by Matthew Cobb

This fantastic photo of a spiny flower mantid displaying on one of those weirdly fractal bobbly Romanesco cauliflowers was taken by Leeds-based photographer Oliver Wright, who kindly gave me permission to reproduce it here. You can see a whole lot more photos – some macro, some not – over at his website.

This is a threat display (i.e. the animal is threatened so it’s threatening back by looking scary). The dark bits you can see on its eyes (and those of many other insects) are not in fact pupils, but are called the deep pseudopupil. These are optical effects that move in their position on the eye as you move your point of view, and they tell us about the organisation of the ommatidia [JAC: the small individual visual components] that make up the insect’s compound eye.

By JAC:

Finally, from a tw**t from Sofia Gabriela, a photo of an albino raccoon and its young spotted by Rick Stockwell in Le Sueur, Minnesota. Albinos in the wild are usually either unhealthy or easily spotted by predators, but this one seems to have reached adulthood and produced a litter. It’s clearly an albino than a case of leucism, as the eyes are without pigment.

I wish it luck. The young are, of course, normal, as albinism comes from having two copies of the mutant gene, which is recessive, and mating with a “normal” raccoon would produce all normally-colored young unless the male carried one copy of the albino gene, in which case half of the offspring would be albinos.

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