Flamingo Friday: Flower-bird

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One Good Shot

The dragons of summer are losing their fire...

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They Don’t Call It a Passion Flower for Nothing

I’ve always liked passion flowers, with their exotic colors, wavy petals, and pop-up anthers and stigmas, as if they were wearing a Carmen Miranda hat. A passion flower looks otherworldly and yet also, just so slightly, artificial: the kind of flower that should adorn a cocktail glass filled with a bright blue mixed drink named something like “Pacific Crush.”

That said, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s something of a good-time flower.

Of course, all flowers are by their very nature good-time gals (and guys). I’ve always been intrigued by pollination, a remarkable adaption through which flowering plants have contrived a means of having sex via animals. Pretty kinky, when you stop to think about it; who thought that daisies had it in ‘em?

And of course the animals get something out of it as well. Nectar, for one thing, of course. But I see bees rolling about ecstatically in the bowls of wild roses, and I can’t help but think that they’re having some fun of their own.

I wondered about this again today, when I saw enormous bees (I think they were carpenter bees) absolutely obsessed with passion flowers.

These bees were covered with pollen as they made their circuits around the flowers, greedily sucking up every bit of sweetness with an intensity that certainly seemed lustful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an enthusiastic example of pollination; the bees were utterly enraptured:

["Yes! Yes! This side!"]

["Now this side!"]

["Now this side too!"--She seemed to say.]

A better person would have looked away, but, as we’ve already established, I am not that person. Instead, I took pictures for your prurient perusal.

Somebody ought to be ashamed.

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Monday's Moral Dilemma: The Face of Weevil

One of the great things about having a macro lens when you, personally, do not have a garden is that you can appreciate pest species for their aesthetic qualities without being troubled by what they’re noshing on.

Take this rose weevil, for example. I can admire its strange shape and its entertaining name (it’s a lot of fun to say “weevil” over and over again—try it) without worrying about what damage it might be doing to the rose bush it was perched on.

Does that make me a bad person?

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Flamingo Friday: Three Bathers

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Imaginal Discs (or, Why You Should Never Believe Phrases Written in Calligraphy)

You know those inspirational cards and posters that say something like, “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was ending, he turned into a butterfly”?

I understand the idea—that sometimes tremendous and painful or frightening upheaval leads to wonderful things—but I think people need to stop using insect metamorphosis as the comparison.

Why, you ask? Because insect metamorphosis is horrible. And the final product not only bears very little resemblance to the initial one, but it is only in the loosest sense the same creature at all.

Here’s what happens: in the pupa, the caterpillar doesn’t just go through some dramatic changes akin to the special effects we see in werewolf movies, where, as it grimaces, its legs lengthen and its wings sprout from its back. No, the caterpillar dissolves. Literally.

All that’s left of it, apart from a liquid mess, are these clusters of cells called “imaginal discs” that contain all the genetic information and coding necessary to create a butterfly.

The cells in these discs divide and develop into body parts by sucking up energy from the swampy (but proteineous) remains of what was once the caterpillar—and it is the product of the development of those discs that is the emerging butterfly.

Not exactly inspirational, is it? More like a horror movie, right? I mean, here’s this caterpillar, going about its business, living its life, and all the time inside it are these little clusters of cells just waiting for the time-bomb of the caterpillar’s developmental cycle to make it disintegrate into a sack of ooze so they can become a beautiful flying creature.

Imagine being seeded with the germs of your own destruction—or ascendance, depending on how much importance you place on the fact that the butterfly shares its genetic material with the caterpillar. Imagine being just the vehicle—and food truck—for the real, reproductive, snazzily winged main event.

Maybe it is a transcendent sort of a concept. But, I don’t know; it just doesn’t say “greeting card” to me.

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Flamingo Friday: A Sad Face

Elizabeth Irvin and her friends know why. (But we're still happy for her.)

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Is This Not the Cutest Spider You've Ever Seen?

(Have I mentioned that I love my new macro lens?)

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Even Fireflies Have "Off" Switches

"Turn that light off! What do you think I am, made of bioluminescence??"

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Mystery-Insect Sex

I spied these creatures having a not-so-private interlude in somebody’s front garden on Sunday (that's right--the DC suburbs remain a swinging kind of place!). At one point they seemed to be moving away from me, but I’m not sure if that’s because they resented my interest or because they feared my lens was a predator… It’s hard to judge the inhibitions of insects sometimes.

If anyone knows what species they are, please let me know. Each one was very small—at most a centimeter long.

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Flamingo Friday: The Sly Look

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Splendor in the Grass

Last week, displaying the kind of frugality that I am known for, I bought a macro lens (hey, there was a sale).

Now, although I have longed for a macro lens for a long time, I didn’t think I needed one in order to recognize and value the world around me. After all, didn’t I have a Ph.D. in biology? Wasn’t my dissertation research focused on intertidal marine invertebrates? Hadn’t I attended an extremely small liberal-arts college? Surely I was already well-primed to appreciate microcosms.

But the macro lens has not only brought into gorgeously clear focus the majesty of creatures I might usually dismiss as pests—it has made me realize that I too can look more closely at and see more of the beasts who go about their business all around me.

For example, during my lunch break on Friday, I happened to pass by some of the many ornamental grasses that homeowners in DC seem obsessed with planting. Because I had my new lens with me, I decided to give the grasses a second look, even though I was pretty sure there couldn’t be anything much in them

Imagine my surprise, then, to find a grasshopper—one of many—peering out at me as it clung to a blade of grass.

And that’s not all. In the few days since I’ve gotten the lens, I’ve seen more spiders, caterpillars, and bizarre shield-shaped beetle-y things than I’ve ever seen before.

[this tiny caterpillar is eating a rose petal]

And here I was, someone who was so smugly certain that I noticed what others didn’t—the hawk stooping for a kill, the snail poised on a stem.

It’s always nice to be reminded of the power that a new perspective—whether it’s brought about through a telescope, a magnifying lens, or a state of mind—has to make visible the humbling complexities of a universe in which other worlds exist below, above, within, around, and in the interstices of our own.

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Flamingo Friday: Action on the Nest

Mid-July, and they were still brooding...

(That sentence, incidentally, would be a great start for a mystery novel.)

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