clementc's Favorites

Done with infancy, time to try adultery!

Colony mostly colourful adults, with some waxy nymphs still hanging about, mostly clustered.
See 1st adult emergence at this colony: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/15714506

See foodplant: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/13066473

The beetle that eats Voacanga stems

This is the longhorn beetle that ring-barks or cuts down Voacanga branches. I have found a few now on the felled branches. The beetle is about 3 cm long. It looks like a piece of curled bark and stays dead-still. Its back is 'truncated' looking like a stub of a branch. On disturbance it lets go and falls to the forest floor.

The coolest find of the day. A Zombie Land of flies - 9 total flies in a 5 ft x 5ft area in different states of Entomophthora muscae infection. One fly was still moving and the infection had only caused one wing to be bent up and non-functional. I could touch it with my finger and it didn't run away. During the course of photographing the other flies this still living one climbed to the top of the plant that I had found it on, which is textbook behavior for the infection as some how the mycelium grows into a portion of the fly brain that makes it want to climb to a high place for better spore dispersal

I don't know if this is a legitimate sighting, but I drew this bizarre little spider from life many years ago (having no camera that could photograph it as clearly) and never knew what it was until I found something very like it on iNaturalist today - Portia schultzi

Diopsis circularis

Identification as per Feijen's 1978 key to Diopsis with a black band across the wing; should be recogniseable from the other two African Diopsis spp of this description (excluding any described since, which I have not yet ruled out, hence 'likely' I.D.) b