Tweaked - _TNY_3561
A couple of days ago, on June 28th, I heard my wife call from the garden and I could tell from the tone of her voice that it was something that would interst me.
She turned out to be standing next to the water barrel where she had discovered somthing trying to swim.
This little something turned out to be this rust pine borer (Arhopalus rusticus). "Little" is actaully a bit of a misnomer - this is a species which is about 25 mm / 1" in length. I put down my finger next to it and it climbed on immediately.
But where to photograph it? My choice became the inflorescence on the purple angelica (Angelilca gigas) which was growing around the front of the house so I put it on one of those.
Now, the colour of the inflorescence here is pretty much what it looks like,but this took some quite heavy tweaking of the colours - straight out of the camera it is much brighter and more red (here is an old shot where I didn't fix the colour: www.flickr.com/photos/tinyturtle/53569765545/).
There is actually a small chance that this could be the very similar burnt pine longhorn beetle (Arhopalus ferus), but that one is much much rarer thouh it has still been found in my region. The way to tell the difference is to look at the rearmost feet, but I had no idea to look there and none of the shots I took show those feet. It is probably A. rusticus though.
Tweaked - _TNY_3561
A couple of days ago, on June 28th, I heard my wife call from the garden and I could tell from the tone of her voice that it was something that would interst me.
She turned out to be standing next to the water barrel where she had discovered somthing trying to swim.
This little something turned out to be this rust pine borer (Arhopalus rusticus). "Little" is actaully a bit of a misnomer - this is a species which is about 25 mm / 1" in length. I put down my finger next to it and it climbed on immediately.
But where to photograph it? My choice became the inflorescence on the purple angelica (Angelilca gigas) which was growing around the front of the house so I put it on one of those.
Now, the colour of the inflorescence here is pretty much what it looks like,but this took some quite heavy tweaking of the colours - straight out of the camera it is much brighter and more red (here is an old shot where I didn't fix the colour: www.flickr.com/photos/tinyturtle/53569765545/).
There is actually a small chance that this could be the very similar burnt pine longhorn beetle (Arhopalus ferus), but that one is much much rarer thouh it has still been found in my region. The way to tell the difference is to look at the rearmost feet, but I had no idea to look there and none of the shots I took show those feet. It is probably A. rusticus though.