Sections

Left, unidentified 'toe biter' (Belostomatidae); Middle, Laccotrephes sp. (Nepidae) collected in Arabia; Right, Nepa cinerea (Nepidae) a British specimen. © The Natural History Museum

As you can see, the Belostomatid dwarfs them both! My supervisor tells me that the biggest Hemiptera are the Belostomatidae and some Pomponia cicada species. Our water scorpion is a relatively small member of the Nepidae, but the unidentified Arabian specimen looks remarkably similar.  I chose Laccotrephes sp. because it is part of the accessions, a veritable treasure trove of unidentified speciemens, and because it has nice patterns on the limbs.

Whilst looking for specimens to photograph, I noticed that the majority of siphons (the abodominal air tubes) of the Nepidae had separated into their two component tubes.

My weekend has been very busy.

On Friday night I cooked for my family; as usual, cooking new dishes meant I was a little late in serving (I made a shallot compote and I used rather large shallots which took longer to cook than I anticipated!) but I think it was worth the delay!

On Saturday we had an early start to go into London and buy a dedicated macro lens for my camera. My Flickr friends recommended getting a Sigma 105mm, so now I can take reasonable photos at a much further distance than I could previously. Once I get some extension tubes I hope to take photos of smaller insects, like leafhoppers and ants.

After buying the lens I went into the museum to try the camera out:

An unidentified Cercopid taken using a Sigma 105mm Macro lens © The Natural History Museum

Very shortly I will be leaving to visit Wicken Fen and shall go insect hunting with the new lens. I’ll post some new photos and the photos I took last weekend soon.

I have been meaning to try and make a focus stacked image after being inspired by some of Lord V’s photos and his various photo stacking guides for the freely available CombineZ programs, made by Alan Hadley.

A focus stacked image is a composite image with a better depth of field, made by combining images taken at different focal distances.

Orellana nigriplaga (depth stacked image)

This image is the result of combining the images below.

Preparatory images for depth stacking

I would recommend trying CombineZP, especially if you work with something like pinned specimens. I will be posting some more depth stacked images soon and might experiment with some landscape images.

This specimen is part of The Natural History Museum collection and was taken for a research request. © The Natural History Museum

The insect collections of museums contain drawers of unidentified specimens which await the attention of specialists. This month a new species of butterfly, Splendeuptychia ackeryi (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae), will be published in Zootaxa after being discovered by a curator from The Natural History Museum, Blanca Huertas.

Huertas collected S. ackeryi during an expedition to Columbia, but it wasn’t until the unidentified butterfly was compared with a museum specimens that entomologist realised it was the same as a 90 year old unidentified museum specimen. One of the distinguishing features of S. ackeryi which helped with the identification were its extremely hairly mouthparts.

I first read about this in a ScienceDaily article.

You can view some photographs on the NHM news page.