Clearly a Sarlacc – another word I did not know how to spell.
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Neat. I presume the hooks of petals are to scrape pollen off bees that come by. Also reminds me of certain naughty folk tales.
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You should check out Ant Lion Larvae. Earth’s Sarlacc pit… for small insects.
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Good one. My kids and i often enjoy catching those little monsters in the summer time
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I believe all of the petals end up opening up, allowing access to the stamen or pistil at the base. The opening petals are easier to see in an uncropped version of the photo:
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Here’s a daisy for comparison. (My wife bought me a bouquet yesterday.) You can see some of the florets opening on the edge of the disk.
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Thanks for sharing a photo. Ant lions are awesome ambush predators… even if they do look like something straight from ya nightmares! 
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I like their excavation technique, too. Have you ever witnessed it?
Sadly not. There is only one place in the whole of the UK were we get ant lions and even then they are pretty rare.
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Check out YouTube as a runner up. Here’s one:
I’m enjoying seeing these macro photos. My iPhone doesn’t have a good macro lense; and my camera back when I took these didn’t have one either but this flower constantly tempted me to get as close up as possible. The similarity in the name made me curious how closely related Drosanthemums might be to Chrysathemums, but I don’t think it is very close. Wiki says they’re ice plants but the mere fact of it being somewhat succulent doesn’t rule out a close lineage. Euphorbias are all over the map in form in terms of succulence.
Drosanthemum ( “dewflowers” ) is a genus of succulent plants in the [ice plant family]
(Aizoaceae - Wikipedia) native to the winter-rainfall regions of southern Africa. Most species bear colorful flowers.
I tried but didn’t get as close as I would have liked to seeing the super reflective center part but it is easy to see how the center collected light and shined it out seemingly even brighter.
It has been at least ten years since I’ve grown it but I have small one going again. If I manage to get a better macro with my wife’s newer iPhone I’ll post it. It is in a big pot which means it depends on me to water it … wish me luck. Oh and this one is Drosanthemum micans, AKA “Dew Flower”.
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Sorry… I have captured them, but i harvested that from the internet. I should have tagged it. I will try to add that 
Good photo anyway. They remind me of the creatures on that planet in the movie The Chronicles of Riddick, though like the sandworms in the Star Wars saga they get a little bigger.
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And some rose petals.
(I gotta say, these macro shots provide good training in patience. This one is composed of 34 exposures. Each exposure had a 5 second delay to allow the camera to stop jiggling, a 5 second exposure, another 5 seconds for the camera to perform some kind of long-exposure noise reduction, and then however long it took to zoom in and move the camera on the focusing rail slightly. Probably 15 minutes in total. Post processing can take anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour or more, depending on the shot. All of these flower ones were pretty quick in that respect.)
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Do you remember those things from The Wrath of Khan?
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Yikes! Crawling in the ear, as I recall.
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This Candiru fish is the one that has me most worried.
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