Favoritos de adam1420

Part of a mixed community of cyanobacteria and lichens that have colonized a sock, embedded in the mud of a flooded abandoned quarry. The filaments of Scytonema are embedded in thick yellow sheaths, 12 to 20 microns wide. The epifluorescence photos reveal the form of the filaments within the sheaths.

I have too many moths to add here.But this one was exceptionally beautiful. ID from a moth expert . This one was sitting on my kitchen wall. After I took the photo she flew away and never revisited me.

Wondering if this is A. hemiophrys but not sure what I'm looking for to distinguish between it and americanus- yes- it's wild. west side of the northern Sable Island on Lake of the Woods (this time of year there are thousands of toads (mostly babies) there so this one caught my eye for being different)

I figured these were something interesting when I saw them, though they were undescribed at the time. It turns out this a species endemic to this site, as well as the only US Asellid endemic to a thermal spring.

Resting on an understorey plant. At a quick glance, I initially thought it was a bird dropping. The white hairs give it the appearance of being infected with an entomopathogenic fungi, maybe as a deterrent to predators...? Definitely the most amazing cerambycid I've ever seen!

Update: this species finally has a name! The paper naming and describing it can be freely downloaded from here: https://doi.org/10.54102/ajt.iv1x5

Growing in wood tunnels of Hylecoetus lugubris, which ran horizontally just under the bark of Populus grandidentata. Fungal hyphae growing on the walls of the tunnels were scaped to get these photographs, and later cultured and sequenced for the cited GenBank ITS sequence. A photo of a larvae from the tunnels is in this observation: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/72682862

It seems to be a commensal organism, not a food mutualist. The larvae appeared to be eating a much lusher growth of another fungus, a filamentous yeast, Alloascoidea.

The microscopic images are stained with cotton blue; the actual hyphae are whitish-clear, aka hyaline.

Car pini

This species belongs to one of the most primitive family of weevils, Caridae which contains only about 5 species world wide. Car pini is the only representative of Caridae in Tasmania and lives soley on Great Oyster Bay Pines (Callitris rhomboidea). My brother and I spent months looking for this, and it was a great reward to find this unique species. we have recorded Car pini between Orford and Bicheno.
about 5 individuals were found on Great Oyster Bay Pines along the Old Convict Road, Orford.
Note: 3 individuals were collected for the TMAG (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery) invertebrate collections