From reader Gaurav Shah, a new contributer, we have a robber fly (species unidentified). Robber flies (also called “assassin flies” for obvious reasons) are in the family Asilidae; Wikipedia gives a curt but accurate description:
They are powerfully built, bristly flies with a short, stout proboscis enclosing the sharp, sucking hypopharynx. The name “robber flies” reflects their notoriously aggressive predatory habits; they feed mainly or exclusively on other insects and as a rule they wait in ambush and catch their prey in flight.
Gaurav notes that “this photo reminds me of a lion on the Serengeti with its prey.”
Here are some lepidopteran photos by reader Jonathan Wallace; his descriptions are indented:
The adult butterflies and moths tend to get all the glory but the larvae are just as interesting and often spectacular looking. The larvae are also, of course, ecologically important by virtue of their role as important herbivores and as prey to a wide range of other species.
The species shown here are the Peacock, Aglais io (on stinging nettle, Urtica dioica) which in common with many of the Nymphalids is gregarious in the larval stage and the Drinker, Euthrix potatoria, which gets both its vernacular and scientific species name from the habit of the larvae to drink from droplets of dew.
JAC: This caterpillar turns into a cryptic bark-mimetic adult moth; here’s a photo from Wikipedia:
Back to Jonathan’s photos; the larval Drinker:
The first picture is a Northern Eggar, Lasciocampa quercus ssp. Callunae. The second (green) picture is of a Coxcomb Prominent, Ptilodon capucina, showing its characteristic alarm posture with the head reared up over its back.
JAC: The coxcomb prominent also has a mimetic adult; this is its photo from Wikipedia:
This is a Vapourer, Orgyia antiqua. The setae are coated in toxins and presumably the dramatic appearance of the caterpillar is an example of aposematism. The female of this species is flightless as an adult and mates and lays her eggs on the remnants of her pupal cocoon.
Here’s a bunneh (eastern cottontail, Sylvilagus floridanus) that I saw stopped in its tracks on my way to work.What do they eat when everything is covered with snow? The lousy photograph is from my iPhone without a flash, but it almost looks like an ink-on-paper drawing. And it reminds me of the opening bit of Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” which F. Scott Fitzgerald described as “the coldest stanza in poetry”:
St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
A picture of the waxing moon from Tumut, NSW, Saturday 28 February 2015. The image was taken with a Canon 70D camera through a 110mm apochromatic doublet telescope.
I’ve wondered that as well. I found this:
“From spring to fall, rabbits and hares eat grass, clover, wild flowers, weeds, and farm and garden crops. In winter, their diet shifts to buds, twigs, bark, conifer needles, and practically any green plant.”
Ref: http://wdfw.wa.gov/living/rabbits.html
Bunnehs, eh. They come to my yard for birdseed and scraps from the backyard composter. If food on the ground runs out, then they eat my shrubs and trees!
I used to throw birdseed on the sidewalks too, and one year, a neighbour reported that there were dozens of rabbits feasting late one night.
One winter ago, I’ve lost a prized Cloud Nine flowering dogwood, the lower trunk of which I had dutifully wrapped with protective armour. Little did I know that it was going to snow tons that year and the the snowdrifts were almost up to the branches. I didn’t even remember to go check and augment the armour. Peter Rabbit simply loped up the slope and had a feast.
When I go through walks in the woods in the winter, I see quite a lot of twigs poking up through the snow that has the bark removed by bun-nehs. I suggest, btw, that one pauses in the n-area.
Bun-nehs
+1
For completeness, it should be noted that the robber fly is eating a syrphid.
I just found that I still remember a poem I learned in my first year of learning English in school.
Oh look at the moon,
she’s shining up there.
Oh, mother she looks like a lamp in the air.
Last week she was smaller
and shaped like a bow,
but now she’s grown bigger and round like an O.
O my… more than 40 years ago… Google tells me that it’s still in the textbook and was written by Eliza Lee Cabot Follen.
Lovely creepy-crawly pictures.
🐰
A great round of pictures. Especially as it includes caterpillars, which is one of my highlighted interests. The Vapourer made me nostalgic, as this was a species I had commonly seen in Iowa. But I never see them where I live now in Michigan.
Robber flies may be fearsome predators to insects, with their piercing proboscis and all, but as far as I have ever heard or experienced they can be handled quite safely.
I wonder what the Coxcomb prominent larva is trying to accomplish with its defensive posture. Maybe it is trying to make its anterior end look like a biggish abdomen, so to direct an attack at its rear end.
I’ve seen bunnies sitting in the middle of bushes eating the wood. They’ll eat saplings as well.
I have a very similar lunar picture that I took with my SCT. I also captured a crescent moon for my friend’s movie that I use on my Twitter background. I’m very angry that I have been too tired and too cold to take deep sky photos or even set up my telescope with the new piggy back adapter I got for my camera and its wide angle lens.
I never really considered that a waxing moon in the southern hemisphere would go in the opposite direction than it does here in the North.
Funny enough it looks like that through my telescope (and I’m in the northern hemisphere) because I don’t have an image erecting prism. 🙂
I have to “fix” my photos in post.
It isn’t the moon that is aligned in the opposite direction, it is you.
From Phil Plait’s blog, you can tell that NSW is in the Southern Hemisphere. And that the image was taken in the evening. Waxing Moons occur in the evening. And in the Southern Hemisphere the dark side of the Moon is on the right, the opposite to the Northern Hemisphere.
Impressive caterpillars!
That bunny photo could have been painted by Beatrix Potter – say, isn’t it from one of the night street scenes in The Tailor of Gloucester?