{"id":33411,"date":"2022-12-12T22:29:34","date_gmt":"2022-12-13T03:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=33411"},"modified":"2022-12-13T01:31:20","modified_gmt":"2022-12-13T06:31:20","slug":"living-in-the-past-vi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2022\/12\/living-in-the-past-vi\/","title":{"rendered":"Living in the past VI"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Back in 2011, I’d planted a whole bunch of wildflower seeds and, very typically I was to find out, almost none of them sprouted. At all. The only one that I could dependably say did was some form of aster, but it fulfilled its purpose in that it attracted a certain number of pollinators, and with them, a certain number of pollinator-predators. This is one of them, a jagged ambush bug (genus Phymata<\/em>.) I couldn’t get any closer to the species than that back then, though now I suspect it might be one of the Phymata americana<\/em><\/a> species, and if you go to that link, you’ll find the manners of differentiating them, which will require me to learn a bunch of new arthropod anatomical terms and then<\/em> see if I captured any of them in the images. Maybe later.<\/p>\n

The image is faintly soft, because it’s highly magnified, and judging from the timeframe, this was done with the newly-obtained macro bellows – I was figuring out what worked best, and settled on other options. Still, it’s enough to see the intricate detail of the species, which is about the size of a blowfly, or a little smaller than a honeybee. I could get away with this from a ‘field’ image (unrestrained and as-found) because ambush bugs sit very still to not attract attention. Most arthropod subjects would be diddybopping around and making it nigh impossible to use something as specific and hard-to-focus as a bellows arrangement, so this was a good test. Ya gotta love that space samurai armor…<\/p>\n

Take a close look at the eyes, though. Ambush bugs have compound eyes like most insects, with the false pupil aspect, but their eye anatomy produces a strange bullseye pattern from the false pupils. This kind of thing makes me aware again that biologists have dissected these eyes, somehow – I’m trying to imagine how you do this and what you use, given that the bits are nearly microscopic. But it’s safe to say that I have enough frustrations and won’t be attempting this anytime soon myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in 2011, I’d planted a whole bunch of wildflower seeds and, very typically I was to find out, almost none of them sprouted. At all. The only one that I could dependably say did was some form of aster, but it fulfilled its purpose in that it attracted a certain number of pollinators, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[2604,803,664,804],"class_list":["post-33411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-photo","tag-aster","tag-jagged-ambush-bug","tag-macro-bellows","tag-phymata"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}