Image ID: A Close-up Picture Of A Spider. It’s Looking Up At The Person Taking The Photo With Its Head

crowded arena starts chanting: ZO-RAP-TERA *clap-clap-clapclapclap* ZO-RAP-TERA

An excellent pine log had a small colony of angel insects. I was pleased. 🤍

7/17/23. N. Florida

So cute

Made by https://paperbeatsscissors.tumblr.com/

the paralyzed cicadas I picked up from a failed cicada killer nest are the perfect material to show off some cool features of insect anatomy! (although the wasp’s venom would keep them alive for her larvae to eat, I froze them to make sure they’re fully dead for dissection).

cicadas are powerful, fast fliers, and all of their thorax is taken up by a bulk of reddish, stringy flight muscles, which I’ll talk more about later. this cicada is a female, so her abdomen is full of white, elongated eggs that she will insert into tree bark with the bladed ovipositor at her rear.

the male cicada’s abdomen, however, is almost entirely empty, and that air-filled space is used as a resonator for his loud calls. the biggest structure visible there is a curved pair of muscles that deforms the tymbals, producing a click with every contraction.

here's a view of the complete muscle, and the tymbals themselves which look like overlapping plates on his belly. if you're curious what the white frosted appearance is, some Neotibicen have a coat of waxy powder or pruinescence; this male N. tibicen is particularly pruinose.

onto the flight muscles:

powered flight is a pretty complex mechanism in any organism, and is never so simple as just flapping wings up and down, but most insects power their flight in a really unintuitive way (at least for us vertebrates): they contract muscles in their thorax that aren’t even attached to the wings!

this method of flight is called indirect flight, in contrast to the direct flight of the dragonflies and mayflies where each of four wings is directly attached to a muscle and can flap on its own.

instead, most insects have a longitudinal (image 1 above, d below) pair and a vertical (2, c) pair of muscles that deform the shape of abdomen, pulling the upper segment of the thorax (notum) up and down, and this moves the wings which are attached to the notum. useful indirect flight gif from wikipedia found here

even if compressed manually, the dead cicadas "flap" their wings due to the motion of the notum:

insect flight is a lot more complicated than this simplified look at them, but I think these cicadas offer a pretty good look at how most insects get around essentially by squishing themselves internally!

Tetragonula carbonaria trying to harvest pollen from me.

Fata Morgana

a superior mirage caused by warm air resting on patches of colder air in an atmospheric duct that acts like a refracting lens. Objects on the horizon could appear to be mirrored, distorted, or float. This form of mirage could be the reason for the Flying Dutchman Legend.

Moth Of The Day #112

Clouded Silver

Lomographa temerata

From the geometridae family. They have a wingspan of 22-30 mm. They tend to inhabit gardens, hedgerows, fens and woodland. They can be found in most of Europe.

how to draw arms ? ? 

ATTENTION: you WILL look at penny.

thank you citizen, she has been sufficiently looked at. have a good day.

Rainbow Scarab (Phanaeus vindex), male, family Scarabaeidae, Pennsylvania, USA

a species of "true dung beetle".

photograph by Michael Reed