Found in tree hollows of #Sulawesi #Indonesia, tiny #primates 🐵🧐 Gursky's Spectral #Tarsiers are #carnivores with their food, #insects 🪲🦗 being poisoned by #palmoil and #pesticides ☠️ Fight for them! #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife

palmoildetectives.com/2026/02/…

Found a nest of one of my favorites! A true oddball. Leptomyrmex erythrocephalus, the red-headed spider ant.

#ants #insects #Leptomyrmex

Post a photo of an animal that looks Gen-AI but is 100% real.

Hegemona lineata, Belize.

#Tenebrionidae #Photography #Insects

A Texas leafcutter ant, Atta texana, hauls spring Prunus buds along a tree branch on her way back to the nest.

#Ants #Insects #Atta #nature #leafcutterants

A small huntress ant, Neoponera crenata, foraging along a rotting log in the Peruvian Amazon.

#Neoponera #Ants #Insects #Ponerinae #Amazon

"Scientists have discovered prehistoric insects preserved in amber for the first time in South America, providing a fresh glimpse into life on Earth at a time when flowering plants were just beginning to diversify and spread around the world."

@AssociatedPress reports: flip.it/PZgHMh

#Amber #Science #Insects #Paleontology

Pardon my over-posting today, but I just wanted to share this beautiful visitor at home on this last day (somewhere already) of summer.

#photography #FujiFilm #nature #butterfly #Insects #lantana #flowers

This monarch, a skipper, & some bumblebees were enjoying the zinnias Thursday. Seen monarchs around the garden nearly every day now. They seem to especially like the zinnias, the most abundant large flower in the garden right now.

#StormHour #butterflies #insects #nature #Photography #AltText

I never worked up this 2016 photo from the Peruvian Amazon because I was running into trouble identifying the wasp, in spite of its distinct markings.

But taxonomic resources are more accessible a decade on, and I'm happy to announce that she's the rarely photographed Polistes torresae.

#WaspLove #Polistes #Insects #Wasps

Pollinator Week is a great time to share this print, which expresses the central theme of my work about the Future of Pollination for Manufactured Ecosystems. Our food sources & ecosystems around us are dependent on pollinators (mostly bees & other insects, some birds & mammals) but insects populations have lost huge numbers and many species altogether.🧵

#PollinatorWeek #nativeBees #entomology #ecology #sciart #insects #butterflies #beetles #moths #printmaking #linocut #ManufacturedEcosystems

An Oecophylla smaragdina weaver ant hangs from the bottom of her nest, alert to any photographers that might try anything brash.

Cape Tribulation, Queensland, Australia.

#ants #oecophylla #insects #australianwildlife

I would never have seen this fellow if he hadn't moved. He's tiny and the color of the sand in this creekside sandbar.

#beetles #coleoptera #insects #InverteFest #Photography

A few years back I got this photo of a honey bee in flight, returning to her hive.

Had to shoot a few hundred photos just to land this one.

#bees #insects #nature

One fully-funded PhD position on mosquito behaviour available at the Insect Neuro Lab in Durham University, with Olena Riabinina @lena_r , plus a second one that depends on securing a fellowship.
insectneurolab.com/vacancies/

#neuroscience #insects #PhDPosition #PhDJobs

oh shit it's #WeevilWednesday

BEHOLD: this majestic _Poteriophorus imperatrix_ observed in the Philippines by Claude Chavand: inaturalist.org/observations/3… " title=""/>

#iNaturalist #bugstodon #insects #beetles #weevils • #Coleoptera #Curculionidae #Dryophthorinae

The coevolution of fungus-ant agriculture

science.org/doi/10.1126/scienc…

#symbiosis #microbiology #ants #insects

Turns out ecologists and entomologists around the world have been warning about declining insect numbers for years. The culprits are climate change, habitat loss, light pollution, intensive farming, pesticide and fertiliser use. But it’s a struggle to get people to act.

It’s not just about bees and butterflies, the poster children of the pollinator world. Other, less photogenic pollinators such as hoverflies, moths, wasps, soldier beetles and earwigs are also showing declines. Several of these species don’t just pollinate. They also eat the pest insects that ruin crops.

Already, in the apple and pear orchards of south-west China, depleted populations of pollinators have forced farmers to hand-pollinate their trees, carrying pots of pollen and paintbrushes with which to individually pollinate every flower. If it sounds labour-intensive and time-consuming, that’s because it is.

#green #ukpolitics #uspol #ukpol #climate #environment #insects #agriculture #farming

archive.ph/tvnld#selection-165…

City wildlife.

Raised from our garden (they like the golden Alexander), we still have a few more and loads of monarch caterpillars.

#insects #butterfly #CityLife

The amazing value of the eLife Assessment, demonstrated:

"The fascinating role of neuropeptide Bursicon and its receptor in shaping insect seasonal polyphenism", by Zhang et al. 2024
elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre…

"This *important* study shows that low temperature activates the bursicon signaling pathway during the transition from the summer to the winter form and that it affects cuticle pigment and chitin content, and cuticle thickness."

"The study's *solid* set of experiments and results reveal a role of bursicon signaling in regulating features of polyphenism related to the exoskeleton. Nevertheless, they only *incompletely* substantiate the authors' claims about the regulation of polyphenism itself."

In which other journal would a reader get such a valuable reviewer comment like this, right away? Only at @eLife ! ELife's Assessment for the win.

#insects #entomology #Hemiptera #Psyllidae

I'm back from a week along Colombia's Caribbean coast! It wasn't a photography trip per se but I did manage a few sessions, and I'll be posting buggy highlights over the next weeks.

Here's a teaser, a little stingless bee pollinating Mexican sunflower:

#NativeBees #Bees #Insects #Color

Surprise observation this afternoon: Homotropus sp. An ichneumonid wasp, about 5-6 mm long.

There are only 8 observations world wide.

inaturalist.org/observations/2…

#iNaturalist #Hymenoptera #entomology #insects #wasplove

Ant biologists thought the small, strangely-shaped Manica parasitica from the Sierra Nevada was a social parasite of another ant species, but the truth is even stranger.

#Ants #Insects #Manica #Parasites

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi…

hey you! Leave me alone!

Ladybug on a rosemary leaf.

Edited with #darktable

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

#photography #naturephotography #macrophotography
#insects
#ladybug
#rosemary

An Acromyrmex octospinosus leafcutter ant, photographed at the famous La Selva biological station in the lowland rainforests of Costa Rica.

#Ants #Acromyrmex #Insects #Spines