Now I suppose this will interest only a subset of our photography enthusiasts here, but I wanted to call attention to an upcoming week-long course on insect photography in Belize, whose instructors include two superb nature photographers that I’ve often featured on this site: Piotr Naskrecki and Alex Wild.

The flyer is below, and the website for the course is here. I’m told that there are only a few slots left.

Besides the photography instruction, of course, there’s plenty of chances to learn natural history from experienced field biologists. Here, for example, is a photo Wild took during the last class (the caption from PopSci):

In the jungles of Belize last January, entomologist Alex Wild noticed something odd about the trap-jaw ants passing through his outdoor insect photography class: They all had shrunken heads and swollen abdomens. A day after making the observation, Wild and his students came upon an ant with a worm bursting out of its side. Parasites were at work. Nematode worms enter the ants as larvae and grow inside the ants’ body cavity, siphoning off nutrients and distorting their hosts’ natural anatomy. When the eight-inch-long nematodes are ready to mate a few weeks later, they push their way out of their half-inch-long hosts, killing them.