Sean McCann

Head of a harbour seal with flippers sticking up. It seems it is perched on an underwater rock and is lying in the water

Harbour seal chillaxing in Oak Bay

Feeding time at the Caracara nest in a Saguaro

Day 4 of #ArtAdventCalendar
Ms. Crested Caracara feeding her trio of mini dinosaurs 🪶

looks like Euperilampus triangularis

New paper on bark spiders, who build the largest webs made out of the toughest silk. We show that their extremely tough silk, which is potentially metabolically costly, is limited to large females. Juveniles and males use inferior silk.

Stripy orange and white lynx spider, legs bunched around her, being a lump, peering at you

#EmotionalSupportSpood
Young Hamataliwa helia, the fiercest of Lumps ♥️

head of a yellow dog, only the eyes in focus, he is looking up and to the left of the frame, perhaps wistfully.

Diego looks dreamy at F0.95

A macro photograph of a robber fly on a blade of grass

Look at those eyes! #flyday #bugskye #entomology #macro

A cattle dog mix puppy, very fat and fluffy, sits in the snow watching the camera.

such a cute puppy too!

Photo of a young black-tailed deer on a bed of fall colored leaves with small pine trees behind them. they are angled away from the camera showing their very black tail and just turning to the right so their head is in profile.

90% of the time when Rashford barks at "something" through the floor level window...it's nothing.

Now and then he gets it right (deer were utterly unbothered by his barking).

Bebe Black-tailed (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) demonstrates the origin of the moniker!

#mammals #becurious

A cattle dog mix, red and white in colour, relaxing on a purple chair with a nice quilt. her whole body is in frame and her head appears large.

Got a 10 mm F2 lens from TTArtisan, so here is Zora shot at F2

Latrodecta, Organ of the Laboratory of Arachnology, National Academy of the Republic of Kazakhstan and Company "Fauna" Ltd, Weissenburg
ISSN: 0940-8185
Mainly scientific articles on the breeding & maintenance of arachnids, but it also includes faunistic works.

Anyone know more about this journal?

A macro photo of a mother earwig guarding a cluster of her tiny, pale babies, all of them on damp earth.

#Bugsky 🐙🌿 Who wants another baby earwig update? Everyone? Thought so. The babies are now two days old and slightly darker than when they hatched. Mama is guarding them and will stay on the job until their second molt. Btw, in the earlier post, the newly-hatched babies only had--

A male Anna’s hummingbird at the door. So nosy! 🤣

Earlier today, I was notified that someone was at my door.

This is who it was:

Close up on the head and front half of a Flying gurnard, a truly unusual fish that creeps across the sand bottom using specially modified fins. It has very large eyes that show refractive irridescence from my strobe, and is sort of polka-dotted in reds, browns and blues

Way too much politics on my timeline right now, deploying weird marine life image. :) Here's up close and personal with an unusually cooperative Flying gurnard (Dactylopterus volitans). Night dive, Ulua Beach Maui. 🌿📷🐟🦑

Two books are propped upright against a wooden cabinet, titled "The Cicadas of North America" and "The Social Wasps of North America". Both books show many colorful examples of the respective insects on their covers. Various holiday ribbons, garlands, and lights are strewn about the edges and foreground of the photo, which I shamelessly pilfered from my mom's attic. The text at the top reads "FREE SHIPPING ON ALL QUALIFIED ORDERS".

Give the gift of hundreds of bugs this year with the OWLFLY HOLIDAY SALE! All orders above $40 USD are eligible for free shipping anywhere in the world (within our normal shipping range) with the coupon code BUGBOOK2025, now through December 31st. Restrictions apply.
www.owlflyllc.com/publishing

A macro photo of a group of just-hatched baby earwigs along with some still-unhatched eggs. The babies are transparent, except for orange-brown on their compound eyes and their mandibles. Those pigmented structures are visible through the shells of the yet-to-hatch eggs.

#Bugsky 🐙🌿 Earwig Egg Update! Yesterday I took a photo of earwig eggs, and when I lifted the rock today, they were hatching. The new babies are transparent except for their compound eyes and mandibles; those were the orange spots you could see on the eggs yesterday. Check out this cropped photo--

A marine spider, Paratheuma insulana, on an oyster shell. The spider is brown with some darker brown stripes. The oyster shell is mostly white with some dirty yellow/brown edges.

A marine spider, Paratheuma insulana, on an oyster shell. The spider is brown with some darker brown stripes.

We found oyster spiders today during my oyster lab field trip for my Invertebrate Zoology class! These are marine spiders! They have special setae (hairs) that trap air and let them live underwater. #invertebrates #spider

Little family of a dozen or so Paratemnoides pseudoscorpions of various stages of life, huddled together on a bit of mahogany bark

When Riley and Jonesy find a family of pseudoscorpions riding on them:
"PHORESY!"

a beautiful Paradise jumping spider, a male, overall he is dark on the body reddish on the legs and has nice frosty whitish blue palps and green eyes. He is on a rock with the blue sky behind.

Habronattus borealis male, from Pomquet Beach, NS

A small bird with white cheeks and breast with tan sides and a black face and head cap is perching on a lichen-covered tree branch and looking to the left, in front of a soft forest green background.

A pretty portrait of one of my year-round Black-capped Chickadee backyard buddies.

Hanwell, #NewBrunswick, Canada
March 2025

📸 #birds #chickadee #BCCH #nature #wildlife #photography #Nikon #Z6iii #Nikkor800pf

I'm still on strike as a PT CUPE professor at SMU, and it's a little mind-boggling how much money SMU has made off of my students. We are now up to $24,272 that my students have paid and had no education in return. That's 2 whole domestic students' worth of tuition they just created out of nothing.

Black and orange stubby chonky bee, curled up on the tip of a twig, mandibles clamped onto the twig for stability. She's very round

Had to work late yesterday, and at dusk I was leaving the building I was at when I noticed a familiar tiny shape on a young maple they had planted on site. Surprise sleepy nugget (resin bee) 🥹
Goodnight y'all

Macro photograph of the globular springtail Dicyrtomina saundersi.

The globular springtail Dicyrtomina saundersi in our #Staffs garden this morning. Between 1-2 mm long. #collembola #mesofauna #macro #photography

Are you a POC student, early career researcher, or professional entomologist from a country in the Global South?

We are now funding memberships!
Apply from October 1st to December 15th.

More info:
www.entopoc.org/apply.html
Apply:
docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLS...

Don't miss this opportunity!

MBE | A Novel Supergene Controls Queen Size and Colony Social Organization in the Ant Myrmica ruginodis

Independently evolved supergenes control colony social organization and queen reproductive strategies in several ant lineages. Sigeman et al. uncover a novel 9 Mb supergene controlling queen size and social organization in Myrmica ruginodis.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf255

#evobio #molbio #ants

Triangle weaver spider's web uses spring-loaded mechanism to move faster than muscle Different species of spiders produce different silks that serve different purposes, from floating on air to cradling eggs. The triangle weaver spider, Hyptiotes cavatus, weaves and holds a three-sided...

🕷️🕸️

Pixelart of an Asian Tiger Mosquito up close, with all the white stripes you'd expect from a "tiger", and all the little hairs, legs and mouth appendages you'd expect from a mosquito

I don't think I've actually posted this one on its own, a travesty

Asian Tiger Mosquito

#pixelart #украрт

A Purseweb Spider rests on the bottom of a plastic pot, set upon a stony path.

I've wanted to see Purseweb Spider since I was a kid, but've never managed to find one despite much searching, so I was overjoyed when one of the other volunteers found this amazing arachnid during this morning's survey work - just look at the size of those chelicerae! @britishspiders.bsky.social

Fuzzy front legs, white, yellow and orange with some black

Beautiful wood nymph (Eudryas grata)

The "beautiful" is part of the name 😵‍💫 - add your own adjectives if you'd like ...

When resting with wings folded, this moth resembles a bird dropping (at least, to some observers) #Inverts