Three amazing photos by Melvyn Yeo

October 24, 2014 • 4:56 am

by Matthew Cobb

We’ve featured the arthropod macro photos of Singapore-based photographer Melvyn Yeo before. You can browse his amazing DeviantArt page. Here are two doozies I just stumbled across. The first is of a mantidfly. These are weird neuropterans that look like a cross between a mantis and a fly (they aren’t). This one has an amazing ‘neck’ and doubles up with some Batesian mimicry – it looks like a wasp. It’s only about 1 cm long…

The second is just a boring grasshopper. But what camouflage!

The third is a tiny (= 0.5 cm) Amblypigid or ‘whip scorpion’ (NOT a scorpion OR a spider, though related to both). In all Amblypigids the first pair of legs has been transformed into sensors – but these are utterly bizarre.

Click to see them in all their glory!

 

23 thoughts on “Three amazing photos by Melvyn Yeo”

    1. When I right click and choose “Show Image”, in Firefox, I get an enlargement, image sized at 960px by 640px.

  3. OK clicking will now take you to the full size image, on Melvyn’s site. This is why Jerry shouldn’t give me the keys to the car. I’ll scratch it, leave it in a terrible state, etc.

  4. Really cool.
    That grasshopper has a nice touch on its leaf mimicry — note the green spots to make it look like holes in a leaf! How the hell does evolution come up with these ideas?

    The tailless whipscorpion looks like it might be a baby. These things, and their cousins the whipscorpions, get real big and scary looking but they are completely harmless. A while ago I got to handle a big, docile whipscorpion. The kids were kind of scared of it at first, but soon saw that it was as benign as a ladybug.

  6. I love the hybrid design of the first one. A wasp-fly-mantis hybrid is simply too weird not to like! The amblypygid is pretty cool, too. It’s a shame most people will barely know about the spiders and scorpions, and never fully get to appreciate the awesome variety of arachnids. The front claws on that thing (the pedipalps, I think) look too small, though. I’m more familiar with the “long-armed” variety. What does this one eat, I wonder, that makes stubbier appendages better?

    The grasshopper one is still amazing. I get a kick out of trying to spot the odd details that betray its true nature, though, like how the back half of the leaf is made up of its enlarged hindlegs. But darn is that impressive.

      1. Many thanks! I had not heard of mantispids before today, and I’m frankly shocked. I hadn’t yet found even some documentary or wildlife book that so much as mentioned them. Something this bizarre and amazing shouldn’t just pass under the radar.

        I find it appropriate that these wasp-mimics parasitize spiders, considering how some real wasp species make arrangements for their own young. It’s like the mantispids are copying everything they can, though the details are pretty different (usually it’s the adult wasps that lay the eggs in adult spider bodies, rather than larvae going against larvae).

        I did wonder at first if the forelimbs were just for show (and therefore their resemblance to mantis limbs was only coincidental), but apparently they’re fully functioning raptorial limbs:

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantispidae

        1. I hadn’t yet found even some documentary or wildlife book that so much as mentioned them. Something this bizarre and amazing shouldn’t just pass under the radar.

          Give me the budget and the film crew and I’ll see that these are included in a documentary!
          I only found out about mantispids by seeing one – and immediately having to find out what it is… thus providing the final push over the edge of arthropod obsession for me…

          These are in the order Neuroptera, along with:
          Green lacewings – as larvae, many cover their soft bodies with debris (sand, dirt, the remains of their prey) so they can be protected from predators while they chow down on aphids; as adults, many communicate with each other via songs made by very quickly drumming their abdomens on the ground/tree branch/whatever. The songs are species-specific, and are performed as duets before mating.
          Antlions – many antlion larvae dig conical pits in sandy soil, position themselves at the bottom, and wait for passing insects to step into the pit. As the insect struggles to climb out while sand falls beneath its feet, the antlion uses its head to flick more sand up to make the struggle that much more futile. The adults are nothing to write home about – clumsy fliers that amble through the air at night, but the larvae are nightmare fodder!
          Owlflies – adults are capable fliers that are known to capture and consume prey during flight (dragonfly much?); larvae are similar to non-pit-building antlions, generally wandering in the leaf litter and eating whatever they feel like. Adults deposit eggs in rows on low twigs, and then deposit a different kind of egg closer to the base of the twig – in some groups, these highly-derived infertile eggs are covered in a nasty insect repellent, so any ant who comes looking for an easy meal is kept at bay. In other groups, these infertile eggs are full of nutrients and provide an excellent first meal for the eclosed larvae – these larvae are generally more stout than their owlfly cousins, and are capable of defending themselves until they’re old enough to drop to the ground and go their own way.

          Neuropterans are usually hard to find, and most of the groups have virtually-unknown life histories – which is unfortunate, because the ones we know about are astounding. Spongillaflies are aquatic as larvae, living inside and consuming freshwater sponges before emerging to make beautiful cocoons before becoming adults. Berothids live in termite galleries, where they consume termites and presumably stay hidden by producing pheromones that mask their presence. Neuropterans that live outside of North America are absolutely beautiful, Neuropterans that lived in the past are evolutionary wonders (raptorial forelimbs and halteres?! These must have been aerial-hunting masters).

          Oh dear, I do get carried away. I need to find a film crew… lol.

          1. Thanks for both your Neuropteran posts, Marshall! I’ve always been intrigued by them myself, but learned so much more from your information. Great links, too.

          2. It’s my pleasure – I rarely get the opportunity to gush about cool bugs!
            There’s plenty of information out there about Neuroptera, but most of it is still “locked away” in obscure papers.
            On the topic of great links, I should have linked to this page when I mentioned lacewing songs – this is Charles Henry’s collection of recordings of these songs.

          3. That’s pretty astounding! Not that I have a subwoofer & can actually hear them, but the sonographs speak for themselves. These are the times when I marvel at all we know about the biota; that someone even discovered, let alone has analyzed in great detail, these subsonic sounds from such minuscule creatures.

            Who funds stuff like this today?! (Wildly free-associating–are most neuropteran larvae agriculturally valuable predators?)

          4. I have no idea who’s funding this stuff, but I’d love to know!
            Lacewing larvae are very effective predators of aphids and other small insects, so they’re looked upon very favorably by gardeners, but I’m not sure if anybody is trying to push neuropterans into the forefront of pest control.
            I just want somebody to pay me to travel the world collecting and IDing bugs! I guess we all have our fantasies. 😛

  7. Mantispids are awesome. They not only look cool, they have a crazy life history as well. They’re hypermetamorphic, so they go through two very different larval stages before pupating and emerging as an adult.
    In the most well-studied subfamily, mantispinae, the larvae emerge from the egg and start looking for a spider to crawl onto. Once on the spider, they wait… eventually, the spider will lay an egg or meet a female to impregnate so she can lay an egg (in which case, the larva crawls from the male spider to the female during sexy-time (or during post-sexy-time-cannibalism)).
    When the spider starts to construct her egg sac, the larva gets in on the action and ends up (if all goes to plan) sealed up inside the egg sac, surrounded by delicious spider eggs. It eats, eats, eats, pupates, and eventually emerges (from its cocoon within the egg sac as well as the egg sac itself) as a pharate adult, walks to a safe place to molt one last time, and the winged adult flies off to make more spider-egg-parasitoid babies.

    Neuroptera is amazing. Arthropods are amazing, but neuropterans sort of typify everything awesome about ’em.

    Errr… sorry! Beautiful photos!

    2. And cool that one of the wasp-mantispids hosts is the ‘Rabid Wolf Spider’, Rabidosa rabida. Sounds pretty creepy.

      1. Oddly enough, Rabidosa is one of my other favorite animals! They don’t have any bizarre or unusual life cycles like mantispids, but they’re just so pretty! They are relatively large wolf spiders that like grass – super common (at least here in the southeast) at certain times of the year, but that’s ok. They’re not as voracious as many of their lycosid cousins, and usually spend more time in tall grass than on the ground.

        Here’s a wonderful photo of them mating, which shows some nice sexual selection (the male’s black front legs – apparently the blacker, the better!).

        I’m not exactly sure where the name comes from, but there’s a silly tradition of erecting wolf spider genera with names derived from vertebrate predators – whether obvious (Tigr-osa, Crocodil-osa) or more subtle (Alopec-osa (fox!)), so maybe it has to do with that.

  8. But those whip scorpions (amblypygids) don’t have whips! The real whip scorpions (thelyphonids or vinegaroons) do! Some call them whipless whip scorpions, which is just as bad as whip scorpion, IMO.

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