I used to think that (a) there was only one kind of cicada native to this area, and (b) I would know a cicada song when I heard it. It turns out I was sorely mistaken on both points.
For the last couple of weeks, we’d been hearing an obviously insect-produced sound around the yard that we hear pretty much every year and that I’d always thought was made by some kind of cricket. It sounded like this[1]:
Warning: This is quite probably the creepiest thing I have posted to date.
We were looking over our cherry tree in late May, and S_ found this fairly nondescript green caterpillar eating the leaves. There are a lot of kinds of green caterpillars, and it is hard to identify them until they turn to the adult form.
So, she gave it to me to raise up, so that we could find out what it would become. Little did we realize what that would turn out to be . . . (Cue Ominous Thunder [1]).
“So naturalists observe a flea/ has smaller fleas that on him prey/ And these have smaller still to bite ’em/ And so proceed, ad infinitum” – Jonathan Swift
S_ spotted this mosquito in the house, and requested that I eliminate it. It then landed on the window screen, and I noticed something odd about it. So, I caught it, put it in the freezer to quickly kill it, and then after it was safely dead and immobilized started getting pictures. See those red bits sticking out to the side? That’s not normal.
Back in October, I put up this post describing a female oil beetle, and mentioned that there seemed to be two very similar species, one that emerged as adults in the fall, and one that emerged in the spring. Well, here’s the one that emerges in the spring (S_ found it crawling slowly in front of the garage in the middle of May) , which is most likely Meloe angusticollis:
The one last fall was probably Meloe impressus. Aside from the time of year that it came out, this one also has little pock-marks on its back on the segment right behind the head, which I gather is an ID feature of M. angusticollis
“The cray is certainly not a fish, [but] a handsome crustaceous animal” – J. J. Audubon[1]
I’ve been meaning to make an entry for crayfish for some time, so when we went down to Otter Lake in the third weekend of May, we made a point of finding one. This one was resting on the boat launch ramp just above the Otter Lake dam, and we were able to just drop the net right over it.
Crayfish are pretty big as Michigan arthropods go. We put it in a glass pan with water for photography[2], and the squares on the checked tablecloth that you can see under it are just about a centimeter across, so it was just over 7 cm across from nose to tail (almost 3 inches)
Sam caught this jumping spider for me shortly after I finished the flash concentrator for the 2:1 macro lens combination. This made it possible for me to get some decent face shots that show its huge eyes and surprised expression[1]
There are two white stripes across the head, one under the eyes sort of like a moustache, and one across the top of the head.
Oh, the buzzin’ of the bees in the . . . wait a minute. Are those really bees?
We have a number of wild “choke-cherry” trees around the property which bloom pretty early in the spring, and back in the first week of May this one was in full bloom and was absolutely humming with bees. So, I went out with the camera to get some bee pictures[1]. Except, that upon closer examination, I saw that a large fraction of what were buzzing were not, in fact, bees!
The bee is one of our honeybees, but the other one is a bee-mimic fly.
As it turns out, Aesop was wrong[1]
Up until this year, I had been under the impression that grasshoppers all laid their eggs and died in the fall, like the fable says, and the eggs didn’t hatch out until spring. What a fool I was. Because on May 2[2], I found this fully-winged adult grasshopper jumping around in our lawn.
While there are insects involved in this posting, it’s actually more about a new, low-cost method I’ve come up with for better flash macrophotography. I’m very pleased with the way it works.
So, here I am with a digital SLR and a macro lens (both bought used to keep the cost manageable), and some domesticated feeder crickets (most likely Acheta domesticus) that I want pictures of. While it’s possible to take pictures of the crickets with just the built-in pop-up flash on the camera, the images come out with a mixture of specular highlights and deep shadows that make it harder than I would like to see details clearly. I also have to open up the aperture enough that the depth of field is pretty shallow, making it hard to get a well-focused image. So, for example, this one has a lot of glare off of the wings, and the lower part of the body is a shadowed and a bit out of focus.
Up to now, I’ve been trying to live with this, mainly by using photo-editing software [1] to adjust the brightness and contrast, but this is not really ideal. I’ve been looking into the preferred methods of insect macrophotographers for some time now, and the recommendation is to get a good macro flash unit. In particular, people with Canon gear have said good things about the capabilities of the Canon Macro Twin Lite MT-24EX. Then I looked at the price.
We were out walking in the back yard last August when we spotted this caterpillar on a leaf of one of our numerous juneberry bushes. Caterpillars are relatively easy to photograph, because they will generally sit still, so we just picked the leaf and brought it home for pictures.
