It is unclear whether the dead leaf mantis is named for its tendency to resemble a dead leaf or because he was once an ordinary leaf mantis, full of hopes and dreams, that once made a mistake, one so terrible that he never recovered, dooming him to wander the garden, never again to feel truly alive.
On one hand, the most logical explanation is that the zookeepers decorated the centipede exhibit for the holiday.
On the other, it was Shabbat and the centipede was clearly not engaged in creative work.
This is not an ant. It’s actually a type of wingless wasp.
A wasp, of course, is any insect of the suborder Apocrita that is neither a bee nor an ant.
The suborder Apocrita is made of all insects in the Hymenoptera that have a narrow “waist” (or petiole) formed between the first two segments of the actual abdomen.
This is where it gets fun …
A petiole is sometimes called a pedicel, which is also used for the second segment of an insect’s antennae, which can be confusing. So you’d think most entomologists would use “petiole”, but that gets confusing because that work can also mean the stalk at the base of the nests of paper wasps *and* the situation where a normally four-sided cell in the wing of an insect has only three.
Why did all of this happen? Because of plants. People were studying plants before they were studying bugs and in botany a pedicel is the thin stem that connects a single flower to the inflorescence (cluster of flowers) or to a single fruit to infructescence (cluster of fruits (or fruit-like things)) while a petiole is the thin stalk that connects a leaf to its stem.
Now let’s talk about figs …
Botanically, a fruit is the seed bearing structure in angiosperms that is formed from the ovary. Figs are false fruits, being formed from an inverted inflorescence that, when pollinated, grows into an infructescence. How does this get pollinated, I hear you ask? With wasps!
The fig’s inflorescence is inverted, so the only way they can get pollinated is with wasps that have evolved to match specific fig species. One wasp crawls into each flower, lays its eggs, and dies. The eggs hatch, and the little wasps chew their way out of the fig flower, leaving their mother’s body behind. Now, normally, people get grossed out at this point, as every fig they eat actually contains several wasps … but that’s not the cool part.
Because a fig is a cluster of little false fruits, each false fruit being connected to its infructescence with a pedicel *and* each one containing a wasp, which is distinguished from other insects of Hymenoptera because it has a pedicel, that means that figs, unlike all the other infructescences out there, has twice as many pedicels as you’d expect!
Ta da!
(This is what happens when a photographer who is both a word geek and bio geek isn’t quite tired enough to go to bed yet.)
And you thought that human goths had it rough.
Sometimes you have work on your fear of heights once small step at a time.
Butterfly remembering all the legs it had as a caterpillar and wondering if they turned into wings or got stuck together to make the six longer legs it has now.
Brown longwing pondering whether the classic “marshmallow experiment” bothered to correct for whether or not kids were hungry and how often they got to eat marshmallows in their everyday life, pondering whether impulse control actually is set at youth, or if poverty and nutrient availability set at youth just has life-long effects.
This name is also a incorrect, as these beetles are not tigers.
Though they are larger than the average katydid, their name is misleading. They’re not really this big.
Gregor had had better days.
Bees seal all their honeys in little cells so no one else can get to them … just like pop singers seem to want to do.
#patriarchy
Some days, he would just sit and look out at the world. He wanted nothing more than to finally be alone to finally be himself. But he feared casting aside his family. For though the constant demands were exhausting, there was a comfort in the buzzing busyness and weight of the certainness of expectation.
So he watched and waited, wanting a world that would never be his.
If you are tired of all the white and brown outside, here’s a bit of green and orange.
This moth was feeding in a flower in the early morning. I was about three meters away … and three meters below it. I was shooting hand-held.
This is one of those shots that really should not have been possible
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Turns out you can use a 400mm telephoto lens as a macro lens when you need to.
This is the best photo of a naked mole rat I’ve ever taken.
Usually, they’re hiding because it’s daytime and they have scratched the heck out of their glass front so there’s no chance.
They’re not the prettiest animal out there, but for a critter that lives a weird sort of mammalian insect it sure does look the part.
Insects are little photobombers.
And then, when a shot works out, it’s seldom of your original intended subject.
See? Background are crazy hard.