some recent wasps
piggsy
Registered Users Posts: 88 Big grins
Variously on the E-P5 with Tokina AT-X 90mm F2.5 + Raynox / Tamron 180mm 3.5 Macro.
Last lot of orange tail mud/potters wasps are a pair that have been camping out on our rice flower bush for over a month now so lots of opportunity for getting decent shots with a background set up. The others were in a nearby abandoned lot that everything has now been cut down in repeatedly so there are pretty much no bugs left in it - used to support a huge population of different bugs.
One seems to have picked up a small parasite or something crawling under one of the plates in the tail in the second from the last one - looks like some similar kind of mite to the one you can just make out in #1 near the black mason wasp. Anyone know what that is likely to be?
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Think your parasite may be a Stylopid.
Brian v.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lordv/
http://www.lordv.smugmug.com/
Thanks for the tip! I will take a look
I can't make out morphology of the possible mite. I have never seen one in such an intrusive position.
Harold
Googling Stylopids brings up some very similar looking bugs - they crawl in between those kinds of overlapping plates on bugs and pupate in there.
That looks about right. So, not a mite. The mite on the leaf in the first image is a cryptostimatid or seed mite detritus-feeder.
Harold