Insect Picture of the Day

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.

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!

I just can’t win for losing in the update race, it seems. Real Life has intruded rather forcefully this past week. I’m still not out of the woods, and I don’t think I’ll be able to backfill—InsectPOD posts take about an hour each to process the image, research the bug, and write up.

I’m tentatively going to try to get the site back on regular posts starting tomorrow. Apologies for the inconvenience; I know some of you were expecting your daily bug fix here.

If any of you are interested in submitting guest posts—meaning a photo AND a writeup, please contact me at the usual address (it’s on the About page).

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Well, it’s time to get the holiday season kicked off right, and I can’t think of a better way to do that than with candy canes!

Um. Would you settle for sticks? …what if they’re walking?

Michelle Reynolds sent in this photo last Spring and I’ve been waiting for just the right time to spring it on you all. It was in the lineup for the October story but the story changed and went in a different direction. It’s probably for the best, since this photo really deserves its own run.

I think it’s interesting to find another picture of multiple walkingsticks in which all of the participants seem to be… um… racing, I think we decided is what they’re doing? Yes. Racing. I have several theories, but no data to back them up so I’ll keep them to myself for now.

Thanks Michelle! Awesome photo.

Hi Gang,

I’m preparing an extra-special ALL-SCARY bug month for October, and I need your help. Specifically, I need your scary bug pictures!

As usual:

• Images should be in-focus and 1280×960 or larger
• Images should be of live insects
• Send them to insectpod at shinybit com

Thanks in advance, now get clicking!

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Dragonflies are quite possibly my favorite thing about Summer. You druids can keep your solstices and equinoxes (equinoxi?), I say Summer is here when the dragonflies roar by, doing their level best to decimate the flying insect population.

Michael Bailey sends in this photo, and wants to know what kind of dragonfly this is. I am pretty sure it’s a “green dragonfly¹”, but beyond that I am at a loss. I am saving up for a dragonfly/damselfly guidebook, but if and when I buy one it will no doubt be localized to some part of North America, and Michael took this picture in Lawshall, Suffolk, UK.

Any takers on an ID?

Also, and this is gonna bug me all day, how do you pronounce Lawshall? “Laws Hall”? “Law Shall”? Wait, this is England; it’s probably “Lozzle” (which incidentally is the same pronunciation as “Lawshallfordhamcestershire”).

I love the scope of this shot. Great photo, Michael! Thank you!

¹ All of you waiting for a D&D reference to green dragons can just keep waiting.

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This spider was sunning itself by an irrigation pond near Utah Lake last week.

I have no idea on the species or genus, but you can tell a lot about this spider just by looking at it. Notice the tall head and the large eyes? This is a sight-hunting spider. Notice the large, strong legs? This spider is built for running speed. I believe this spider is a wolf spider, but that’s about like looking at a dog and saying “Ah yes, the world-famous brown dog.” Wolf spiders use their eyesight and speed to hunt prey by running it down.

These spiders don’t normally let humans get too close. Happily, the reason it was sunning itself was that it as about 3°C (38°F) outside at the time. The reason it was sunning itself was so it could kickstart its own metabolism.

Body length on this critter was about 1cm, so it’s one of the smaller wolf spiders.

My apologies, folks, the automagic updater for InsectPOD ran out of magic this morning, and where I am right now I do not have the tools to fix it. There is a post for today, but it won’t be up until this evening. If you read InsectPOD in the morning, my apologies, and I guess there will be a twofer for you tomorrow.

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Say hello to reader Earl Goodson’s first submission to InsectPOD, a fantastic photo of what I believe is Asphaera lustrans—the Shining Flea Beetle. It could also be A. abdominalis, which is found in Texas and Arizona (this photograph was taken at The Alamo), but I was unable to find a photo for comparison. Besides, just look how shiny it is.

How shiny is it? Well, if you look close, I think that’s Earl reflected in the carapace there!

Flea beetles are tiny. It’s a testament to Earl’s photography skills that this bug looks like a gigantic scarab. In fact, it’s probably only about 7mm long.

Is it just me, or does that bug look like it should be about the same size  as a C-cell battery?

Thanks, Earl, and welcome to InsectPOD!

P.S. Earl Goodson went to The Alamo. And he took pictures of bugs. WIN.

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Yesterday’s spider concludes the Halloween Spider Week. Halloween is still 3 days away, I have picked 3 really creepy insect pictures for your enjoyment this week.

Today’s picture is a ladybug larva. After the winter cold snap, Sandra Tayler called me to tell me that her side of the valley had not received snow and that they still had bugs in their yard. I grabbed my camera and came over, and we spent some time photographing insects and spiders in their yard.

I’m not really sure what the purpose of metamorphosis really is for ladybugs. The larvae are fully mobile and eat aphids just like the adults.