ISAAC THE DOG

Field crickets (Gryllinae) aren't just plain brown chirping things in backyards - the group is actually pretty diverse, with >3,000 species. Maybe the weirdest are in the genus Sciobia, which all have these delightful Pikmin-like "hats" 🥺

📸: Sciobia barbara, Pierre-Henri Fabre

#EverydayEnsifera

Chthonius ischnocheles with an Orbatid mite meal, in the garden in Shaftesbury. They seem to like these!

Macro photograph in side view of a small ant carrying a bit of tree bark in her mandibles, her gaster tucked tightly under her body pointed forward. The ant's head, antennae, gaster, coxae, and femora are black, the thorax and petiole are red, and the tibiae are bright yellow.

Temnothorax isabellae, from the rainforests of Puerto Rico, is one of the more colorful ant species I have photographed.

Pile of skulls with bat skullies flying about

Pile of Skulls

#Art by José Segrelles, 1920

An orange, black, and ivory beetle that looks more like a Millipede with only six legs.

I found a leviathan of a railroad worm (aka glowworm, aka larviform female Phengodes beetle) on a rock in New Hope Creek. Biggest I have ever seen

Fortuitously, an elementary school field trip passed by just as I was rescuing it from watery doom, so impromptu show and tell commenced. #invertebrates

macro photo in face view of the head of a ruddy red ant with massive black compound eyes and two wide open, rake-like jaws with sharp teeth

Hello, I am Myrmoteras and I will be your disembowler this evening.

Junebug larvae use their back hair to move. #tmi #beetles #coleoptera #entomology #melolonthinae #scarabaeidae

Oak treehopper nymphs lined up on an oak branch.

A mother oak treehopper (right) stands face-to-face with her nymph on a branch.

A mother oak treehopper (left) stands next to her newly emerged adult children and a nymph on a branch.

Two newly emerged oak treehopper adults stand face-to-face on a branch.

Oak treehoppers are out! Known for their endearing maternal care, mamas remain with their babies until they emerge as adults and eventually leave the oak branch where they were born.

Ghostly white planthopper facing you, large bird-like wings spread wide, tiny white eyes peering. Creature is chilling on a palmetto frond

Tiny bird 👀
(Paramysidia mississippiensis, little derbid planthopper 🤍)

Photograph of an Australian White Ibis - a large water bird. It is white with a bald black head, a long curved black beak, and bright red skin exposed on its arms as it flaps its wings to dry them off. The photo gives a better than average appreciating of bird anatomy, due to the high visibility of its arms and its exposed thighs (gasp!). PS: Any "Bin Chicken" comments might get you muted or blocked. Give these beautiful, displaced birds the respect they deserve.

Australian White Ibis drying off after a bath.
#birds

Absolutely stunning. It looks like a prophet. I wish I had the pride of knowing I had captured a photo so powerful... truly wondrous... thank you for sharing this with the world...

Lost lives & #Lifelines for today’s #Leptember

I just passed the site these photos were taken on. It’s been destroyed, all habitat scraped away down to dirt.

I must be the only person in the world to even notice or lament the loss of that place & the homes for nature it provided.

Hilarious reference.

Photo of William Maxwell’s short novel So Long, See You Tomorroe showing farmhouses and trees against billowing clouds all in a black and white / sepia tone

“Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end.”

What a deeply melancholy and yet beautifully resonant book.

Pale yellow large midge with an alien-esque tiny head and fuzzy long abdomen

The midge is beginning to elongate its abdomen, showing a red membrane between the segments

The abdomen fully extended, nearly twice the length, with the 3 red membrane portions larger than the outer segments

*Archer pants fabric stretching noise*

Not sure I've noticed a midge do this before.
Cecidomyiinae

Burnished Brass (Diachrysia chrysitis).

Just a few regulars in the trap this morning, nothing special. So here's another shot of the Burnished Brass from the other day.

#teammoth #mothsmatter #moths

Ruby Tiger (Phragmatobia fuliginosa) caterpillar.

Knot Grass (Acronicta rumicis) caterpillar.

Vapourer (Orgyia antiqua) caterpillar.

#Caterpillars that I'm rearing – Ruby Tiger, Knot Grass and Vapourer. #teammoth

A rook, a black crow with a white unfeathered area round the beak, standing on a harvested field.

Rook / Saatkrähe (Biblis, Germany) #rook #crows #krähen #birds #nature #animal

A pair of gold-marked thread-waisted wasps (Eremnophila aureonotata) shot in profile as they mate on the little white flowers. The tips of their abdomen are locked together with one thin black wasp on top of the other.

#insectthursday
Gold-marked thread-waisted #wasp - Eremnophila aureonotata
(Shot near Cincinnati 8-26-25) 🪲🪳🐝 #photography #wildlifephotography #wildlife #nature #animal #invertebrate #insect #bug #bugsky #ento

Hear me out. An entomology show called "KPop Dermestid Hunters"

Try putting really hot water up against the bites; almost hot enough that it's a bit more than you can stand (though of course do not burn yourself). I've heard from someone else that the heat helps break down the proteins in the chemicals left behind by the mosquito.

Front view of a male banded demoiselle on a grass stem

Another male banded demoiselle #photography #macro

adorable male Pityobius click beetle displaying his exquisitely biflabellate antennae

oh! good morning

Gorgeous!!

That first image is so dreamy. It would look wonderful framed on a wall.

A close up on some barnacles. They're all clustered close together, white-colored shells that look like little white rocks with one big closed eye each (the two shut lids of the shell). Some of the barnacles have black "eyelids" instead of white eyelids. I don't know the scientific reason why, unfortunately.

The same barnacles from earlier, but instead of being close-up, we're WAY out! So you can see that there's a whole lot of them all together on this rock!

It's amazing how much closed barnacle shells resemble sleeping eyes. It makes me happy. Soothing to stare at. I was happy I got to see barnacles. Did you know barnacles have the biggest penis-to-body ratio in the animal kingdom? It's amazing. It's like an orgy to watch them go at it.

#barnacles

A picture of a sea slater on the sand, near a rock, barnacles, and bits of algae. It is a pale sandy color with grayish-dark markings. Its compound eyes are big and dark.

A picture of the same sea slater as in the previous image, but at a somewhat different angle.

This is a sea slater. One thing that's really fun about them is those sizable compound eyes. Their compound eyes are pretty big in comparison to their more landbound kin... I was delighted to spot this one at a beach.

#isopods #bugsky

Sorry for the late response: I saw this on the underside of a rotting log. I really deeply appreciate that you offered a suggestion of what it could be. It's kind of you to help.

A picture of a snail on some pavement. It has a yellow body, though it is only peeking a little bit out of the shell. The shell is white, and very pretty: brown spots go around in a ring, and the center whirl is a jewel-like/lapis-like gorgeous blue, with faint pinkish stripes extending out like a peppermint.

I wish I could've stayed to wait for it to come fully out of its shell, but I was in a hurry that day. But look how pretty the shell is. Such beauty!! So beautiful. Sometimes I feel like these creatures are the only beauty I have in my life. It may be true.

#snails #bugsky

Why was I born this way.