the mantises (as well as nearly all other critters of interest) seemed to have moved on – it’s been days since I’ve seen any sign of them, but I’m not at all surprised, because the hot and dry weather has been taking its toll on the plants and so the favored lairs of the mantids are not very impressive read more

The same and different

I just received a gout of photos from the blog’s official central US non-correspondent Jim Kramer, from his trip through Wyoming, which I will be featuring here as soon as I can get to it. Unfortunately, this year seems to be trying to prove to me that I can’t set aside much time anymore, so I’m not exactly sure when this will be, but sometime before the Tricentennial, I’m read more

Whatever happened to…?

… the mantises that we watched hatch?

Well, they’re still around, I just hadn’t seen much of them from shortly after the hatching, coupled with being pretty busy myself. There’s a vague suspicion that a skink that we have living under the front steps might have feasted on a lot of them, but at least a few can still be found, now grown to about 30mm.


They remain read more

Too cool, part 35: A modicum of success


The praying mantids have been an ongoing saga on this blog now for several years, and if you want to call it an obsession, no argument from me. While I am definitely motivated to capture sequences and behavior of any species that I can, I happen to like mantids, and I’ve had the opportunities to bear close witness to them. So here we are again.

Not having found any distinctive evidence of local read more

May’s mirror

It’s gotten cold again and there isn’t a lot to photograph and truth be told I’m not even trying, so we’re going back to May with this one. I’ve had it sitting in the blog folder for all this time (yet it’s far from the oldest photo in there,) because I was doing too many mantises back then. Yeah, I’m finally admitting it, I had a wild and hedonistic youth, read more

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