The Smaller Majority

African Tuesday: Heelwalkers

After ice crawlers (featured in a recent post) were officially recognized as a new order of insect in 1915, entomologists pretty much assumed that this was it, and no more discoveries of such magnitude were expected. After all, an order is a major unit of classification – elephants, turtles, and flies are examples of orders…

African Tuesday: Duck-faced lacewings

Thread- and spoon-wing lacewings (family Nemopteridae) are related to antlions and similarly thrive in dry, sandy habitats. Although they are known from most parts of the world (with the exception of, sadly, North America), Africa is the real center of their diversity, and this is where over 80% of the 150+ known species are found….

Slipping out of the skeleton

A time-lapse video of a male Chinese mantis (Tenodera parasinensis) undergoing his final molt. I recorded it last night over the period of 5:35 hours; this movie contains 494 individual frames taken with Canon 6D. Note: If the quality of the video clip embedded below is poor, click here to see the uncompressed video.

Mom would have been so proud

A couple of months ago tiny Chinese mantids overran my house, having hatched unexpectedly from an ootheca that was supposed to stay dormant until spring. Last night the first female of the batch successfully molted into adulthood (the first male had his imaginal molt three days earlier), thus completing the cycle that started when I…

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: Matabele ants of Gorongosa

Shortly after arriving in the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique I witnessed a puzzling phenomenon: while exploring the network of roads in the woodland savannas of the park our local driver would barely slow down to avoid hitting antelopes and warthogs, but immediately slammed on the brakes if he noticed a long column of large…