Beetle jewelry

Oddities week - day 1

This series is going to be a lot tougher than spider week, apart from the jumping spiders, I could plan the week as the spiders are in the same place everyday, unless Fitri finds them with her trusty stick! So, the best that I can do for you, is to bring you the oddest find from each day. If I get desperate, I can always bring you a macro showing an odd view of a more common creature, but that would be in an emergency as I have to blip something.

Amazing session today, with 35 subjects (some didn't make it) with 38 keepers. I put the fifteen best bugs, including a couple of spiders (but you should be desensitized by now) in folio, I think worth a look. Had it not been for this series, today's blip would have been a dragon, despite the sparkling livery of this bug!

tortoise beetle - Deloyala guttata (close anyway).

This is a whole new level of observation. It took me two hours to cover 100yds of path, stopping at each bush and scanning every leaf. Every bit of dried, twisted leaf, every bit of fluff and every drop of bird crap has to be inspected as these insects are devious in their camouflage. My observation skills are still left wanting some, as I am yet to find a stick insect!

Today's offering was found early on in the session. I nearly passed it by, thinking it was just another metallic green bug, the likes of which have been blipped be me and many others. It was only with a closer inspection through the lens that I realized that today's search may be over.

Obviously a clear winner with its dazzling display of metallic green patterns, but a nightmare to photograph. A fairly static subject, but at only 4mm in length, I had to get in close, introducing serious DOF problems. The best that I could do was to merge two images together and perform some major cropping in order to give you something to look at.

Assuming that problems would be encountered, after photographing in situ, I collected the bug in a small plastic container to enable another session back at the lab. I did indeed attempt another session, but before I even got the camera focused it was gone, flown the coup and in the cluttered junk shop that is my lab, impossible to find again, so that was the end of that idea!

Ironically, this bug is of the same type that Ellebasi brought to my attention in a link in her comments a couple of days ago, asking if I thought the colorful bug was real. I first saw this kind of bug (in brown) a couple of weeks ago and thought it very unusual, prehistoric in appearance. It looks like a cross between a beetle and a ladybird (ladybug) and a very fitting start to the week.

Dave