Readers’ wildlife photos

Please send in your good wildlife photos; there’s always a need, and it’s beginning to press. . . .

Today’s photos come from our most regular regular, Mark Sturtevant, insect photographer par excellence. Mark’s captions and narrative are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are more pictures of insects (and one spider) from last summer. All were taken near where I live which is in eastern Michigan. I shoot with Canon cameras, mostly with the manual Laowa 2.5-5x super macro, and the Canon 100mm f/2.8L macro (often with a Raynox diopter to boost the mag). All but the last of these pictures are focus stacks, as I have become addicted to additional post-processing.

Let’s start with ants. We have a large Cottonwood tree in our backyard that is steadily infested with black Carpenter Ants. One day I saw that there was a small swarm of these smaller red ants carrying pupae, larvae, and eggs INTO the tree as well. Perhaps they were moving to higher ground after being flooded out. I am not good with ant identification, but at this time the good folks at BugGuide had tentatively identified them as being Aphaenogaster sp. Despite the some-what controlled conditions of a staged setting (a dish of water that prevented the ants from running off) I needed to take about 200 pictures to get a few keepers. Ants hard!:

Next up is one of the Soldier Flies, Solva pallipes. Soldier flies visit flowers and seem to mimic wasps. The description in Wikipedia mentions that they are rather inactive, and come to think of it, that is true. This is once again from a staged setting, but the fly just sat there:

Here is an exceptionally poofy moth that came to the porch light. Although I often ignore plain-looking moths, this one was such a floof that it had to be photographed. It turns out to have an odd name: the Arcane Grass Tubeworm Moth, Acrolophus arcanella. The group gets their name because the larvae live in leaf litter, where they hide in silken tubes:

The small beetle shown in the next picture was a bit of a puzzle in that I really had no idea what family it belonged to, but I would see a lot of them. One day, by chance I stumbled upon its ID. So this is one of the Soldier Beetles, and in particular it is Trypherus frosoni. I suppose its colors are a warning that it is toxic. Soldier beetles are herbivores, and many species stay on flowers where they eat pollen. But I see this species only sitting out on leaves. Interesting that its forewings are shortened but the hind wings are not.

Next up is a large Ground Beetle which I think is Scarites vicinus, although it could be a couple other species. I am going with some tiny details like the length/width ratio of antennal segments. Ground Beetles are predatory, as one might guess with those jaws. I just had a neighbor stop by to show me one of the same beetles that they had squished (I am known in the ‘hood as the person to go to for bug information), so I gave her admonishments about how they are beneficial:

It’s time for some dragonflies. First up is one of our Baskettail Dragonflies, Epitheca sp. One cannot easily identify these to species except after very close inspection of genitalia.

Next is a nearly-new species for me because it’s been about 7 years since I’ve seen one. This is a Four-spotted Skimmer, Libellula quadrimaculata. Occasional vagrants do appear in my area, but they normally range farther south, which is where this picture was taken:

One of the most common of our dragonflies is the Twelve-spotted Skimmer, Libellula pulchella. Males like this one develop white spotting as they age:

An always exciting find is the Dragonhunter, Hagenius brevistylus, what is pretty much our largest dragonfly in the area and as far as I know they are the largest of the Clubtail dragonflies anywhere. With a length up to 90mm (~ 3.5 inches)  and those extra heavy legs, they are not dragonflies that are “good for controlling mosquitoes!”  Their common name refers to their well-above-average interest in eating other dragonflies. This female is as I usually see them, weighing down their favorite twig as they face out over the water:

An unusual spider wraps up this set. This is our Featherlegged Orbweaver, Uloborus glomosus. There are several different spider families that spin orb webs, with the most familiar being spiders in the family Araneidae. But there are other spider families that also practice this craft, and I don’t know if this is a case of convergent evolution or what. But here we have an orb-weaver spider from one of the “other” families, Uloboreidae, and they are a bit different for a couple reasons. One is that they don’t produce sticky silk but instead use finely meshed silk that entangles prey. Another little detail about these spiders is that they have no venom. This one is eating an unidentifiable prey, and the mass to her rear is an egg sac. This is focus stacked while I was sitting somewhere deep in the woods: