Yesterday, about six o'clock in the afternoon, I drove about six kilometers to one of the meadows near the village of Shishan. I spent a few hours there searching for interesting details.
Today, in this post, I'm ready to show you what I collected through the collecting power of my camera equipped with a small, versatile macro lens that can be added or subtracted, depending on what is being photographed.
These are the Potentilla recta flowers.
I saw quite a few of them yesterday.
When the Potentilla recta flower loses its petals, it looks like a lovely little star. The photograph on the right was taken with the flash, the one on the left without it.
Here you can see a crab spider (Thomisidae family) with its prey. The scene was photographed on the Knautia integrifolia flower, and I used the flash.
This shot, taken a minute later, shows the same situation from a slightly different angle, and the spider is in a slightly different pose. The scientific name of the species is Thomisus onustus. Judging by the size, shape, and especially the pretty long two pairs of forelegs, I'll say this is a male spider.
Here you can see a Knautia integrifolia flower in the subdued ambient light at dusk. In the following photograph ...
... the fruit and the flower of the same plant are posing next to each other.
Illuminated by the flash or the more intense sunlight in the period between dawn and dusk, the colors appear different.
What looks like a single flower is actually an inflorescence made of many small flowers called florets.
The Knautia integrifolia flower shown in this photograph isn't fully developed yet.
This is one of the visually most striking, if not the visually most striking, flies that can be seen in my area. The scientific name of the species is Myopa dorsalis. It belongs to the Conopidae family. In the above photograph, the fly is resting on the Knautia integrifolia flower. In its adult stage, Myopa dorsalis feeds on nectar. Larvae live and develop as parasites inside the body of some bee and wasp species.
On the nearby flower of the same kind ...
... I had the oportunity to photograph another fly from the Conopidae family. The closely related Myopa hirsuta.
Just like in the case of Myopa dorsalis, the adult flies feed on nectar and visit a wide variety of flowers. The larvae parasitise mainly on bees from the genus Andrena in the Andrenidae family.
At some point, while I was observing the scene through the macro lens ...
... the fly started cleaning its head and forelegs, allowing me to get a few interesting poses for this set of six consecutive photographs.
In this shot, the fly's feeding apparatus, which is usually packaged and hidden in the lower part of the head, can be seen in all its impressive length.
About half an hour later, and forty or fifty meters further ...
... I came across an interesting scene in the midlle of the relatively large meadow.
A brand new Tettigonia viridissima adult just exited the nymphal exoskeleton. If you take a good look at all the details in this photograph, you may notice the shape and reduced size of the nymphal wings and compare them with the adult's wings that were slowly reaching their full size.
Tettigonia viridissima is a big insect, so I used the macro lens only for this photograph, which doesn't include the complete legs, wings, and antennae, and even here, the macro power of my lens is at minimum. Some insects are just too big for macro.
As the hemolymph, the insect equivalent of blood, gets pumped into the veins of the wings, they are slowly spread into their final shape. If you compare the three shots in this tryptich, you may notice the small differences in shape and size of the wings.
When these four photographs were taken, the wings were almost ready.
Molting of an insect is always an interesting scene to observe, and is also an easy one to photograph. Even the fastest and shiest species can't run, jump, or fly away during this process that makes them very vulnerable.
While taking the last few shots of this Tettigonia viridissima bushcricket, I noticed the icon on the display of my camera signaling that the battery is very low; It was time to change it, so I decided to walk back to my car parked by the side of the road.
While digging through the backpack in search of spare batteries, I saw a young roe deer crossing the road. This was the last shot taken before changing the battery.
Here you can see the shrubs by the side of the road, not far from my car.
That's the place where I photographed this crane fly.
The scientific name of the species is Tipula lunata. In the following photograph ...
... you can see the same crane fly from a slightly different angle.
On the leaf of a blackberry shrub in the same roadside area ...
... I found a small spider resting in an interesting pose. One of its hind legs was stretched vertically and was holding a barely visible thread connected to the foliage about twenty or thirty centimeters above the spider. I'm not sure about the species, but I can confidently say that it belongs to the Araneidae family. I'm also kinda convinced that it is a juvenile spider that will grow considerably bigger. It could be a juvenile Agalenatea redii, for example.
This much bigger spider is a fully grown Araneus angulatus, another orb-weaving species from the Araneidae family. I found it on the large web built about twenty meters further along the dense, green wall of shrubby vegetation. The spider was eating some small insect, or a small fragment of a bigger insect caught in the web.
There wasn't much space between the web and the shrubs behind it, so getting this photograph, which shows the upper part of the spider's body, was far from being easy. Here you can see the markings and protuberances on the abdomen that make the identification much easier. Near the edge of the web ...
... I noticed a surprisingly photogenic remnant of one of the spider's recent meals. The wings and thorax of a green lacewing. These three shots were taken with the flash of my camera on. The following photograph ...
... shows the same scene in ambient light.
Here you can see a bush cricket nymph posing on a blackberry leaf. The name of the species is Leptophyes punctatissima.
This is the Idaea degeneraria, a moth from the Geometridae family. I used the flash in this shot.
Here you can see the same moth photographed in low ambient light at dusk.
This caterpillar also belongs to the Geometridae family, but ...
... but in this case, I can't tell you what species exactly this is.
Not only are there quite a few very similar-looking Geometridae caterpillars present in the area, but also, in many species, the markings and colors of the larvae can vary. All that can make the identification quite confusing.
AND THAT'S ALL I PREPARED FOR TODAY. THE POST ENDS HERE.
AS ALWAYS ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK.
The following links will take you to the sites with more information about some of the protagonists of today's post. I found some stuff about them there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentilla_recta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomisus_onustus
https://identify.plantnet.org/k-world-flora/species/Knautia%20integrifolia%20(Honck.%20ex%20L.)%20Bertol./data
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myopa_dorsalis
https://www.flickr.com/photos/63075200@N07/albums/72157679771875731/with/49081221243
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tettigonia_viridissima
https://www.naturespot.org/species/tipula-lunata
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/121769-Araneus-angulatus
https://www.naturespot.org/species/speckled-bush-cricket
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaea_degeneraria
