This was from yesterday between jobs when I went hiking. That entire place is mushy. There is about a inch of standing water and if you stomp your foot and make a 2 inch deep shoe print, it fills up with water.
Found this Polistes metricus “ metric paper wasp “ crawling around with its wings mostly missing yesterday. I think it got into line sap and the pine sap tore them off as they got away. But it’s just a guess based on seeing sap all around where I first saw it on a broken off pine limb. I don’t know wasps really and so someone else IDed it for me.
But I’ll remember it now. Dark red upper body with a black lower body and yellow lower limbs and feet. It’s actually very pretty. I did not have a jar with me otherwise I would have brought it back to my house and kept it feed and watered until it passed. But the best I could do was move it to a oak tree so that maybe it can make it a few days longer. Once they see wingless, they can’t return to their hive and they are a really good community species. Even sharing nests with species outside of their species , but in the same genus and have overlapping generation offspring that they care for. I guess they have been studied enough to even know if it’s going for a long flight or short flight when leaving the nest. Wikipedia had a decent amount of info on them.
Big fan of these sorts of radially arrayed flowers. I don’t seem to be able to take such rich close ups. This flower certainly rewards closer inspection.
Pictures , at least mine, don’t do them any justice. They are small. There are thousands of them blooming among many others. Really beautiful. Waiting to find what pollinates it the most or feeds off of it.
Landscape near Ocotillo Wells (the very tall plants are the Ocotillo–Ocotillo is in the same order as kiwifruit, Impatiens, ebony, persimmon, heath, rhododendron, blueberry, Brazil nuts, phlox, primrose, new world pitcher plants, tea, and camellia).
Many plant orders seem rather heterogenous, at least to non-experts. Ericales is among the most diverse ones, so there is some reason for the variety.
Neogastropoda would seem pretty comparable to most people, the main obvious synapomorphies are mobile-prey carnivory (a few families became grazers again), a siphon (tiny in some groups), and comparatively frequent large size (i.e. median might be 10 mm, instead of 4 mm). It probably contains about 40,000 species (estimated recent), and almost half of those are in one superfamily.
Enjoying all the beautiful organisms and landscapes on this thread. Figured I share a monochromatic scene from the Great White North. One of my dear study subjects (February, Saskatchewan, -40 C)
COOL! Really!
This is exactly how I imagine all of Saskatchewan year round in my fantasy imagination of Canada north of Ontario.
What a wonderful photo!
As it gets hotter and our winters become icier down here in mid Michigan, your winters look like something I could learn to live with. But I am a pansy. So talking brave really is a joke. It is heartening to see real snow somewhere on earth these days, though.
Yes, isn’t that the case—we should enjoy fluffy powdery snow while we still have it.
Michigan, eh? I was in Lansing a few years ago for an ornithology conference. Enjoyed a fieldtrip to see the endangered Kirtland’s Warbler. Good memories and beautiful landscapes there too!