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Special Camouflage - _TNY_8590S4

This busy little guy is a larvae of one of the tortoise beetles, I'm pretty sure it's the green tortoise beetle (Cassida viridis).

 

They are predatory and that dark thing on it's back is a combination of its own excrement and the empty shells of its unfortunate victims, presumably used as a camouflage for either prey or larger predators. I can't help but wondering how a larvae manage to get it up there though.

 

This is a four exposure focus stack combined using Zerene Stacker. As it was taken back in 2016, I was still using an undiffused ring flash which makes for quite a lot of reflections.

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Uploaded on September 12, 2018
Taken on June 25, 2016