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Pete Boardman, who is organising the Shropshire Springtail Atlas, calls this the finger-post springtail as this is where he usually finds them. Sure enough, that's where I found these, my first sightings of this species. They are so round & shiny that I thought they were some sort of giant mite at first. Great patterning & textures when looked at up close. So shiny in fact that you can see not only the reflection of my diffuser, but also the LED panel I use to light subjects in the dark.
Found on a finger-post in woods near Ropewalk Meadow, Coalbrookdale.
Globular springtail on the greenhouse glass. Focus stacked using zerene stacker. Same springtail as #2
Not sure about this one....think there were 2 males about 0.5mm on the soil in my garden. May have seen a larger(~1mm) yellow female in the same area too but I only saw that with my naked eye and couldn't find it through the lens.
Or I could be miles off and those chunky antennae are not for grasping females with!
Fairly warm yesterday morning (about 9.C) and i opened up one of my compost bins to see if there was anything interesting going on. There was- all around the rim were tiny white flecks which I though was a fairly large concentration of tiny springtails feeding on the biofilm on the rim.
Focusing on them at 5:1 with the MPE-65 lens - they certainly were springtails ( Proisotoma minuta) but it looked like whatever they were feeding on was fighting back and eating them !
Think this is a slime mould which seemed to be getting the upper hand in this battle. Never seen anything quite like it! There were also some mites that were getting engulfed too.