If you zoom in on this photo, you’ll see that strider’s right eye is malformed. I do not know if it got crushed somehow or (more likely) if something went wrong when it was growing.
Given what I know of insect brains and how they handle image reconstitution, though, this may not actually be a drawback to how they interpret the world. The operating theory seems to be that each eye facet sends an image section to the brain, which folds them all together into a single concept of the world around them. Unlike our eyes, which have focusing mechanisms, each facet in an insect eye consists of a fixed lens (like a GoPro) connected to a single sensor cell (not like a GoPro), so it is quite possible that the insect’s brain can reconstruct a mental image of their surroundings just fine with eyes that aren’t spherical. They likely have some blind spots on the right, but it’s probably more like cataracts than total vision loss.
I was going to make a joke that diving beetles have to practice their dive so they don’t splash and earn low points from the East German judge. Then I grew concerned that too many of you would point out that the surface tension of the water would prevent splashing anyway, so I started researching fluids with low surface tension and remembered that some insects can produce surfactants, which, while possibly not true for this particular species, could still allow the joke to work.
Then I grew concerned that I wasn’t remembering the whole “East German judge” thing properly and fact-checked that. That led me to the wikipedia page on East Germany jokes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Germany_jokes ), all of which are better than this one.
It can be very hard to positively identify certain animals, particularly insects. For example, with dragonflies, you have to know the colour and patternings on their body, but you sometimes also have to know general size, where they’re located, and the time of the year you saw them.
Of course, it helps if they’re also not partially inside of a mongoose.
I also played a bit with my new super-macro lens. Like most lenses that focus to more than a 1:1 level, it works a lot better with flash. But it was a sunny day so I got something.
In reading about these guys I found them described as both grasshoppers and locusts – so I went a researching.
It turns out that all locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. Certain grasshoppers, when conditions are right, will go into a swarming mode. This is often triggered by over-crowding. Interestingly, the over-crowding response is triggered by their hind legs being stimulated, which causes a release of serotonin (I believe in the brain, but the articles aren’t clear). This release causes the grasshoppers to change form, eat more, breed more quickly, and start to congregate into groups. Then they all fly away to devastate the land all around them.
That’s right, the grasshoppers’ genetic response to overcrowding is to eat all their food and make more grasshoppers.
In reading about these guys, I learned that, like all* butterflies, it can’t chew so it has to suck fluids from through it’s proboscis. Unlike most butterflies, this one lives off of “rotting or fermenting fruit.”
That means you’re looking at a photo of a carrion eater.
