Dazzling photos capture the unreal beauty of insects

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Dazzling photos capture the unreal beauty of insects

Wavy-lined emerald moth

AlexMckPhotography

Insects, with all their intricacies, make for captivating subjects to photograph, but their size and strangeness make capturing the details of their lives a challenge. This year’s winners of the Royal Entomological Society Photography Competition, ******** photographers all, manage to render this miniature world with colour and personality. Here are six of New Scientist’s favourite winning photos.

A wavy-lined emerald moth (Synchlora aerata) – named for the symmetrical white lines that run along its wings – is captured in textural detail in the image above by Alexander McKerracher. If you think this ****** moth would blend in among the greens of the forest, consider its caterpillar form, the camouflaged looper, which uses silk to attach pieces of plants to its back to hide from predators.

Pete Burford captures a damselfly that appears to be peering into the lens of the camera with its bulbous green eyes. Like dragonflies, damselflies have compound eyes made up of thousands of individual photoreceptor units called ommatidia, each with its own cornea. This helps them see movement and colour in higher resolution than other insects can.

Flying ants

Rosemary Haleem

Winged, or “alate”, ants appear to be floating in water in this pleasantly chaotic image by Rosemary Haleem. In a mature ant colony, male and female alates are tended to by workers until they depart for their nuptial flight to mate. Female alates then lose their wings and continue on the ground to found new colonies as future queens.

Thorny lacewing

Enrico Bonino

A thorny lacewing from the family Rhachiberothidae ***** captured in Burmese amber in this image by Enrico Bonino. Such specimens are important to reconstruct ancient ecological and evolutionary history. But in recent years, exploding interest in valuable amber from Myanmar has fuelled ********* in the country.

Cuckoo bees

L D CHAMBERS PHOTOGRAPHY

These cuckoo bees are asleep. Lest they fall off their perch, they have anchored themselves with their mandibles to a blade of grass, as you can see in this delightful photograph by Luke Chambers, which was the overall winner of the Royal Entomological Society Photography Competition. Normally, these bees aren’t so sanguine: they are known for laying their eggs in the nests of other bees, much like the cuckoo birds from which they get their name.

Cotton harlequin bugs

Nikita Richardson

Green-and-orange cotton harlequin bugs (Tectocoris diophthalmus) shine in this photograph by Nikita Richardson. Common in Australia and surrounding islands, these bugs are known for coming in colourful varieties. Individuals of different colours have been misidentified as separate species by taxonomists many times.

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