Privet Hawkmoth, a British native night-flying moth.
Tags: Privet Hawkmoth lepidoptera england holmbury st.mary moth insect hawkmoth macro
📷 Anyone have any experience with M42 MTO-1000A, or another recommendation for vaguely affordable super tele however weird? (for birding, APSC). I can live with doughnut bokeh (I think!) 🤔
This is an example of a shot I can't live with anymore, uses Old Sigma 150-500 + TC. Looking for something that's not so darn soft... thanks!
This lovely Mayfly had just emerged and was resting on some grasses near to the River Wey which runs through the centre of Farnham, and where I went for a potter today at lunchtime trying to find something productive to do with a lunchtime hour and lovely sunshine. I parked in the sports centre and there's a lovely area of long grasses just nearby that I'll almost certainly come back to during the summer.
Mayflies or shadflies are aquatic insects belonging to the order Ephemeroptera. This order is part of an ancient group of insects termed the Palaeoptera, which also contains dragonflies and damselflies. Over 3,000 species of mayfly are known worldwide, grouped into over 400 genera in 42 families.
Mayflies are relatively primitive insects and exhibit a number of ancestral traits that were probably present in the first flying insects, such as long tails and wings that do not fold flat over the abdomen. They are aquatic insects whose immature stages (called "naiads" or "nymphs") live in fresh water, where their presence indicates a clean, unpolluted environment. They are unique among insect orders in having a fully winged terrestrial adult stage, the subimago, which moults into a sexually mature adult, the imago.
Mayflies "hatch" (emerge as adults) from spring to autumn, not necessarily in May, in enormous numbers. Some hatches attract tourists. Fly fishermen make use of mayfly hatches by choosing artificial fishing flies that resemble the species in question. One of the most famous English mayflies is Rhithrogena germanica, the fisherman's "March brown mayfly". This looks likeone of those.
The brief lives of mayfly adults have been noted by naturalists and encyclopaedists since Aristotle and Pliny the Elder in classical times. The German engraver Albrecht Dürer included a mayfly in his 1495 engraving The Holy Family with the Mayfly to suggest a link between heaven and earth. The English poet George Crabbe compared the brief life of a newspaper with that of a mayfly, both being called "Ephemera", in 1785.
Tags: mayfly shadfly pentax k3ii ingleslenobel Rhithrogena germanica March brown mayfly closeup
An attractive groundbeetle that the neighbour just brought me, Carabus Violaceus. The neighbour was chopping wood and found this inside. You can just about make out the violet edge to its body that is the cause of its name. First shot on Flickr with my new toys, MP-E 65, 5D2 & MT-24EX. Fun fun fun!!
Tags: Carabus Violaceus groundbeetle beetle coleoptera
The turkey moray is a medium size moray which can reach a maximum length of 120 cm, but specimens usually encountered are much smaller. The ones we came across in Mauritius were about 50cm long. Its serpentine in shape body has a dark brown to black background colour, dotted with numerous small white spots uniformly distributed. The inside of its mouth is completely white.
I was surprised by how blase our scube instructors were about morays and once they emerged from their hidey holes, they were perfectly happy to be fed by hand. Of course this is a small moray and you don't really want to be feeding the huge ones as they might take your hand out. But the small ones look a lot worse than they are - and they're probably a lot more frightened of humans than we are of them.
Taken on the recent trip to Mauritius using a WG-5GPS at about 10m deep.
Tags: moray conger fish mauritius underwater scuba