cnestus

[cnestus]

Fairy wasp (Mymaridae)

#hymenoptera #mymaridae

[cnestus]

check out this Phanaeus vindex a buddy of mine picked up for me in kansas! a truly handsome beast

#oh hell yeah

[cnestus]

check out this Phanaeus vindex a buddy of mine picked up for me in kansas! a truly handsome beast

[cnestus]

this tarantula was having none of my shit. Aphonopelma eutylenum i think.

Carrizo Plain National Monument, 2019

[cnestus]

observe: pets on Rudbeckia laciniata

[cnestus]

as far as my experience IDing a couple hundred Andrena bees over the last 2 weeks is concerned they're all miserable. which isn't to say I don't love them but goddamn the differences between a lot of species and even subgenera are insanely fiddly.

I was going to be pedantic about that's not actually A. miserabilis in the photo but on visiting the site it seems like this was just google's fault selecting an unrelated photo from the same page for the preview. the one in the photo is a male Andrena vicina, "The Neighborly Mining Bee"

here's a male A. miserabilis:

source

Maybe it's just miserable

#hymenoptera #andrenidae #andrena

[cnestus]

leaf beetle larvae or old bananas?

[cnestus]

wanting to do invertebrate ecology because you're intimidated by molecular phylogeny. are you reading directly from my mind

yeah i have a lot of complicated feelings about molecular phylogeny as a field but the bottom line as someone who paid my way through undergrad working in a PCR lab is that it's just straight up something that i would die of boredom if i had to do professionally for the rest of my life.

(it also turned out that modern ecology research is also not something my brain is suited towards which is why i don't do that professionally now either)

#entomology

[cnestus]

Triungulin Time

#hymenoptera #Andrenidae #Andrena #coleoptera #meloidae #triungulin

[cnestus]

animals i saw at work

[cnestus]

the funny thing is that in grad school i specifically aimed for an insect ecology related degree because i was so intimidated by taxonomy, but mostly because i really didn't want to do molecular phylogeny shit. But then my current job made me realize that morphological taxonomy tickles my brain in a good way and now it's all i ever want to do.

this photo doesn't look like much but it represents probably over a hundred hours of bee identification over the last few weeks. the right half of the drawer is mostly bees in the genus Andrena, a monstrously tricky group containing over 450 species across 47 subgenera just in the US.

i haven't been keeping track of my overall bee project's stats but i'd estimate i've IDed easily thousands of specimens across hundreds of species over the last year. not bad for someone who'd almost never keyed a bee past genus level until i started this. at some point hopefully i'll have the time to take some nice macro photos of a bunch of them. they won't be Sam Droege level but it'll still be fun.

#entomology #taxonomy #caveat being that i still fucking hate genitalia morphology #which is why i tend to save the male bees for last

[cnestus]

this photo doesn't look like much but it represents probably over a hundred hours of bee identification over the last few weeks. the right half of the drawer is mostly bees in the genus Andrena, a monstrously tricky group containing over 450 species across 47 subgenera just in the US.

i haven't been keeping track of my overall bee project's stats but i'd estimate i've IDed easily thousands of specimens across hundreds of species over the last year. not bad for someone who'd almost never keyed a bee past genus level until i started this. at some point hopefully i'll have the time to take some nice macro photos of a bunch of them. they won't be Sam Droege level but it'll still be fun.

#hymenoptera #bees #entomology #note that the bees per hour conversion rate here is much lower than usual because im digging into the really gnarly genera now

[cnestus]

humpbacked ichneumonid

[cnestus]

some handsome beasts i saw at work: an ornately sculptured rove beetle, probably Micropeplus sp; a polyxenid millipede, probably Polyxenus sp; and a bat bug, Cimex pilosellus

[cnestus]

Doctor! I thought you might like this photo of a harvestman eating a single Velveeta noodle I took while camping.

wow! a sumptuous feast!

[cnestus]

lab bug roundup

Dryinidae, Clastoptera sp., Stenus sp., Pseudomasaris sp.

[cnestus]

Head like a hole

Black as your soul

I'd rather die

Than give you control

Hylocurus bark beetles. their heads are naturally like that. I don't know why