MACRO OCTOBER IN MARLERA - Episode Five - ON THE TENTH OF THIS MONTH

As with all October days that preceded it, the tenth of October was unusually hot. I arrived in Marlera, the coastal area a couple of kilometers from the village of Liznjan, and about five or six kilometers from where I live, around 5 PM, and stayed there until sunset.

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As always in this series, I'm gonna show you some small arthropods and plants I photographed there on that specific day. Have a good viewing.

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This is a butterfly. I mean - obviously. It's a pretty small butterfly that belongs to the Lycaenidae family. The name of the species is Aricia anteros. I used the flash of my camera in this photograph.

Here you can see the same butterfly photographed in ambient light. In the following photograph ...

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... you can take a look at the habitat, The intricate mix of relatively tall dry grass and various herbaceous plants that cover a good chunk of Marlera.

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At some point, I saw a caterpillar magically floating in the air. I mean, it looked that way from a certain distance, but ...

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... but these photographs reveal the trick. The larva was holding a silky thread of its own production.

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Through a series of swinging movements, the caterpillar was climbing the thread ...

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... attached to the stem of a relatively tall Foeniculum vulgare plant. When the following photograph was taken ...

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... the caterpillar has reached the plant.

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Less than a minute later the caterpillar has assumed its mimetic pose.

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With this tryptich, you can take another beneficial break from the macro view. Foeniculum vulgare plants are the protagonists of these three shots.

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I don't know what species this is, but there are a few things about the caterpillar shown in this long line of caterpillar-themed photographs I do know for sure. First of all - I can tell you that it's a moth larva.

Second of all - I know that the moth and its larvae belong to the Geometridae family.

The characteristic shape and the way of walking around that inspired the common name of this type of caterpillar it's an unmistakable sign that we have a Geometridae larva here. These, and I mean this type of caterpillars not only the ones of this particular species, are commonly known as inchworms. I like that name a lot.

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All in all, I don't know much about this species but I'm always able to say a few things about Geometridae in general.

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Not far from the caterpillar, on the yellow leaf of the small blackberry shrub, I found a well-camouflaged butterfly.

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This is the Colias croceus, a butterfly from the Pieridae family. In the following non-macro photograph ...

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... you can take a look at the tall dry grass at dusk.

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Here you can see the lovely fat larva that was posing on one of the dry plants that were growing among the grass. This is the larva of the mint leaf beetle (Chrysolina coerulans).

This is the Helicoverpa armigera caterpillar.

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Helicoverpa armigera is a species from the Noctuidae family.

The larva was feeding on the Dittrichia viscosa flower.

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This photograph offers some more dry grass for your eyes to graze on.

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Here you can see a bug from the Pentatomidae family. A shield bug, that is.

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I'm not sure about the species. Could be the Peribalus strictus. It has a lot of similarities but a few details don't match exactly. Maybe is some other species from the same genus. I don't know, if someone on Hive knows better, I'll gladly hear his/her conclusion.

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This is a small, and definitively pretty young grasshopper nymph.

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This is a juvenile, wingless version of some species from the Acrididae family.

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In the foreground of this photograph, you can take a look at the cypress spurge (Euphorbia cyparissias).

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The Hippodamia variegata ladybeetle shown in this penultimate shot was posing on the Euphorbia cyparissias plant.

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AND THAT'S IT. AS ALWAYS HERE ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK - THE END.

The following links will take you to the sites with more information about some of the protagonists of this post. I found some stuff about them there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aricia_anteros
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometer_moth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colias_croceus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysolina_coerulans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peribalus

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