Micromeraviglie by Nicola Zagari

Chrysomela populi laying eggs

A nice Chrysomela populi laying eggs. Well I took this picture on the Easter sunday... are those Easter eggs? Stupid joke. Anyway do you want to know what is the step before laying eggs? Then take a look at this here. Thanks for watching!

Pisaura mirabilis or the "nursery web spider"

This is a Pisauridae, Pisaura mirabilis I suppose, and it's a female carrying her eggs.

But where is she going? Well these spiders glue their eggs to plant leaves and make a web around as protection until the newborns will go out.

This is why they are sometimes called the nursery web spiders.
I put here other two pictures of the same spider.

Melolontha melolontha

Hey there, do you recognize him?

The antennae are so evident that it's easy to say our friend is a cockchafer, or May bug or Maggiolino in Italian, a big beetle which almost diseapperead some decades ago because of the use of DDT and other pesticides. Now it's getting a bit more common again but it still has one big enemy: artificial lighting. Its orientation system cannot cope with it and that's why this morning I found this guy (it's a male, 7 leaves on the antennae instead of 6 for the females) crawling on the grass like if it was drunk (see pic below). It was right below a big light where yesterday night it most likely crashed into many times.

After some time it managed to fly away but I had enough time to take another funny picture.

Sympetrum sanguineum

OK, sometimes i want to be a bit artistic... let's go back to reality.

A very quiet dragonfly that was patient enough to let me take a couple of hundreds of photos. You should be happy that I am posting only three of them! Please click to zoom! I don't care about the number of visits, I don't have any advertisement to make money with but if you don't zoom in you loose too many cool details!

Isodontia mexicana and Sceliphron nest

Are they mating? Is the wasp eating the cricket? Are they trying to enter the same hole at the same time?

Well, the idea is that the wasp paralized this little cricket and is bringing it to its nest, inside this metallic tube.

It will not be its meal but it's for its progeny that will feed on this paralized but living cricket.
These wasps make their nests inside tubes, holes and put grass inside to close them.

Another Sphecidae like this, the Sceliphron also makes little nests but made of soil and clay that are full of little spiders to feed the larvae.
Here are two pictures of this little nests that you can easily find near the edges of your windows. One is broken and you can see the content, and in the other pic I put 1 €cent coin for size comparison.

I have to thank this great forum that helped me a lot with species identification.

Bye!

Phaneroptera nana (adult)

Ages ago I posted a pic of a young grasshopper that made me spend a lot of time to understand what the hell of species it was. The adult instead is very easy to identify and it's quite a big insect, don't ask me why it's called "nana" (dwarf).

Rhagonycha fulva

An acrobatic "ménage à trois" :)

Misumena vatia

If you are a fly or a bee and you are landing on the wrong flower, the last thing you can see will be something like this:

It's a spider that can rapidly change colour to be absolutely invisible and instead of spinning a web he will just wait. It can catch preys way bigger than him as in this photo I took long time ago in Sicily. And don't tell me it's scary because it is only few millimeters big :)

Mammoth wasp : Megascolia maculata flavifrons (female)

Often called "Mammouth wasp" it is the biggest wasp in europe, 5 cm long! I have to admit that I was quite scared while taking these macros instead this beast was not scared at all by my camera.
It's absolutely not dangerous for humans and it only feeds on pollen... so why these huge jaws?

The reason is that it paralyzes caterpillars, usually the huge larva of the rhinoceros beetle, to lay eggs on it. The new born, devouring it from inside, will have a massive amount of food to grow until making a cocoon and becoming an adult. The male is smaller, black head and longer antennae.

Oryctes nasicornis larva

I was walking toward Civita di Bagnoregio, one of the most beatiful places I've ever seen and I run into this monster about 8 cm big. It was on the side of the street, no idea how it arrived there but it was not looking so happy of being there... anyway it is a rhinoceros beetle, yes, this one: just a bit younger. The funny thing is that when it becomes adult he cannot eat anymore, he will not even have a mouth. he will be only able to fly and to look for "love". He has few weeks to find a partner and reproduce then time is over...

bye bye