Reader’s wildlife photographs

I’m late today; I overslept while recovering from jet lag, and am preparing for a trip to Houston. On my way to work, there were police cars and helicopters everywhere, for President Obama is speaking today at the Law School (only law students and profs allowed) about his Supreme Court nomination.  But on to the photos:

Reader Stephen Barnard has been experimenting with video, and I’m chuffed to present his first one. His notes:

When a Bald Eagle (in this case Desi —Haliaeetus leucocephalus) carries a load to the nest (in this case a Rainbow Trout — Oncorhynchus mykiss), he first swoops below the nest to pick up air speed, then rises to a perfect stall before landing, gently. It’s a beautiful maneuver.

To see it in full size rather than the reduced version below, go to the flickr page.

And reader Mark Sturtevant sent some lovely photos of arthropods:

First we have the lovely orchard spider (Leucauge venusta), which spins a distinct orb web that is somewhat horizontal.

The next picture is of another orchard spider. I really like how the abdomen resembles antique porcelain, and check out those beautiful translucent green legs. This picture took many hours to prepare because as an experiment I combined two pictures that were focused slightly differently. The final picture was assembled manually by transplanting focused parts from one picture onto the 2^nd picture, and blending the pieces together. The surgical operation was done with a free program called Gimp, which is very much like Photoshop (only its free). To complete the process, many of the tiny bristles that are silhouetted against the background are drawn in. If you double click and zoom in further you might be able to detect my deception.

Next is a colorful two-striped grasshopper (Melanoplus bivittatus.), named after the two parallel stripes running down its prothorax I have not had much success taking pictures of Orthopterans since they always jump away, but this one was kept overnight and released the next day. It was hungry, so it allowed me to take pictures while it was munching on plants.

This wasp was extremely hard to identify, but I think I finally got it. It belongs to the family Thynnidae (a family I do not recall hearing about), and it is a five-banded Tiphiid wasp (Myzinum quinquecinctum) – so apparently it was once in the Tiphiid family (?). These wasps are parasitoids of beetle larvae in the scarabeid family. Perhaps this one parasitizes June bugs, for example.

Finally, a viceroy butterfly (Limenitis archippus) which is a well known Müllerian mimic of the monarch butterfly. I had seen this male repeatedly over a period of a couple weeks, sitting at his favorite perch along a field path that I used regularly in my photo safaris.

JAC: Mark got it right here. It used to be thought that the viceroy was a “Batesian mimic” of the monarch: a tasty butterfly that gained protection from bird predation by evolving the warning colors of the unpalatable monarch butterfly. In other words, it deceived the predator about its palatability. This is the way the system was taught by evolutionists (including me) for many years. Now, however, recent experiments suggest that the viceroy is also unpalatable to birds, and that it’s a case of Müllerian mimicry, in which two unpalatable species converge in color and/or pattern, which reduces predation by making the butterfly’s appearance easier to remember (and avoid) by birds.