Checking out more wasps today, and came across this crazy specimen, which I had to share with you - and it made for a great opportunity to show you the automontage camera mentioned in my last post!
Spot anything unusual on the wasp above? She's pretty sandy and dirty, but if you look around the wing area on her body, you might spot some mites! Mites and ticks are in the group Acarina. They have eight legs, no antennae and no segmentation of the abdomen (their body all looks like one piece). The wasp above is a parasitoid... and these wasps are probably acting as parasites, feeding off the wasp. Parasite inception!
Spot anything unusual on the wasp above? She's pretty sandy and dirty, but if you look around the wing area on her body, you might spot some mites! Mites and ticks are in the group Acarina. They have eight legs, no antennae and no segmentation of the abdomen (their body all looks like one piece). The wasp above is a parasitoid... and these wasps are probably acting as parasites, feeding off the wasp. Parasite inception!
The photo above shows the camera and the flashes used to take the picture of the wasp. Mustard is checking out the wasp specimen (inside the white cylinder). The cylinder helps disperse the flash, so we get even lighting and not too much reflection.
The camera moves down from focussing at the top of the specimen to the bottom, taking pictures as it goes. Then the computer program stitches them all together, taking the parts in focus to make one big composite image.
The finished image!