Macro

Western thrashing ant attacking insect larva. We arrived at an area of southwest Washington called Long Beach yesterday.   This morning I was out for a quiet walk with my camera; it was equipped with a macro lens and macro lighting system.   It is always fun to explore new places to see what kinds of finds can be discovered.   I had quite a bit of luck as I ended up with half a dozen pictures which I am excited about.   The one above is an example. Thrashing ants feed on a wide variety of foods.   They will take seeds, honeydew from aphids, and small prey items such as this insect larva.   Ants have very strong jaws.   They are capable of subduing smaller insects with relative ease and, when working together, can overpower significantly larger creatures.   They will bring their find back to the nest where it will be fed to larvae, the queen, and shared amongst the adults.   When in “bug mode,” I am scanning the environment for a...

Margined white butterfly on wild dandelion. If you have seen a white butterfly flitting around in your garden, it likely is the cabbage white butterfly.  This European invader has supplanted the native margined white butterfly shown above.  This is actually not the cabbage white butterfly’s fault; it is capable of feeding on a wider variety of plants than the margined.  To complicate matters, the primary food of both is the mustard plant.  Much of the native mustard varieties, which the margined primarily feeds on, has been replaced by invasive European ones.  The cabbage white can eat both plants while the margined white can only eat native species.  If eggs are mistakenly laid on the foreign variety, the growing caterpillars die. According to William Neill, author of Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest , the margined white butterfly used to be common throughout most of mid latitude North America.  I found this one in a very rural area of Wa...