Tom Astle

A macro photo showing alate (winged reproductive male and female) black harvester ants near a burrow entrance on desert sand. The male alate is a bit smaller than the female, and has a markedly smaller head. Also visible, mostly out of focus, are a few wingless workers.

A macro photo, ground level, of a male black harvester ant alate (winged reproductive caste) on desert sand.

A macro photo of an unlucky male black harvester ant alate (winged reproductive caste) hanging upside-down in a spider web.

A macro photo, vertical orientation, looking down at a female black harvester ant alate (winged reproductive caste) on desert sand. To the left of her are two wingless worker ants, both of which are much smaller than she is.

Black harvester ant alates (winged reproductive males & females), Mojave Desert. Their emergence was well-synchronized across numerous colonies; on the same day I saw them coming out of nests hundreds of yards (even a few miles) apart. The male is the tiny-headed one, but I don't judge. #BugSky 🐙🌿🐜

Photo of a very large mosquito in brown and cream with striking gold bands on its abdomen, and gold and blue on its legs and proboscis.

Australian Elephant Mosquito (Toxorhynchites speciosus).
A most welcome sight in my garden. The adults don't drink blood at all (they prefer nectar and sap), while the larvae consume other types of mosquitoes!
#insects #invertebrates

Very large dark red mayfly with wings held up straight, and giant two-toned compound eyes, orange in the upper third and dark blue below. She's holding her 1st leg pair forward and up like antennae

Top down view of the creature's head, giant eyes protruding out like a drum set

Face of the creature, big blue/orange eyes peering at everything everywhere all at once

Extremely close shot of the creature's compound eyes

Throwback to the time This Thing appeared 👀 (giant mayfly, from 2021)

A macro photo looking down into a multi-petaled, yellow flower with a moth in the flower's dark yellow center. The moth has a fuzzy gray thorax and cream-colored wings with pink edging. There is also a very small green plant bug in the upper left, peeking from behind a petal.

Photobombing is a constant problem in macrophotography

(Heliolonche pictipennis moth in the Mojave Desert last weekend; green mirid plant bug going "Oh heyyy" in the upper left.) #BugSky 🌿🐙📷

A macro photo of a cream-colored crab spider clinging to the tip of a cream-colored flower petal, against a blue sky background. The spider is far left in the frame; in the lower right the flower shows dark red and greenish-yellow stripes toward the petals' centers.

Here is your Saturday Spider 🕷️

(A tiny crab spider waiting for meal delivery on a scale bud flower, Mojave Desert) #BugSky 🐙🌿📷

A female hairy woodpecker perches on the side of a spruce tree trunk. She is black and white with a long sturdy beak for digging into the trees looking for bugs. The background is orange from the late evening sun.

We are fortunate to have both Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers around all year, but they are particularly active in the winter.
This female Hairy Woodpecker arrived with a few loud PIPS, to forage for snacks on or in the trees!
#Birds #photography #wildlife 🪶

This is not the way

A macro image of the backside of a sleeping bee, whose head is not visible because it's jammed down into the center of a yellow flower. The bee's abdomen is dark with thin light-colored bands of hair. The flower's petals surrounding it are smooth, and the flower's fuzzy stigma is next to the bee, like a yellow pom-pom.

Guess what
Bee butt

A small (under 1 cm., way smaller than a honeybee) male Dufourea sp. bee sleeping in a sun cup (Camissonia campestris) flower in the Mojave Desert last week. Males of many solitary native bees sleep in flowers or use their mandibles to clamp onto thin plant stems. 🐙🌿📷 #BugSky

Macrophotography: Photographing Our Smallest Organisms Bring the tiny wonders of Anza-Borrego into focus!

Hey SoCal folks - on 3/21-22 @mhedin.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-day macro workshop in Anza-Borrego Desert! We'll have Saturday class time to cover composition, equipment, lighting, etc., then field time Saturday afternoon, blacklighting that night, and reconvene for a morning bug-walk. 📷🐙🌿

Macro photograph, in top view, of two insects standing on a cluster of small, 4-petalled white flowers. Both insects have a red head and thorax and black at their back ends. The beetle on the right is slightly broader, and has a narrow white line separating the red and black parts of its body, as to suggest a narrow ant waist.

Model and mimic: a clever longhorn beetle (Euderces reichei, at right) tries its best to look like a local carpenter ant, Campontous decipiens, as they both feed on a spring dogwood flower. Brackenridge Field Laboratory, Texas.

A top-down closeup photo of a pale yellow flower with serrated-tip petals, with the ground and leaves below out of focus. There are two little moths in the flower; the moths have a fuzzy gray thorax, and cream-colored wings with thin bands and edges of deep pink.

These pretty, day-flying moths (Heliolonche pictipennis), only about 1 cm. long, are one of my favorite desert spring insects. The only flowers they visit (desert dandelion, desert chicory, or scale bud) close up at night; the moths sleep inside them, which is scientifically adorable. #BugSky 🌿🐙🌼

Yes! I had seen the katydid eggs on a grass stem, and noticed one had a tiny hole in it - I realized what it probably was and kept an eye on it. The next day, the wasps (and one katydid) started hatching.

Eddie and Bob are getting up tomorrow 🐢⏰

The katydid was released in the garden. These particular wasps wouldn’t hurt the katydid itself - they lay their eggs inside katydid eggs.

CORRECTION: ID'd by my bee-friend Krystle Hickman as Dufourea sp.

Was ID'd as a Dufourea sp. (by my bee-friend Krystle Hickman)

A macro photo, front three-quarter view, of a small dark bee, sprinkled liberally with tiny white pollen grains, perched on the smooth yellow petals of a flower, against a bright blue sky background.

Is this desert flower (sun cup, Camissonia sp.) small? Yes, under 2cm. Is this bee (maybe Lasioglossum sp.?) even smaller? Yes, 5-6mm (zoom in!). To get a blue sky background behind a plant under 15cm. tall, did I have to lie sideways on the ground and get sand in my ear? Also yes.
🌿🐙📷🌼 #BugSky

A macro photo of a rich pink flower with a bright yellow throat, with a touch of green in the background upper right.

I don't post a lot of flower photos (unless the flower has a bug in it), but I do make exceptions. Here's a close look at the Red Rock Canyon Monkeyflower (Erythranthe rhodopetra; rhodo=red, petra=rock), a rare endemic found only in, you guessed it, Red Rock Canyon State Park in California. 📷🌿🌸

A macro photo of the folds of a peach-colored flower, covered in many tiny dewdrops.

A phone pic, vertical orientation, of a patch of large white flowers with yellow centers, growing out of desert sand, in morning sun. Two faded blossoms in the foreground are pale pink. Mountains and blue sky are in the background.

Extreme closeup of tiny dewrops on a faded desert evening primrose flower (Oenothera sp.), Mojave Desert, California. The large flowers start out white and fade to pale pink; wilted blossoms like the one in closeup can be pink or peach.

A phone photo, vertical orientation, of a desert landscape in the slanted light of morning. In the low foreground and into the middle distance are bright yellow, dandelion-like flowers growing intermittently on the sand. The flowers are known as scale bud (Anisocoma acaulis). Larger shrubs, mountains, and a bit of sky are in the distance.

--this one is seasonal and solitary, with no hive. A lone female mates, digs a burrow in the ground (hence "mining" bee), provisions it with pollen, and lays her eggs. Then she seals up the entrance and never sees her offspring. One of my favorite spring species. Mojave Desert, CA, yesterday. 🌼

A macro photo, front three-quarter, elevated view, of a bee inside a pale yellow, multi-petaled flower. The bee is overall dark metallic blue-green, and has a face covered in fuzzy white hairs, bedecked in small round pollen grains.

🐙🌿📷 This wee bee (Andrena olivacea) is a native mining bee. Less than half the size of a honeybee, it looks dull and dark from a distance - but is beautiful up close. It's one of over 1600 species of native bees (which honeybees are not) found in California alone. Like almost all bee species--

A friend (who specializes in native bees & photographing them) and I had this talk yesterday in the California desert. I showed a feral honeybee hive to a couple hiking where we were. They had no idea that honeybees didn’t belong there. My friend said she’s had this convo a billion times.

A photo of a small butterfly perched atop a plant with, curled, holly-like, gray-green leaves and brownish patches. The butterfly is upper left, seen from the side with wings folded. The forewings are orange with white marks, and the hindwings have a row of dark spots along the rear margin, with white and orange below. The body is dark with lots of bluish-white hairs.

Western Pygmy Blue butterfly (Brephidium exilis) on one of its host plants, desert holly (Atriplex hymenelytra, a type of saltbush) in the Mojave Desert yesterday. They're the smallest butterflies in North America, with a wingspan just over half an inch. #BugSky 🐙🌿📷

In the desert this morning I saw (and heard) a pair of prairie falcons mating, then watched one of the pair (I think the female because of the large size), do a couple of relatively close circles overhead. Luckily, my telephoto lens was safely at home in a cabinet. 📷🦉🔭

Yes - I’ve had a swarm move in to a bird box in my backyard, it was quite interesting.

Feral honeybees (honeybees are not native to North America, but feral colonies are established in many places) in the desert this morning. I was gonna go ask them why they were so swarmy, but decided against it 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝

A macro photo of a slender, tiny wasp atop a batch of katydid eggs. The eggs, which look like brown lima beans, are tiled along a brown grass stem. Four have roundish holes chewed through their sides, where parasitoid wasps (like the one perched on top of them) chewed their way out. The wasp is metallic-copper colored with a yellow abdomen band and large eyes.

A macro photo of a group of katydid eggs, which look like brown lima beans, tiled along a brown grass stem against a pale green background. In the upper right, a tiny wasp's face is peeking out of an escape hole it is chewing from the inside of a katydid egg it has parasitized. A second egg, lower left, has a hole in it where a wasp has already hatched and flown off.

A macro photo of a tiny, green, newly-hatched katydid nymph perched atop a fingertip, against a green and blue-green background. The fingertip and katydid are lower right, and one of the katydid's extremely long antennae stretches all the way up to the upper left corner of the frame.

From a few years ago: katydid eggs mostly parasitized by tiny wasps. When a katydid hatches, the egg opens like a clam shell; but as you can see (pic 2), if there's a parasitoid wasp inside, they chew their way out. Btw, the baby katydid on my fingertip hatched from the same egg clutch. #BugSky 🐙🌿

During their search for food, most insects head specifically for the flowers that promise the highest reward. Researchers from the #UniKonstanz and the @uni-wuerzburg.de have now studied how bumblebees process information about their food sources. Full story: t1p.de/mndcd

A photo of a spider suspended from a web strand that's attached on the left to a single dry brown stem. The background is bluish gray sky. The spider, in the lower right third, is mostly black, with a row of red dots along the side of the abdomen.

A black and white photo, vertical orientation, of a few sparse dry grass stems and many tiny spiders in a web attached to the grass. The bright sky is the background, with a thin slice of grassland out of focus in the bottom of the frame.

A cool and quite pretty little spider, Parawixia bistriata, that I saw in Brazil in Emas National Park. This spider lives in social groups of up to several hundred. Pic 2 shows a small portion of the communal web. 🐙🌿🕷️

Macro photo of a brown stink bug in face view on a leaf, guarding a tightly-clustered bunch of eggs that are shaped and colored exactly like a full tray of dark beer with foam on top.

Finally, the bug is back with a round of the Guinness.