Spur-throated grasshopper
New bee photographs
Here are a few new photos from the last week or two — got a handful of interesting bees.
Oriental beetle
Bee-like robber fly
I couldn’t find my macro diffuser when I went out to shoot this morning, and since I was trying to get out the door before some rain moved in, I just configured my bracket so the bare flash head was as close to the focal point as possible. This put it a few inches in front of the lens, so it probably had an apparent size about half again as large as in the position I normally use it. I was actually pretty impressed with the results. It could be that it’s just close enough to work well when it’s configured like this, though I was also shooting bugs in flowers for the most part, which might well have been acting as little miniature reflectors. We’ll see; it was definitely convenient to shoot this way, with no diffuser to keep from slipping after every shot.
This is one of the images I got, of a bee-like robber fly (Laphria, maybe thoracica?) who kept turning to watch me intently as I was shooting. It’s a perfect example of a bee-mimic, like so many flies: I thought I was shooting a bumblebee until I got a closer look at the head. The mimicry is defensive for many of them, especially the ones that look like yellowjackets. The robber flies are predators though, and I’d bet that their appearance lets them get close enough to their prey to catch and kill them. Notice the tubular mouth, underneath the moustache-like bristles? They stab with that. And though it’s not apparent in this image, their legs are covered with spines that keep their prey from escaping. Some of the larger robber flies can have a painful bite, and have been known to eat hummingbirds. Fun little flies.
Toxomerus marginatus
First bug photo of 2011
New Photos, 9/3/10
The photos I’ve added to my gallery this week are from a trip to visit family in upstate New York. My parents get a lot of bees and butterflies in their yard, so it’s usually a good opportunity to get something interesting while I’m there.
New Photos
Sorry for the lack of posts lately — been a hectic couple of weeks. Lots of work, lots of back and forth, and very little time to sit down to get through photos. But here’s a few that I added to my gallery this week.
Long-horned bee
A male long-horned bee, possibly in the genus Melissodes, drinks nectar from a sunflower. The long-horned bees, or Eucerini, are a large tribe of solitary bees that dig nests; like most solitary bees the actual nesting habits varies from species to species, but none of them build the huge nests we associate with honey bees. And none of them have the same complex social structure with queens, workers, and drones. The Eucerini get their name from the extremely long antennae of the males: the word itself means “true horn”.
I see large crowds of these bees on sunflowers near me, especially in mid to late summer. The males hang out and drink nectar, and wait for a chance to mate with females who stop by for a break in their constant pollen-gathering. They start early and work at it all day: I walked past some at about 8:30am this morning and there were several females with heavily-loaded pollen baskets. A few miner bees and tiny sweat bees as well.
I took this shot yesterday afternoon. It’s at a 1:1 magnification ratio, so just the macro lens without any tubes. The flash, a Canon 430EX II, is mounted on a bracket I put together, and shot through a diffuser made out of an old yogurt cup and Rosco diffusion paper. Unfortunately, right after I finished with these bees and started walking to the next place I hoped to find bees, the off-camera cord I had the flash mounted on literally ripped off of its threaded mounting post, and bungeed down onto the street. No damage, I think, since the coil-cord slowed its fall, but it’s making me seriously rethink the value of using the cord’s hotshoe as a mount: obviously there’s too much flex and stress with the flash’s center of gravity so much higher than where it’s secured.
The identification of this bee proves difficult. I got several clear shots of the wing venation, an important characteristic to select between the hundreds of species of bees in New England, and one or two showing the color and texture of the thorax very nicely. With this, I used the bee genera guide at discoverlife.org to narrow it down to a few species in several genera that don’t really look like perfect fits — different proportions and eye color, for example — or one eleven species in the genus Melissodes, which I think this probably is. The guides at discoverlife.org are highly detailed keys that need more knowledge than I actually have, not to mentioned a mounted specimen and a microscope, to take full advantage of, but it’s still extremely useful in drilling down with the right shots. Once I repair my rig, I plan to go back to these flowers at night to shoot them sleeping — the males really don’t seem to leave — and hopefully get a few other details that will help confirm the ID.
Lucanus capreolus
Reddish-brown stag beetle
Lucanus capreolus
Here’s a big little beast. This reddish-brown stag beetle is about an inch long, with a thick, deep red body and huge mandibles. They look like an over-grown, over-armored army ant, but in fact the jaws are not terribly powerful. (From what I hear — I haven’t been pinched by one personally.) The beetle doesn’t need them to be: the adults feed on tree sap, and the females have little nubbins instead. Well, really the females have normally-proportioned mandibles for a beetle of their quite large size, but in comparison to the males’, they look a bit dwarfish.
Given that these oversized mandibles are useless for foraging and impractical for defense, and that it’s the males who lug them around, you can immediately guess what they’re for: wrestling. They fight over breeding territory, and the biggest mandibles gets the ladies. After mating, the female lays her eggs in rotten wood, which feeds the larvae as they grow over the next few years.
I found this particular guy upside-down on the sidewalk, fairly early in the morning. They’re crepuscular animals, meaning they come out at dawn and dusk, so he was probably wrapping up his morning activity. No idea how he got flipped over, but they’re not very graceful fliers, and he may have just tired himself out. They seem to play dead when on their back, like many insects, but I wonder if that’s a defensive response or if they just take a moment to gather their strength. At any rate, I brought him home and stuck him in a clean plastic cup, with some paper towels for cover, and gave him a few drops of sugar water later on.
To shoot him, I turned a small cardboard shipping box into a lightbox, by cutting away a few extra sides and flaps, taping white printer paper along the inside, and covering the top with Rosco 1/4 Tough diffusion paper. I put the 430EX II on a light stand directly overhead, and used the WhiBal to nail the color temperature down and get the exposure in the right ballpark. I took a few shots at 1:1 with the 100mm Macro, and made a series of four verticals to merge into a hi-res horizontal, but he moved around a bit as I was shooting and they don’t have a consistent focal point. This is one of them.
Identification was simple. Any huge beetle with huge mandibles is probably one of the stag beetles (Lucanidae), and we only have a few in New England. Lucanus capreolus is dark red, with a lighter yellow thigh. I was pretty confidant after flipping through Marshall’s guide, and then checked the key on bugguide.net to confirm it. There’s another species, L. elaphus, with even larger mandibles, but the ones on this guy are only about as long as the pronotum (the head). It’s not visible in this image, but he has fan-shaped clubs at the end of the antennae, the eyes are slightly divided by a little protrusion called a canthus, and the surface of the pronotum and the elytra (the wing covers) are pretty smooth. All these things say Lucanus, and rule out other related stag beetles.
Scytodes thoracica
Spitting Spider
Scytodes thoracica
This handsome little spider is, literally, a spitting spider. Their silk glands are located next to the venom glands in their head (well, the cephalothorax), instead of the abdomen, like many more common spiders. They don’t spin webs at all, preferring to stalk their prey at night. Once they’ve gotten close enough, about a centimeter or so, they spray a line of venomous liquid silk from their fangs, snaring the prey. And then they eat it.
This is the first spitting spider I’ve ever seen. I pulled out a bowl for some cereal, and lo and behold, there was a spider with these really neat markings in it. Nature is everywhere, even the cupboard. It’s a very small spider: this photo was taken at 2:1. I used the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens on extension tubes, lit with a 430EX II. The flash was shot through a 43″ umbrella mounted on a lightstand; ordinarily I would say that’s an impractical setup for macro, but the spider wasn’t going anywhere and I had the whole thing set up in the living room already, except for the lens. Post-shoot wrap-up consisted of tossing the spider outside and getting a new bowl for the cereal.
It was a pretty straightforward animal to ID. The distinctive markings would have made it easy if I had known about this species, but I didn’t and so purposefully ignored them: the spider was small enough to be a juvenile of one of the more common kinds I see around the house, and color patterns are really variable in many spiders. Judging by the large cephalothorax (the front section, with the legs), I didn’t expect it to be a weaver. The eyes jumped out at me though, definitely not a jumping spider. There are six: a pair of median eyes in the center, and a pair of lateral eyes high on each side of the median eyes, partially hidden in the dark bands. So I turned to BugGuide’s guide to spider eye arrangements, got momentarily concerned because of the resemblance to the recluse spiders, and then found the species immediately when I checked the Scytodidae. There’s only one genus and a few species, and as it turns out, the markings for S. thoracica actually do look pretty useful for identification.
Spring flowers
The appearance of small plants and flowers in the past two weeks has been a huge relief. I’m not much of an indoor photographer, and with the change of weather I’ve finally been able to get outside again. I’ve gotten a few good ant shots already, but with my macro rig in a transitional state (to put it nicely) I’ve been changing things up by shooting some flowers in natural light. I uploaded several to my gallery this morning.
Prints of all these images are available through the links.
Green metallic bee, spiderwort 2
Another green metallic bee, but I think these guys look great. I just replaced a few of the other Agapostemon shots with slightly retouched versions (nothing major, just some better sharpening and JPG output) — the difference probably isn’t noticeable if you aren’t comparing the two versions side by side, but these should produce better prints. I just ordered some for myself yesterday, and can’t wait to see them.
On that note, I’ve also removed the option to buy glossy prints from my gallery. The lustre prints have the same type of finish on a higher quality paper, and since there are so many size and paper options to sort through already, I don’t see a real need to offer both.
If you’re interested in ordering a print of my work but aren’t sure what paper type to go with, you won’t go wrong with lustre. Metallic prints can look incredible, but not every image works well with it. It gives images an incredible appearance of depth and vibrance, and handles dark and shadowy areas beautifully, though brighter highlights can look strange. I’ve got a few more coming in this latest batch I ordered, and hope to get a better idea of what kinds of image I’d recommend it for soon.
Water on sumac
It’s been cold and rainy here for the past week. I built a new diffuser yesterday, and hope to get a chance to test it with actual bugs sometime soon — once I do, I’ll post an update on what my current macro rig looks like, since it’s changed a bit since my post describing my DIY flash bracket.
Carpenter ants at work
I just posted a gallery of black carpenter ants harvesting honeydew from a herd of aphids. A colony will tend a large number of aphids, protecting them from predators and culling the infectious sick, collecting the sugar-rich secretion the aphids produce in return.
Also some cool shots of two ants exchanging their stomach contents in a process called trophallaxis. The whole colony will have similar proportions of food in their stomachs because of this sharing of food. Gross, but very cool.
Harvestman
This morning was pretty chilly and not much was out in the way of tiny invertebrates. I was trying to get a better angle on a small spider who was hiding in a curled leaf, and as I stood up to move to the other side, I saw an absolutely gigantic opilionid, a harvestman, sunning itself on the leafy bush next to me. A much better opportunity. I ended up finding about a half dozen harvestmen in and around the bush, and a few one the surrounding trees as well.
They look like spiders — they are fellow arachnids — but there are a few important differences. For one, they don’t spin webs (they lack the organs to) and have no venom at all. They mostly prey on soft-bodied animals like aphids, and actually have some value in agriculture as a species that contributes to keeping down pest levels. They’ll also scavenge and cannibalize.
You can tell a opilionid from a spider quickly by two obvious clues. First, opilionids have two eyes mounted on a tubercule along the midline of the body, instead of the eight eyes spread along the front of a spider’s body. Spiders and harvestmen both have a body composed of two main segments, a cephalothorax (the front head-torso region) and an abdomen, but while spiders have a narrow pinching waist that clearly marks where one ends and one begins. The two sections are much harder to determine in opilionids.
I’m pretty certain that the species I photographed is Phalangium opilio, and the bolder markings along the abdomen seem to imply that I found females. I am open to correction on both of these points.
Daring jumping spider
A daring jumping spider (Phidippus audax), in my bathroom. I saw it while getting ready for work, and ran to grab the camera — didn’t have time for a great shot of those green chelicerae but I was happy with this one.
Although they’re large (this one was about a half-inch long I think), jumping spiders are harmless. Nothing to be afraid of from this animal. They’re called ‘daring’ jumping spiders because they’re quite aware of you when you’re watching them, and they’ll watch right back. Most spiders either have poor vision and won’t see you, or have good vision and will run and hide. They’re popular with arachnophiles because of this, and because of the metallic green chelicerae (think fangs) you can see in this image. They don’t spin webs: you’ll see them with silk tethers, but they only use them as safety lines while hunting or traveling.
Speaking of the macro bracket, I’ll be posting an update on how it works with an off-camera flash cord later this week. My first impression is that the balance and weight are much better, and the flash is much more securely placed than it was with the Cactus V2s receiver. I do need to find some way of diffusing the light, though.