Ants farming aphids for honeydew on a wild senna stem, Senna hebecarpa. The ants appear to be red-banded carpenter ant, Camponotus chromaiodes, based on a quick internet search. An even quicker search suggests the aphids may be black bean aphid, Aphis fabae. Taken with 60mm AF f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor. Related articles Best Cheap Nikon Macro Lens: 60mm f/2.8D AF […]
Photographed with a Nikon AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 70-300mm lens on a Nikon D90. You could say Black-Crowned Night Heron‘s Back, too. We featured a different black-crowned night heron in a previous post. This time, we see the flip side on the same species. The two long white feathers comprise a plume that is held erect in […]
Taken with a Micro-Nikkor 60mm on a Nikon D90. Autumn meadowhawk dragonflies are the last dragonflies to leave the local ponds in the fall. They stick around, as long as the weather holds, into November. November this year was particularly favorable. There were still half a dozen of these actively breeding on November 17; that is […]
Beautiful but deadly! Well, not deadly, but extremely uncomfortable. This saddleback caterpillar, Acharya stimuli, is bristling with stinging hairs. Potent enough to cause nausea in addition to straightforward pain. Thumb for scale. I followed this specimen over several days as it worked on blackberry leaves. I was excited to find this; I have been looking for one for […]
A spreadwing damselfly among the colors of autumn. Spreadwings are damselflies; they share the slender body of most damselflies but tend to hold their wings away from their bodies rather than fold neatly over the abdomen. This species is also quite large for a damselfly, at least two inches long. We were enjoying an unusually […]
As is customary, the brown pelicans were literally at their posts at the boat ramp on Tarpon Bay, Sanibel Island, Florida. These two had a habit of doing the same thing at the same time, albeit in different directions at this moment on a fine April evening. They were on posts about 20 feet apart. […]