A Field Guide to the North Side of Old Mill Hill, Atlantic Mine, MI
Archive for the ‘Neuroptera’ Category.
Last year, I had an entry about ant lions, with pictures of the larval form (which digs pits in sandy soil and grabs unwary insects that stumble ino them). Well, here is the adult form, that S_ just caught for me out on the front porch:
Every morning when I bicycle to work, I go past “Houghton Medical Arts”, a private clinic. For a long time, their sign out in front has said “Try Acupuncture for Pain”, and whenever I saw this, i would think of a scenario kind of like this:
Acupuncturist: Now hold still . . . [Jab]
Patient: Ow! Hey, that hurt!
A: Well, what did you expect? Didn’t you read the sign? [Jab]
P: Ow!
[and so on]
Ah, the simplifications of death . . .
On the photography front, it turns out that death greatly simplifies things. I found the green lacewing (family Chrysopidae) below as a tiny, pathetic corpse hanging in a corner near our front door, where it had been caught in a spiderweb sometime last year. All things considered, it was pretty well preserved, and it certainly wasn’t going anywhere, so I could photograph it to my heart’s content. The only downside was that, since it is (a) dried out, and (b) a bit encumbered with spider silk, it isn’t really identifiable down to the genus or species level. Lacewings are very 3-dimensional because of the way they hold their wings. Since close-up photography has a rather limited depth-of-field, it was hard to both see the wing detail, and the body. So, there are two pictures, the first concentrating on the wings and the second on the body. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find a lacewing larva sometime this summer, they are interestingly evil-looking critters.
