Diorama of Newark Liberty Airport except as hell… and a prison too

To commemorate my trip to #EntSoc2025 my sister made this for me

Sometimes I think about how our species just so happens to exist in the same era as one of the most dramatic radiations of animals, and how lucky we are that they’re (often) hyper specialists who go after what eats our food.

You can’t argue against parasitoids being the best bug, it’s objective😎

This was a good morning read! Though it’s a shame, if taxonomy had more funding we might have already known if Synopeas is one of the groups that are specialized enough to be safe to use as biocontrol.

A macro photo, side angle, of an insect called a mantidfly against a pure white background. The insect is facing left. It's overall a mix of dark and light brown/tan, with large, round, rainbow-green compound eyes. It's a long, thin insect, with mantis-like raptorial forelegs, clear lacewing-like wings folded along its back, and giraffe-neck-like extension of the thorax. Overall, it looks like a mashup of a mantis and a lacewing, hence the common name.

--species are parasitoids of beetle, bee, or wasp larvae. Others seek out spider egg sacs, or hop aboard female spiders with the intent to parasitize the egg sacs when the spiders construct them. Mantispid larvae then chew through the silk and live inside, eating spider eggs. #inverts #insects

Ben E. King — Stand By Me [Letra + Video] YouTube video by armxndo

Best way I can think of putting it:
You know the start to Stand by Me? www.youtube.com/watch?v=einn...

🎶"When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see"🎶

That's kinda the vibes here. Pretty fitting, "moon mili" was always there, just waiting for us to find!❤️

Dang, A+ name! 🤩

Extra context (as they are underselling it):
A 霽月/Jìyuè moon, as in the idiom 光風霽月, has this great sense of tranquility & hope to it, a sign that the intense storm is finally gone & the night is calm again, where you let out that breath you didn't know you were holding in.
[🧵]

Millipede in its natural leaf litter habitat, appearing brightly white against its dark background

Hell yeah, bless us, moon millipede.

A new epigean species of Trichopeltis Pocock, 1894 from southwest China (Diplopoda, Polydesmida, Cryptodesmidae) A new species of Cryptodesmidae, Trichopeltis jiyue sp. nov., is described from the Ailaoshan National Nature Reserve in Yunnan Province, southwest China. The new species is distinguished from its con...

I HAVE to highlight the most poetic etymology section I've ever read for a millipede: "Jiyue (Chinese spelling) alludes to the bright white appearance when the animal emerges from the leaf mold, like the moon appearing from behind a dark rain cloud." Source: zookeys.pensoft.net/article/1280...

Hey I started a new section of my website called Derek's Tech Corner, come check it out: www.derekhennen.com/derekstechco.... It's where I'll share various software and other tech tools for cool kids that will save you time--so that you can go look for more bugs.

I've seen a lot of truly beautiful photos of chalcids in my day, but these ones of Metapelma westwoodi (Metapelmatidae) might just be my favorite www.flickr.com/photos/dhobe...

Slender mopy wasp, with a green head, thin antennae, tan thorax with a purple stripe across the sides, tiny wing stubs, and a dark iridescent abdomen terminated by a black feathery ovipositor sheath(?). She's paused over a slight blemish in the wood, abdomen arched, thin ovipositor proper injected into the blemish.

Not only did I get to see a gorgeous old friend roaming the familiar boardwalk again this afternoon, but I saw her ovipositing into something in the wood, for the first time!
Hope to see her next generation, next year 🖤
Uropelma formosum, eupelmid wasp. Mope. 🧪

A macro photo, vertical orientation, of an unusual moth cocoon, spun out of gold silk but in an oval-shaped, open-weave basket that looks like wire mesh. Part of a green leaf is out of focus in the background, and the top of the basket is attached to a white woven thread extending up out of frame. In the lower left half of the cocoon are a dozen or so small, gray, seed-like structures that are probably the cocoons of tiny parasitic wasps or flies, indicating they parasitized the moth pupa that originally made the mesh cocoon.

Urodid moth cocoon, Costa Rica. The basket hangs by a thread (possibly to discourage ants) and the structure may allow rain to drain and/or prevent mold. But it doesn't stop parasites - I think the seed-like ovals are cocoons of parasitic flies or wasps, indicating the moth pupa's likely fate. 🐙🌿

cartoon of a fly cleaning its eyes

Graduate student @kylethieringer.com and I wrote a dispatch about a new @currentbiology.bsky.social paper (doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...) describing a proprioceptive neural circuit that helps the fly visual system identify (and ignore) its own legs.

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lYLj3QW8S...

Red and black wasp clinging on a twiglet with its mandibles

I enjoy recognizing behaviors supposedly typical of bees in some of their ancestors, the wasps. A digger or thread-waisted wasp, Ammophila heydeni (Sphecidae), still sleeping shortly after dawn clinging to a twig with its mandibles, as commonly done by many solitary bees sporting strong mandibles.

side view of a 4mm black wasp with muscular hind legs sitting on young flower buds of a Galium plant. it's slurping up a tiny drop of sugar-water that I put there to keep it busy so it's easier to take a picture

Neat little wasp with muscular hind legs :)
Although I see Chalcidoidea almost daily, this was only my second Chalcididae. IV.2024
Haltichella rufipes, 4mm, a larval parasite of a diverse set of hosts: Tortricidae-moths, death-watch and darkling beetles
#hymenoptera #parasitoidwasp #macrophotography

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.

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