While many species are known to have evolved specialised colouration to better blend into their environmental backgrounds, there is another important form of camouflage: incorporate your environment into your appearance! This can be seen across the animal kingdom, including in insects and their larvae, sea urchins, and snails. Now, researchers have found some of the…
Tag: insect
New photographic project captures intricate beauty of insects
A new collection of images launched this week by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History reveal in stunning detail the intricacies of insect anatomy. Each image is a composite of around 8,000 individual photos, with the artist Levon Biss painstakingly adjusting the lighting and settings for each one to best highlight the microscopic details…
It’s a leap day! Frog hoppers accelerate at equivalent to more than 500g to beat nature’s high jump record
Although the flea is well-known for being the greatest animal high-jumper, researchers have demonstrated that the frog hopper could steal the crown for insect acrobatics. Compared to the previous title-holders, frog hoppers take off almost five times faster, exerting a force equivalent to over 400 times their own body-weight where the flea produces around 135…
Dragonfly eyes detect up to 30 different ‘colours’
Our retinas contain four different types of light-sensing photoreceptor cells: rods, which detect low levels of light, and three cone cell types which detect red, blue and green wavelengths of light. These allow us to see in (relative) black and white when it’s dark, and in vibrant colour when it’s lighter. The wavelengths that different animals…
News: RVC’s Dr Richard Bomphrey talks about smoke, lasers and solving the bumblebee paradox
It’s a commonly-quoted scientific paradox that bumblebees should be unable to sustain flight, according to the laws of aerodynamics. But Richard Bomphrey, from the RVC’s Structure and Motion lab, is using biomechanics and some seriously high-tech equipment to solve this and other major questions in insect flight – read all about it in a new article…
Parasitoid wasp Wallaceaphytis kikiae, discovered in Borneo
This minute wasp was discovered in the tropical forests of Malaysian Borneo and measures just 0.75 mm in length (750 µm). Its generic name, Wallaceaphytis, refers to Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently proposed a theory of evolution by natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin after extensive travel, specimen collection and research in…
Gene expression patterns in developing Drosophila flies
In this image we see 16 Drosophila melanogaster fly embryos, photographed during their development under a confocal microscope. Fluorescent markers for different proteins have been injected into the embryo, so researchers can see exactly where they are expressed (produced). The labelled proteins here are involved in organising the embryo into different parts as it develops, so we can…
Anatomy To You 