Jacky Chitty

Photo of a slender, elongate orange insect in side view standing in a pure white field. The insect has long threadlike antennae and a needlelike tail nearly the same length as its body.

The sheer elegance of wasps! Here’s a Spathius that arrived to a blacklight sheet in west Texas.

Baffling in North American tree crickets This project aims to collect data on “baffling” behaviour in tree crickets (subfamily: Oecanthinae). Baffling is a strategy used by males to make themselves louder. They do so by calling from leaf edg...

Tree crickets build megaphones, called "baffles", by chewing holes in leaves to attract mates. For my PhD, I am studying the evolution of baffling. Lil bit of phylogenetics, lil bit of citizen science. Follow the link to my new project on @inaturalist.bsky.social
www.inaturalist.org/projects/baf...

Side view of an orange-brown tiny wasp with grey legs. Head and antennae are to the left of picture; head has very large pale blue eye, antennae are black and have brilliant white tips

A beautiful Dusmetia pulex parasitoid wasp of the Encyrtidae found in meadow at Great Dixter this morning.

#UKWildlife #wasps #HighWeald #Encyrtidae

#NewSpecies
New parasitoid wasp from #southkorea just flew in:

Lipolexis longipetiolata

Treatment: treatment.plazi.org/id/9A82AD3B-...
Publication: doi.org/10.3897/zook...
#ZooKeys #LipolexisLongipetiolata

#FAIRdata
#OA #biology #taxonomy #nature #entomology #insects #hymenoptera #wasps #parasite

Photo of two ants facing each other on a clean white background. The ant at left is orange and massive, with a head that's nearly as big as the rest of its body, and small black eyes set low on its face near its mandibles. The ant at right is smaller, black, shiny, and slender.

Pheidole militicida desert big-headed ant sisters. Major workers (left) and minor workers are set on different developmental trajectories by environmental stimuli as larvae, and mature to perform different roles in the colony. Arizona.

Illustration showing seven sequential silhouettes of a skate (a type of ray related to sharks) demonstrating its "flying" swimming motion. The drawings highlight the wing-like pectoral fins stretching backward and bending in smooth, fluid curves, resembling the wings of swift birds. The images depict the fins' rhythmic up-and-down movement as the skate propels itself through the water, emphasizing its specialized form. Captions note that this motion has inspired nicknames like "Sea Eagles" and "Sea Hawks" for some species. The page includes additional text about various shark and skate species and their morphological adaptations.

🦈 Shadows in the sea
Philadelphia, Chilton Books[1963]

[Source]

Historical scientific illustration showing multiple detailed cross-sectional views of the skull and nasal cavity structure of a mole (genus Talpa). The image includes labeled anatomical features such as bone, cartilage, and sinus cavities. Each section is numbered and scaled, highlighting the complex development and structure of mammalian skull anatomy. The drawing is monochromatic with fine lines and shading for depth, emphasizing internal components like the nasal passages, cranial bones, and associated soft tissues. This plate from an 1885 publication by the Royal Society of London visually documents skull morphology in Mammalia for comparative anatomy studies.

🐾 On the structure and development of the skull in the mammalia /.
London: Royal Society of London, 1874-1885.

[Source]

Keep stories like this in mind before you publicize locations of sought-after invertebrates on social media and sites like iNaturalist.

Our false head work is out! By analysing ~1000 #butterflies, we found many traits at posterior end of hindwings evolved correlatedly, likely forming a trait complex w/adaptive function to dupe predators into thinking these traits together are actual head!!

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Shiny black teardrop shaped beetle, elytra only halfway over its body. Maybe 2-3mm long. Two silly slender antennae coming out the sides of its miniscule head

It Beetle

Close-up photo of the ventral aspect of a Luna moth with no appreciation for boundaries

Cotton ball with legs glued onto it morphology

Kramer, what's going on in there? Inconceivable amounts of Hyemnopteran diversity, Jerry

If you plant a mountain mint/Pycnanthemum in an area where they are native, you will get the weirdest bees and wasps you have ever seen, and they will ignore you.

Impact of temperature and hypoxia on the size and survival of aquatic insects Understanding size–temperature relations is crucial for the conservation of aquatic insects. We hypothesised that the combination of high temperature and hypoxia will lead to a reduction in the size...

Thread Our new paper shows aquatic insects shrink & develop faster as water warms. That weakens their role in ecosystems, hurt by global insect decline. Why shrink? Larvae can’t get enough O2. @ebdonana.bsky.social @csic.es @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social @katharinehayhoe.com
📄 doi.org/10.1111/een....

A set of six detailed images of beetles belonging to the family Dermestidae, arranged in two rows of three. Each beetle is shown dorsally (view from above) against a white background with a scale bar indicating 1 mm. The beetles vary in color and pattern.

Six skin beetle species of the subfamily Attageninae were reported for the first time from Saudi Arabia.

Find out more here: doi.org/10.3897/zook...

#taxonomy #beetles #entomology

@galling.bsky.social Artichoke gall- very pretty! Seen today in Norfolk #galls

A photo of a brown and tan mantidfly from the side as it walks across a white sheet. The mantidfly has a small head that is mostly large round bronze metallic eyes with long slender antennae pointing forward. The bespined brown and tan mantid-like raptorial claws which gives these insects their common names, is tucked up underneath the head. The thorax has a long neck-like tubular structure that sweeps down to a tan striped box like structure that the other 2 sets of legs come from. Long transparent ovate net-like wings cover the brown and tan striped abdomen.

The Mantidfly Union™ has informed me that they have noticed a lack of my cooperation recently so I should remedy that. 🫥

Beautiful #Mantidfly, #Leptomantispa pulchella, a tiny (15mm long) friend.

#fujifilm X-S10, #Laowa 65mm #Macro

#MacroPhotography
#photography
#Invertebrates
#insects

Meteora sporadica, a protist with incredible cell architecture, is related to Hemimastigophora “Kingdom-level” branches are being added to the tree of eukaryotes at a rate approaching one per year, with no signs of slowing down.1,2,3,4 Some are …

Studying single-cell biodiversity feels like going back in time 200 years. No one has any idea what's going on (in the best possible way). BASICS about life are still being discovered. If you'd like to learn more, & see more videos, check out the study here:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Three-quarters profile view of a springtail (Order Collembola) against a white background. The springtail is quite globular and I haven't yet tried to figure out what family it belongs to. The background color of the body is a a kind of pale orange-y red and it has many, mostly small dark spots over its body. It's moderately long antennae are strongly elbowed (geniculate).

Every so often during the past couple of years, I would come across this springtail in my Malaise trap samples and think "I should really try to image this".

Well, my friends, today was the day.

#Collembola
#FocusStacking
#NaturalHistoryCollections
#NotAI
#SpottyMcSpotface

Oh, yeah, adults of this species are loooooong 👀
#Invertebrates

Subcommittee Markup of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act | United States Senate Committee on Appropriations United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

🧪 BREAKING (good news): Senate subcommittee says NO! to Trump's proposed slashes to NASA & NSF funding.

Today, the subcommittee said to keep NASA + NSF funding at $33.9 billion, the same as in FY24.

See 7:15 below. Full Senate appropriations committee meets tomorrow about it.

🧵 1/3

Photograph of a metallic blue/green beetle with a very spider-like body, a huge fake "abdomen" that is swollen and dented with even pits over its bulbous surface. It is otherwise ant-like, standing on a pure white stylized background.

The thing about entomology is, there are always weirder bugs than anything you could imagine on your own.

Here's Cysteodemus wislizeni, a blister beetle from west Texas.

A round green gall sticking out from between the leaves of an oak tree. The gall is covered in small, green and shiny wasps with long ovipositors, a needle like organ that protrudes from the rear of female wasps.

A marble oak gall getting swarmed by chalcid wasps, possibly Torymus sp. Some of them are already attempting to lay eggs in the gall. :)

#wasps #entomology #insects

Photo from above of a small blue-black shiny wasp standing on a pair of shorts. The wasp is so small that all is visible of the shorts are giant woven fibers. The wasp has a dumbbell shaped head, small body and iridescent wings.

Photo of the same wasp this time on a green card used for photographic backgrounds. The scale is so large the printing dots are clearly visible. This time the wasp is photographed standing in profile so the shape of the body and some of the odd facial structures are visible

New fav wasp, just look at this wasp. Big head, small body, spiky brows, toddle-walk... 10/10

The 6 y/o called this a chibi wasp, I think it's genus Cratomus. Found in my bathroom.

Custom stationery of a Parisian insect dealer, exquisitely decorated with Aubrey Beardsley style insect illustrations

We’ve been on a deep dive in the museum archives this week and you would not believe the letterhead game some of these gentlemen had

🚨BREAKING🚨COOL SHREW FOUND
insideecology.com/2025/07/03/o...

a silly #SciArt redraw of the squish that cat meme, but it is a grey stickfigure squishing a mosquito (that looks like a little cat) with the text SQUISH THAT BUG!

You want to collect insects (and maybe other arthropods) for reference genome sequencing, but don't want to spend a fortune on dry ice shipping!

All you gotta do is SQUISH. THAT. BUG!

More details in our recent preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Belleza en estado puro...

Large red velvet ant on dry oak leaves, nearly facing you. Her head is a rounded square

Pseudomethoca velvet ants have such chonky bulldog heads and they're kinda my favorite (don't tell Ephuta) ♥️

Little clay model of a male anglerfish

Clay model of an anglerfish, with the glow in the dark spots glowing green

Huge female anglerfish model next to her tiny husband

Finished! I made a husband for my anglerfish model. It's air dry clay so he's a bit clunky haha but I think he's cute.
#sciart #deepsea #anglerfish #fish

Artwork with beetles in the Kunsthaus Zürich

Found insect art at the Kunsthaus Zürich