Insect Picture of the Day

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It was Disney, so there were all these beautiful things everywhere, making it easy to find things to photograph.  It’s not hard to find good photo subjects in Disney, because there’s just so many great things to capture on film.  Every turn there’s something new to inspire the snapping of cameras; overwhelming views from interesting angles, well-put-together scenes right from the stories one grew up with, just fantastic wonder all around.

Which is probably why my wife finally started walking away as I stopped to photograph something, leaving me behind to catch up with her when I was done taking pictures.  I think she got to that point after I filled my first memory card with over 1000 shots.  I guess I can’t blame her.

What I think got her going even more was the fact that the photos I was taking were split about 40/60, bugs to sight-seeing sights.

As I stopped to photograph this beautiful little bug, about a dozen other tourists stopped to see what I was taking a picture of, and then immediately drew their cameras, proving to me that there is hope out there, that even the awe-inspiring awesomeness of Disney won’t stop people from admiring good-old nature, and snapping their own pictures of what one child called “a funny-looking butterfly.”

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Taking a cue from my buddy Earl I took the shot while on vacation at Disney World.   Actually, I took lots of bug pictures while on vacation in Florida, because it seems they grow them bigger down there.  Much bigger.

Aren’t the markings on this dragonfly absolutely awesome?  She was just sitting there in the stairwell as I was heading out for a swim.  I brought my camera with me everywhere since I’m the consummate tourist while on vacation, and I was so glad that I did!  It’s not often I get this close to such a big bug!  Here in Delaware, most dragonflies are about 2-3 inches long, and pretty skinny.  This dragonfly was easily bigger than that, and thick around as a pencil!  Amazing!

I usually try to give in-depth information about the insects that I put on the site, but I think this time around I’m just going to let the picture speak for itself.  Click on it and see it full-sized to see all the really neat detail in its patterning and wings!

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Before you let your teenage damselfy go out at night, you need to know: Where is she going? Who is she going to be with? What will she be doing? You’re the parent. You need to know these things.

Because if you don’t know, she could be hanging out with carp.

They eat damselflies, okay? This is a bravery stunt about to go horibly wrong.

Thanks are due to Athena Fritz for sending this one in. Sorry for the mega-zoom-out here. You may need to uses the larger version to even see the damselfly. She’s the flash of blue at the center.

It’s impossible to make a positive ID at this resolution but I think it might be Argia vivida or a related species. They’re pretty common and match the markings here.

Thanks Athena!

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Don’t let the blue background fool you: that dragonfly is green, and that means Spyro only has one hit point left! To everyone who gets that reference: “Hi Sean!”

This picture comes from who else but Scott Roche. I believe it is the same dragonfly as this one from last week. In this picture, however, the dragonfly has given up trying to eat Scott and has decided to move on to petty theft. Unfortunately, the water bottle he’s trying to steal is also way bigger than he is. This dragonfly has some serious size compensation issues, that much is apparent.

This viewing angle affords us the ability to classify this bug’s gender: it’s a boy. The blue spots at the end of the tail are an optical illusion. They aren’t there at all: you’re looking at the blue webbing of the chair through an open space. The black lines surrounding this open space are the anal appendages¹ or “claspers”: the male uses these to grab the female’s head during mating. Have you ever seen a pair of dragonflies zip past while linked together? You were looking at a male and a female mating. The one out in front, of course, would be the male. They have be the ones doing the driving—it’s a guy thing for them too. They also won’t stop and ask for directions.

Thanks are again in order for Scott. Great photo!

¹ I’m sorry. I tried hard to find you a polite-sounding Greek or latin word for them, but the English term is more common. I suppose there’s nothing stopping us making up our own Greek or latin word, like proctodactyli² or stercomani³.

² “butt fingers”.

³ “poop handlers”.

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Dragonflies have a saying: “How do you eat an entire human? One bite at a time.” Reader Scott Roche discovered this painful truth the hard way just moments after this picture was taken.

I am kidding, of course. Scott is here demonstrating that the secret to luring dragonflies in for photo sessions is to be sticky. I mean sticky not like syrup, but like in the joke: “What’s brown and sticky? A stick.” Dragonflies love to perch on twigs and sticks that poke up. Perhaps because this gives them a clear view of their surroundings? If so, do they do this for defensive purposes (”nothing can sneak up on me here!“), or offensive (”anything I see moving gets eaten!“)?

Then again, maybe dragonflies are smarter than we give them credit for. Perhaps they do this because they know the human owning the finger will freak out and take their picture (”I’ll meet you guys down at the lake in a minute. But first, this lady has a Nikon DSLR and it takes a bigger bug than me to pass that up.”)?

I mean, if I were a dragonfly, that would totally be why I would do it.

Thank you Scott… another awesome picture!

Feeling in the mood for a wallpaper? Click here for a 1600×1200 version of this image.

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Scott Roche took this photo on the 4th of July last year. This image connects to something deep in my psyche, the soothing golden reflections of the lake and the sun-drenched mud below the surface… the blue dragonfly in the picture is also quite artistically captured.

What can I say more? Here’s a wallpaper.

Thanks, Scott!

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Reader Mark White sent in this great photo of a dragonfly he stalked at his daughter’s soccer game. He doesn’t know much about it, and sadly neither do I. I suspect it’s a skimmer, but that’s about like identifying a man by saying “I suspect he was right-handed.”

When I identify a bug, I often start with coloration, and this is why I am so obviously inexpert. Coloration is often meaningless for identifying species–for example, what color is Homo sapiens? Identifying dragonflies is a very complicated affair, but fortunately it is indeed largely based on coloration. Unfortunately, it is a very complicated affair. You and I look at that picture and see a yellow dragonfly with brown spots on its wings. A biologist needs to know a lot more: what color is the face? eyes? thorax? wings? And not just the coloration, but the pattern as well. Oh, and not just the wing, but the parts of the wing: what color is the pterostigma?

(Umm… yeah. I had to look it up, too. It’s the tiny bit on the front edge of the wing almost at the tip. In this photo it is reflecting light and almost looks pink.)

Anyway, once you know what all those colors mean, you can identify your dragonfly. Oh, but wait. According to bugguide, dragonflies can change color: right after emerging, they are sometimes nearly colorless and change coloration several times over the first few days. Some change color when they die. Still others change color with temperature (insert novelty coffee-mug slogan joke here).

So yeah. It’s mainly based on coloration, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple. As far as I can tell, it’s a yellow dragonfly with brown spots on its wings.

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Reader mARK bLOORE sends in this picture of a dragonfly at rest on his hand. I find this fascinating. I know how to coax damselflies onto a finger, but how do you trick a dragonfly into landing on your hand? Same way only bigger, I guess.

This dragonfly looks particularly sinister. If the insect world had black helicopters, this little guy would be it, no?

Perhaps that’s why it landed on mARK’s hand: it was trying to decide whether or not to eat him.

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Today’s amazing insect photo comes to us from “Jeff T”, who photographed this dragonfly at a lake in Estonia with his Canon A95 camera. I am not certain about the species here, but I’m pretty sure this is a female dragonfly, as Jeff has caught her in the act of laying her eggs, a behavior quite rare among male dragonflies.

It was kind of hard for me to understand this picture visually when I first received it. Here’s a dragonfly on a log or tree trunk, with a weird kind of meniscus behind her, what is that? Jeff filled in the missing detail for me: that’s not a tree, it’s a dock piling. The photo is looking down into the lake itself. Jeff captured the dragonfly’s wingspan across the frame. If we rotate the image until the dock piling is upright, we get this perspective, and the water reflections suddenly all make sense:

According to Jeff’s report, she was about 10cm long. This picture was taking in July or August of this year.

Dragonfly eggs hatch into nymphs, which are aquatic and cheerfully carnivorous. They eat mosquitoes, midges, and the larvae of anything in the lake. I have even heard that they will go after small fish!

Awesome photo, Jeff! Thank you!

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This is Argia Vivida, the Vivid Blue Damselfy. This photo was taken with the lens about 6cm away from the damselfly. My Dad had accompanied me on this trip and as I crept closer and closer, I heard him mutter, “They just let you get that close?!?”

The secret to stalking dragonflies and damselflies is to understand how their eyes and their brains work. The eyes are compound and without lenses, which means that, like pinhole cameras, they have no focal depth: everything appears to be in focus, near and far. This means they have no focal cueing to determine if an object is approaching or receding; they have to rely on motion detection for this. As we grow to understand image processing in the brain better and better, one thing we find is that motion detection and shape recognition are relatively easy things to do for even a small number of neurons.

The trick, then, is to not change shape. By approaching a dragonfly straight on, the only change in my appearance to the dragonfly is that my shape gets slightly larger. Since this happens very slowly, the dragonfly’s tiny image processing cluster files me safely away as harmless background.

I explained this softly to my Dad as I eased in for still closer pictures, and then I quietly announced, “Now watch, this will scare him off.” I reached my fingers around the camera to adjust a knob, and sure enough, he zipped off to safer haunts downstream.

The other secret to stalking dragonflies and damselflies is to remember that they are very territorial. I had enough pictures of him that I could afford to scare him off, but whenever I scare a dragonfly off, if I want more pictures I just sit quietly and wait. They inevitably return to resume the photoshoot.