Readers’ wildlife photos

Today Mark Sturtevant here) has returned with some lovely insect photos. His comments and IDs are indented:

The first two pictures are of ebony jewelwing damselflies (Calopteryx maculata). This is a lovely species that I will return to again and again as I experiment with ambient light versus flash to try to best represent them. Here a bit more flash is used than I normally like in both examples, as this mutes their metallic color even though it does mightily help illuminate these shade-loving insects.

The first is a female, with the characteristic white pterostigma on her wings, and the second is a male. The male was taken on a dangerously hot and humid day, and I pretty much had to flee to a shady creek in the woods and sit down in the cool water. The damsels were abundant there, and they soon returned to settle on the tall ferns and horsetails that hung over the creek. What could have been a dreadful day became a very enjoyable day in the Carboniferous.

Next is a picture of a great spangled fritillary (Speyeria cybele) on milkweed in the Magic Field. This is another species that I frequently photograph.  Readers might want to embiggen this one. The ‘lighting gods’ were with me for 1/250 sec.

Continuing with the Magic Field, we return once again to grasshopper nymphs, another subject that I love because they are both cute and odd-looking. It can be hard to identify the youngsters to species, but the first is probably the beautiful red-winged grasshopper (Arphia pseudonietana). The second is one of the slant-faced grasshoppers, but I have yet to identify this one to species.

In one of my other favorite parks I noted a suspicious smudge on a picnic table that turned out to be a lappet moth caterpillar. This was exciting! The next two pictures show the remarkable camouflage of this insect after it was transferred to a twig. When doing their disappearing act, lappet moth caterpillars flatten themselves so that their pro-legs stick out laterally, and they press down their hairs to conceal their own shadow. The blue tubercles are actually an artifact from the camera flash so they are not blue in natural light.

These larvae are so difficult to see that when I simply glanced away to check the camera I promptly ‘lost’ it, even though it was sitting just inches away. I can’t even find the species name, but it is likely either in the genus Apotolype or Tolype. I am still smarting from the lost opportunity for a ‘Spot the caterpillar!’ game, although likely this would have been too difficult.

Next up is a recently emerged female damselfly (species unknown), which has yet to harden and develop colors. The inverted sky and trees in the background is because the scene is overlooking a lake that is reflecting the sky.

A lovely female scorpionfly (Panorpa sp.) is shown in the next picture. Scorpionflies belong to a somewhat obscure insect order (Panorpidae), and they are scavengers of dead insects. I have some rather disgusting pictures to share later regarding that point.

The final pictures are of a strange little wasp that I found in the weeds at an abandoned construction site. There were several of these wasps, and they seemed dedicated to visiting a particular kind of flowering weed, ignoring all other flowers about them. The wasp belongs to a rather obscure family, Gasteruptiidae, and the genus is Gasteruption. Their larvae are known to feed on the larvae of other solitary wasps.

One may fairly wonder why they have the strangely elongated neck, although in truth the ‘neck’ is really the front of the thorax. I do not know why they have this seemingly specialized feature, but the last picture silently offers a possible explanation.