Red flagged hopper

This strange hopper landed near me during my crouching session today. It looked fairly ordinary at the time, but when I was processing the frames, I noticed tiny red growths like flags on its rear legs and just behind its head.

The shot that I chose to blip clearly showed the red marks on both legs in the same place, so no accident or debris is to blame. The other shot that I had was actually a better shot of the whole insect and showed the mark behind the head, but the red marks could have been anything. So in the end I deemed it necessary to make a composite to show what I wanted.

The marks may be something or nothing. They may well already be well documented by insectologists or maybe not. Know this, not everything has been discovered yet and you don't need an ology to make a contribution. Only a few short months ago, a new wasp was discovered in Indonesia. It has been named the goliath wasp and it is massive, making the big wasp that I blipped yesterday look like a mosquito. How can such a monster go undiscovered for so long, insects don't evolve over night.

A few years ago, on a fishing web site, someone asked why do fish have scales. I thought about evolution, nothing evolves without a reason. If scales did not give the fish an advantage then scales would not have survived for millions of years. I had been doing a lot of study of vortices and deduced that the scales were designed to catch the vortices, as the water turns and gives the fish free forward momentum.

It turned out that the fish scale question was one of the all time unanswered questions by science. Unfortunately, someone claimed the answer just a couple of months before me. Sometimes all the high powered brain power of our scientific community simply misses the obvious and it is down to laymen to show the way. My point is, don't assume that you are not qualified to make observations. Simply by being a blipper, you are paying way more attention than the average person. Qualification enough in my book.

Dave