One of the most endearing characteristics of grasshoppers is their ability to produce sound. Some of the most wonderful memories of my childhood include sitting in a meadow bursting with sounds of insects and watching grasshoppers use their hind legs to produce soft, rhythmical songs, and not realizing that a seed that would eventually blossom…
Category: Macrophotography
Mozambique Diary: It is loud out here
I am back from the first reconnaissance trip to the Cheringoma Plateau in the eastern part of Gorongosa. It was slow going and in nearly all places we were forced to do a lot of road clearing, removing or finding a way around fallen trees, but the rewards were great. The eastern part of the…
Coneheads
A fact that entomologists are well aware of, but one that usually comes as a surprise to everybody else, is that most insect species are still unknown to science, and only a relatively small portion of them have been formally named and described. According to recent estimates only about a quarter of currently living species…
Join me in Belize to learn macrophotography!
I am pleased to announce that I will be joining macrophotography legends Alex Wild, John Abbott, and Thomas Shahan in a tropical insect photography course in Belize later this year. The workshop will be held September 22-29, 2013. Today is the first day of registration – hurry up, it usually sells out very fast, and…
African Tuesday: Being bark
When I first read “Out of Africa”, which to this day remains one of my favorite books, the one thing that left me oddly dissatisfied was the lack of attention to trees of the savanna – their smell and colors, the texture of their bark and, most importantly, all the wonderful creatures that the author must…
Stalk-eyed flies
I really don’t like when organisms that deviate from our narrow, anthropocentric perception of the natural world are described as “bizarre” but, let’s face it, flies of the family Diopsidae sure look that way. They are hypercephalic, which means that their head is extremely expanded in a way that places both their eyes and the…
The Smaller Majority 