Insect Picture of the Day

It’s Spider Friday!

I did not actually get any spider pictures last weekend, but when I announced that I had no spider pictures, Andrew Lin emailed me and offered to send me stacks of ‘em. You have him to thank, because this means I can squeeze an extra week out of InsectPOD now; we have pictures for a total of five weeks now!

And so, without further ado, meet my favorite spider of all, which is, of course, Phidippus audax:

Click for larger version

Andrew has this to say about this photo: “This guy is trying a different tack than other jumping spiders by using a sports car to pick up the ladies.”

In the full size picture (I’ve decided to just make them all 1920×1200 desktops from now on, unless the source image is too small), you can see the line of the hood.

Thanks, Andrew!

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Who wants to see a corpse-eating flesh fly? Oh, let’s not always see the same hands.

This is a flesh fly, genus Sarcophaga, probably Sarcophaga bullata, the most common species of sarcophagid. The larger image is actually a 1920×1200 desktop image.

Hey, remember yesterday when I said there would be some InsectPOD fanservice coming up? Well, okay then! Who wants to see some sarcophagid booty!

Okay, seriously, you guys? The same hands thing is getting creepy. Especially you. And you.

Click for larger version

Okay, it’s not just gratuitous, it’s also educational: an identifying trait of sarcophagids is that both their eyes and their, um, taillights, are red. The larger image is also a 1920×1200 desktop, because if I know you two, you’re gonna want them both. Seriously, guys. Kinda creepy.

Some folks have asked me why I let InsectPOD go into hibernation. The answer is complicated, but to sum it up:

1. I had hoped to be able to monetize InsectPOD enough to pay for hosting and perhaps a little extra to save up for better camera and/or computer equipment. After 18 months of investing 20-100 hours a month into InsectPOD, and counting the $1.00 that my mom donated to test the donation button, InsectPOD made a grand total of $0.66. (Paypal kept $0.34 of Mom’s donation.)
2. The server hosting situation went from bad to worse to completely borked at a point in my life when I didn’t have time to fix servers. The hardware was fine and I had some access to some great sysadmin help, but between weird timing errors and configuration problems I finally just threw in the towel.
3. I broke my camera.
4. (And I’m not even considering here JFargo’s herculean effort to keep the site going through all this hassle. I am VERY grateful to him for his help there. Fate was pretty determined to knock InsectPOD down, however, and did so by blowing up his computer.)

The monetization aspect was frustrating, and server hassles were aggravating, and though I was coping it was steadily wearing me down. The final straw came when I broke my camera. As I held the pieces in my hands, I suddenly realized how very, very tired I was of all the hassles dragging InsectPOD down. I decided that the best thing would be to take a break for a few days… which turned into weeks and then months, and now here we are.

When I borrowed Mom’s camera last weekend, it reminded me how much fun actually doing InsectPOD was: the photography, the research, the blogging… it’s like a very happy piece of me had been found, and I didn’t even know it had been lost until that moment.

I may have to reconsider this retirement thing altogether.

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When I went down to the creek, I expected to see tons of Argia vivida, the brilliant blue damselflies that are usually down there. This time, however, they were all the wrong color! The creek was positively heaving with red damselflies!

This is a male Hetaerina americana, which is latin for American, um, Hetaerina. The common name is “American Rubyspot Damselfly”. The name “rubyspot” comes not from the red overall coloration, but from the bright red spot on the wings. This happens to be a male damselfly. I would point out the cerci on the tip of his tail, which he uses to hold the female during mating, but I have tastefully blurred them out because this is a family-friendly website. (Oh, don’t look so disappointed. There is plenty of insectoid fanservice coming soon.)

Did you know that insects are covered in tiny hairs? They use them as tiny tactile sensors to detect wind and touch. Don’t believe me? Let’s have a closer look, then:

And you doubted me.

Two things happened last night.

1. I found out I had over a dozen really excellent bug photos, and more than 20 if I allow a handful of “twofers” (repeats of the same bug).
2. I remembered just how much fun it was writing InsectPOD.

So… instead of coming out of retirement for a week, how about I do it for a MONTH?

Here’s the plan, then:

• Updates will be five days a week, Monday-Friday.
• There will be no Spider Fridays. I’m not happy about this either, but the fact is I didn’t find any spiders to photograph!
• I’ll run InsectPOD for four weeks, through August 20th.

After that, I can’t make any promises because I don’t have a good macro camera. But who knows, a month is a long time; I might be able to borrow that Canon again in a few weeks. We’ll see!

If you would like to wish encouragement at me, please send me an email to bugdave at shinybit.com, or follow insectpod (or dbrady) on Twitter. If you’re REALLY feeling encouragey, hit the donate button over there on the right.

Click for larger version Click for Desktop (1920×1200) version

I wish I could tell you the name of this butterfly, but the fact is he has about 20.

For starters, this is a Tiny Butterfly. No, I mean that’s his name. The Lycaeinids, which means “Little wolves”, also means, inexplicably, “tiny butterflies”. I would tell you why, but then it would be explicable, see?

This is Plebejus melissa (not to be confused with Bejeezus melissa, which startles far more easily) a tiny butterfly in Family Lycaenidae (Hairstreak butterflies). The term “hairstreak” comes from the thin lines on the wings. It belongs to Subfamily Polyommatinae (which means “blue” butterflies and not, as you might expect, a fondness for discount-priced daytime cinema). Blues is a subfamily in need of revision; according to wikipedia several genera currently in blues might not even belong there.

This doesn’t surprise me. Order Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths: literally, “scale-winged” insects) is incredibly complicated and hard to navigate. Our little Blue fellow here, for example, is probably a Blue because of those metallic blue spots on his wings.

I found a HUGE list of fascinating things about P. melissa while researching it. For example: you see how the front legs are slightly reduced in size compared to the middle and rear pairs? That means he’s a boy. Yes, really.

This picture was taken with a Canon EOS 5D camera, a 21 megapixel monster with a 50mm macro lens. My previous work here in InsectPOD was with a handheld Canon PowerShot, and to get this photo I would have to get the lens literally within a couple of centimeters of the butterfly. Have you noticed that there aren’t a lot of small butterfly pictures here on InsectPOD? That’s because they’re incredibly skittish and easily startled (B. melissa).

I took this picture from three feet away. I love that camera. Here’s the full size image of that butterfly for your desktop.

Hi Gang,

Well, it’s been a while. What with the broken camera and the website crashing and JFargo’s computer frying, it seems like there was a lot of conspiracy against InsectPOD. I finally fixed the website a few months ago, but being sans camera really made things difficult.

Last weekend I went down to the family homestead in Moab, and found that Mom was in possession of a Canon EOS 5D camera. This is a very high end, professional grade, digital SLR camera. Seriously this thing is like 25 megapixels. My old Canon was 10.

I… really don’t have time to start InsectPOD back up again full-time. But when I saw that camera, you know what I had to do. If you guessed “shoot 10 gigabytes of pictures”, you guessed right. (Although, at 25MB a pop, that’s still only 400 pix.)

So stay tuned this week. Some new InsectPODdery is coming your way, starting tomorrow!