Hard to decide what to pick for this. Since butterflies get all the press, let’s go with a moth for a change. Meet Virginia ctenucha, a wasp moth.
I had hoped to find time to hunt down a true bug, (which would be an insect of the order Hemiptera), but the month is running out, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. It seems that @Twoflower has that covered, anyway, the only true bug posted so far to this thread.
So, just now, I ended up digging through my old photographs, for a picture of a tiny critter, a mite; not a true bug, not even an insect.
Just now, I successfully Googled up that this is most likely of the species Bryobia praetiosa, known as a concrete mite, a sidewalk mite, or a clover mite. I’ve generally seen these if I look very closely at areas on concrete where ants are present. They appear as very tiny dots, barely visible to the naked eye, moving very fast, much faster than ants. If not for their bright red color, I probably would never have noticed them at all.
Getting this photograph was non-trivial. I had my D3200 with its stock 18-55mm lens mounted via 68mm of extension tubes (12, 20, and 36mm), and took hundreds of shots, hoping to get a few good ones. This was a small, 960-pixel part of the whole 6016×4000 pixel frame, processed with some heavy-duty image-enhancement software.
55mm, 1⁄320 of a second at ƒ/11 (though effectively smaller, because of the extension tubes), ISO 1600. Pretty much stretching the limits of my camera and what equipment and methods I have to go with it—short of incorporating my microscope—to resolve small objects.
I wish I could say, with reasonable accuracy and confidence, how small this critter is. I have my microscope, and a much simpler camera that I commonly have used with it, calibrated so that I can give an accurate account of the size of anything that I photograph that way, but I have no awareness of any way to similarly calibrate this camera, lens, and extensions tubes. All I can say is that this critter is so small as to be barely visible to my unaided eye, with no hope of ever directly seeing it as anything more than a tiny, fast-moving red dot. According to the Wikipedia, they range in size from out 0.75 to 0.85 of a millimeter, or 0.03 to 0.33 of an inch.
And the competition is closed for another month. Thanks everyone. I’ll get the poll up later tonight.
Please vote for your three favourite photos, using whatever criteria you feel is best. All Dopers are welcome to vote - you don’t need to have submitted a photo. You cannot vote for your own photo. You get three votes (and the poll will make you use all of them).
The voting deadline is 9pm UK time on Tuesday 30th Jan.
- AHunter3
- Chad_Sudan
- Crane
- snowthx
- Dung_Beetle
- Dogginit
- zimaane
- Aspenglow
- Pardel-Lux
- Shoeless
- Teuton
- WildaBeast
- beowulff
- Strinka
- Treppenwitz
- BetsQ
- Galactus
- Twoflower
- Kimstu
- romansperson
- Bob_Blaylock
- Zyada
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