Grayling butterfly
When in the New Forest I saw more graylings than I ever have before, especially at Hatchet Moor, with another couple near Crockford stream. They didn’t want to pose, but I managed a few shots:
When in the New Forest I saw more graylings than I ever have before, especially at Hatchet Moor, with another couple near Crockford stream. They didn’t want to pose, but I managed a few shots:
I’m a bit of a pond dipper, as some regular readers will have worked out, but there is one species that has always eluded me, the water stick insect. This year I saw a preserved specimen and a captive one (which I never managed to photograph), but never before had I seen a live wild…
Here’s a slightly different pond creature shot, with a white background. The backswimmer is also a bit different as its Notonecta maculata, rather than the usual N. glauca.
Ive posted photos the larva of a lesser water beetle and the great silver water beetle recently, but the most ferocious of them all are the larvae of the great diving beetle species or Dytiscus larvae. If you mange to get one of these in your pond dipping tray, you will soon end up with…
Following form my last post, here are the photos from that feeding great silver water beetle. You can really see those asymmetrical mandibles in this close up. Which they use to eat the snail. It would occasionally uncurl to get some air from the surface. Before recurling around its wandering pond snail prey. In this…
Here is a video I made of a great silver water beetle larva (Hydrophilus piceus) feeding on a wandering pond snail (Radix labiata). It has an interesting method of feeding where, after grabbing the snail in its unsymmetrical mouthparts, it then curls its body around it to get a better hold as is devours it!…
A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the strange looking larva of the lesser diving beetle Acilius sp. (probably sulcatus) swimming around in a pond. I quick went and got a net and caught one, before taking it inside to photography in my aquarium set up. It is a fairly distinctive larvae with its…
Last week a realised that the emerald damselflies would soon be emerging and there would not be nymphs around for much longer. This because despite hatching in March/April, they only take a matter of weeks to grow and emerge as adults, so the time available to photograph them is not very long. I managed to…
Today at Wat Tyler there were dragonflies abound at the one pond I managed to visit in my lunch break. The first I noticed was this male broad bodied chaser On the water surface a number of azure damselflies in tandem were egg laying in the weed that was at the surface. Soon after I…
I had a quick dip in a pond at Wat Tyler CP this evening just before the sun had set. And when I say quick I mean I put the net in the water just the once! Along with a diving beetle larva was a small newt: I thought it was rather small for a…