POV - INSECTS or STARS...

When is a cockroach not a cockroach?



I've been photographing and attempting to classify insects since that evening in 2007 in Atenas, Costa Rica when I stepped out my front door and, for the first time, noticed the hundreds of insects attracted to the porch light. 



The nice thing about hunting for insects is that each day there is at least one which will leave you astonished whether a wasp building a nest, a nectering bee with _______, a weevil with its scimitar proboscis....



Fully seduced by insects, a common cockroach is seen as an exotic creature in need of identification.





The luckiest of us have access to  or, at minimum, getting down on our knees once in a while to look at ants or crooking our necks to see the stars.



Our visual knowledge of the world is circumscribed by the location of our eyes in our heads. Unless we get down on our knees once in a while to watch the ants or crook our necks to see the stars, we're left with a corrupted view of our place in the universe. The luckiest of us have tools to help us see - electron microscopes, ordinary microscopes, macro and zoom lenses for our cameras and telescopes



A microscope reveals the world of the paramecium whose landscape is a droplet of water. The curious ask how it reproduces in its watery landscape, what it eats, who eats it, what it would be like to be a creature who never thinks about God or faith or heaven because, we're pretty sure, it hasn't a brain like ours with which to think about such things?



What about the moth?  Is it pissed that it's not flying as well as it did in the old days (yesterday) because an irreverent bird took a bite out of one of its wings?



Without any visual assistance we watch two moths attack an innocent porch light. One of the two otherwise identical moths has green spots on the tips of its wings. But why is it different? Does it sleep on a different tree from that other moths and those spots help to disguise it from predators?  Do some females find those green spots attractive thus favoring the moth's chances of genetic survival?  A camera with a macro lens allows us to see the other 'spots' on these moths' bodies but these 'spots' are moving! Are they parasitic larvae?  Ramora-like moth cleaners?  Are they annoying? Deadly? An electron microscope allows us to look closer still at the moths' lovely fur chapeaux and the intricate structure of the feathery layers that make up their wings.



moths and tree hoppers - remarkable colors - Egyptian turquoise, Gr. Grand's fuschia hued velvet dress



Young mantis grooms itself...its legs as a cat does, an antenna in its mouth like a child sucking on its hair, what can be reached is cleaned.  It's tidier than many insects who travel through the grass or fly in the air covered, bits and pieces stuck on bristly hairs, clinging to the finest of moth 'feathers', leaving trails of detritus on walls and the ground...but you have to look close.