Wonderful insect photos

Linden Gledhill’s Flickr page contains 32 sets of photographs, half of them devoted to biology or physical phenomena in nature. You could spend hours looking at them, for they include insects, plants, insect eggs, insect parts, fungi, as well as paint splashes, astronomy shots, and travel photographs.  Linden has given me permission to put up a few of his insect pictures, but be aware that they’re “copyright Linden Gledhill” and can’t be further reproduced without his permission.

I believe it was the stalwart Matthew Cobb who called my attention to Gledhill’s close-up photos of butterfly wings. The entire album is here (it’s two pages), and on that album you can click on each of the images to enlarge it. This array of thumbnails from the first page (screenshot below) looks like a wonderful patchwork quilt:

Photographers will be interested in Linden’s extensive technical notes about how he made the photos.

Here are two closeups of the wings, with a butterfly wing first:

Sunset moth wing, looking like an array of ribbons in a gift shop:

There’s an album of insects in flight, too, and Linden called my attention to a flying Drosophila (I suspect it’s D. melanogaster):

Here’s a ladybird beetle, showing how the “elytra” (or wing covers, features that themselves evolved from ancestral wings) are retracted to allow the true wings to produce flight. One can consider the elytra to be a vestigial character, but one that has been coopted to serve a new function: protecting the wing and the beetle and advertising its distastefulness.