I finally went to the nature preserve near my place, supervised by the Japanese national museum of natural history.
Busy time for the insects before the coming of winter, so my camera sort of failed me, as it couldn’t capture much but blur. Spotted only a single dreaded giant hornet (the place is littered with multilanguage warning signs about them), which escaped my camera as well.
Yeah it has macrochelid mites attached to its abdomen. I wish I had been able to get a nicer picture of them, but maybe next year! I think the Raynox 250 or a nice dedicated macro lens would have better luck with something that small.
Unless we have an unexpected heat wave here, I think I’m just about done shooting bugs until next year. It’s been about 30-45 degrees.
This confirms my suspicion that we got a nest of jumping spiders somewhere around our appartment. They provide the much needed ray of light in this rainy season.
what I assume is some random male. I was struck by its totally unremarkable look, if I may say so. It is the first time I come upon such an European looking spider over here.
Have we had any ant pics? Took this when I was in Australia some years back. Only just checked what kind it is (Myrmecia or a ‘bulldog’ ant) and… whoa, some of these jump and are known for their aggressiveness and ferocity as well as painful sting.
And it doesn’t look like it is a soldier, since it is so lightly armoured? Wow, those mandibles.
Speaking of which, do ants sting or bite? both? depends on the type? I remember back in France, we used to say red ones stung while black ones were peaceful. No idea if there was any truth to that, honestly.
I, sadly, don’t have the hardware to capture those everbusy little mirrors of our own societies in their constant and frenetic moves. All I can catch is a blur, at most.
Here is the single picture I could take of an endemic species:
Japanese carpenter ant, what I assume is a soldier (they aren’t very big, but twice as big as most of their congeners). Not interesting looking at all, but I won’t complain that I didn’t come across one of those dreaded South-American fire ants that landed in the country this past year.
I believe that a lot of ant species will bite you with their pincers, but it’s rarely painful (I think some can be irritating). Many species sting, like bees, and that’s frequently referred to as an “ant bite” but it’s not. Fire ants hurt you by stinging you, for instance. But a lot of the small black ants that are here in America (for example) don’t sting, or at least don’t sting humans.
Ooo, that’s very cool. It’s like a domino, or something.
Yeah, ‘ant sting’ made me think it was referring to a bite but these have stingers in their abdomens! This was fascinating and grim from the Wikipedia entry:
Myrmecia famously appears in the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s major work, The World as Will and Representation, as a paradigmatic example of strife and constant destruction endemic to the “will to live”:
“But the bulldog-ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary example of this kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head seizes the tail in its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head: the battle may last for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This contest takes place every time the experiment is tried.”
I don’t have any comment to what hast just been posted. God forbid if curiosity turns the educated version of me into a tormentor of the little devils. I know better than to trust a philosopher, anyway!
Those landed this year in Japan, it appears (they had landed before, but queens are suspected to have made landing for the first time, through the Kobe port). I am not particularly looking forward to meeting the invasive tourist.
Here is a “nacré de Pallas”, as we call them in France:
Edit: why doesn’t discourse let you rename pictures. Worse: re-uploading one with a different name brings back the old one, as if it was saved for ever and ever :(
That fly’s colours… :O
Such a beautiful mariage with all that vibrant green.
Are the flies supposed to be this leisurely gorgeours around frops? Is that why they so gluttonously devour them?
The (few) flies around here are so boring looking… although they are playful
(warning, NSFW)